Americans are divided in many ways, but there are some points of convergence—one of which seems to be hatred of the cable company Comcast. Notoriously terrible customer service, a pricing system described as “absurd” and a stranglehold on internet speeds garner the cable behemoth a remarkable amount of dislike and distrust, which played a role in the quashing of its recent effort to merge with perennial runner-up for worst company in America, Time Warner Cable.
You’d think it would be bigger news, therefore, that Americans who hate Comcast largely for reasons related to its very bigness are now facing the possibility of, essentially, another Comcast. The harms from a possible merger between Time Warner, Charter Communications and Bright House Networks were detailed in a piece for BillMoyers.com (2/4/16) by Michael Copps.
Former FCC chair calls the proposed TWC/Charter merger an “affront to the public interest.”
Not a stranger to the issue but the former chair of the FCC, Copps notes that this new mega-company would control about a third of the nation’s cable and cable-broadband markets; would also own programming, including regional sports networks; and would dominate some of the biggest media markets, like New York and Los Angeles.
Worse, since the new company wouldn’t share any markets with Comcast, they’d have no incentive to compete, but every incentive to coordinate against joint competitors, including those offering independent and diverse voices.
Least surprising, the deal would start the new company off with some $27 billion in debt, a time-honored incentive to raise prices and cut services—and why not? Where else will people go?
ACTION:
There’s still time to speak out against the TWC/Charter merger. One place to file comments with the FCC is NoMoreMergers.com.
Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the host of CounterSpin.
while the lack of competition in these markets and combination service/content providers are super disturbing, it wouldn’t be larger than comcast, so I fail to see how the FCC (or the FTC) has any real basis for preventing the merger. We need to legislate a return to the days of restrictions on media ownership and either much tighter regulation of service providers as utilities or removal of local monopolies they get as “regulated” (ha!) utilities.
Bright House is owned by the elderly Newhouse brothers, famous for owning a dozen rightwing newspapers like the one that has strangled both journalism and reform in my city and state. Their company, Advance Publications, also owns dozens of magazines, like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Approval of this merger was reported in the business press as an done deal, until competitors, not the public, challenged the FCC. The brothers had been expecting $billions$.
Call me a pessimist, but I think FAIR has some skin in this game.
Call me a pessimist, but it seems FAIR has some skin in this game.