PureCocainePureCocaine
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- Posted: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 18:43:37 +0000
So, according to the article below, Comcast, already a massive soulless corporation etc. wants to purchase a massive ******** amount of the competition. Damn near the whole southeastern seaboard rocks Bright House, a Time Warner company. We let this go on, these guys are gonna take s**t over, and I'm personally not okay with that, I don't know about you.
I'd fill up a lot of space explaining what monopolies are, what they tend to do upon completion, and why they are generally a bad idea, except, well, you know, too much effort, not enough reward. You should already know that by now anyway.
article below
I'd fill up a lot of space explaining what monopolies are, what they tend to do upon completion, and why they are generally a bad idea, except, well, you know, too much effort, not enough reward. You should already know that by now anyway.
article below
Article below from AlterNet.org, written by Zaid Jilani.
In February, news broke that cable and Internet giants Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Comcast would be merging, placing a new mega-company in charge of services rendered to their 30 million customers. And neither the Obama administration nor Congress don’t seem to be raising many red flags. David Carr in the New York Times recently wondered aloud about Comcast’s $45 billion bid for TWC,“How can the largest cable company in the country bid to buy the second-largest and gain control over 19 of the country’s top 20 markets — corralling a 30 percent market share in cable and a 40 percent share in broadband — and there be no serious questions?”
How monopolistic would the new Comcast-TWC company be? Susan Crawford, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, estimates that the “network would pass nearly two-thirds of American households (meaning that those homes could be connected to the company’s network without any further extension of the network). The company would have just one direct competitor: Verizon’s FiOS service, which would overlap with just 15 percent of the new company’s territory.”
Consumers Union warns that “Comcast owns a wide assortment of content and television channels as a result of its previous merger with NBC Universal. By owning a massive network of cable and broadband pipelines and significant content, Comcast would have the ability to control the speed, quality, and type of programming for an unprecedented number of consumers.”
But it’s not just consumers that could get the short end of the stick.
“In a future without Net Neutrality, Comcast would be free to act as the Internet’s editor-in-chief, choosing what content and services get attention, and what doesn’t — what content gets to pass through its pipes, and what content gets blocked,” says Free Press’s Tim Kar. “This would not only snub out any online innovation that Comcast doesn’t control, it would also threaten the free speech rights of all online users, including journalists.”
Ironically, Comcast is arguing today that buying TWC would be good for consumers, but it made the opposite argument in 2010 — that keeping TWC as a competitor would prevent anti-competitive behavior following its purchase of NBCUniversal. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this month, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) pointed out this hypocrisy:
Comcast has argued that there’s nothing to worry about here because it doesn’t compete with Time Warner Cable in any ZIP code … When Comcast wanted to acquire NBCUniversal, Comcast’s CEO told this committee not to worry about it because there were still other robust distributors, and he specifically named Time Warner Cable, which would prevent Comcast from setting anti-competitive prices for Comcast content.
The point was that Comcast couldn’t get away with that sort of behavior because distributors including Time Warner Cable wouldn’t stand for it, and they could go to the FCC and complain about it, too. Later in the hearing, Comcast’s CEO also told us, ‘We are not getting any larger in cable distribution here.’ Well, if this deal goes through, Comcast will become larger in cable distribution, and if this deal goes through, Comcast never again will have to negotiate with Time Warner Cable when it comes to setting prices for NBC content. And NBC content, everyone should remember, is 20-some networks.
Comcast can’t have it both ways. It can’t say that the existence of competition among distributors including Time Warner Cable was a reason to approve the NBC deal in 2010 and then turn around a few years later and say that the absence of competition with Time Warner Cable is a reason to approve this deal.
But as is often the case in Washington, the arguments publicly made are just the tip of the iceberg in the push for policy changes.
In February, news broke that cable and Internet giants Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Comcast would be merging, placing a new mega-company in charge of services rendered to their 30 million customers. And neither the Obama administration nor Congress don’t seem to be raising many red flags. David Carr in the New York Times recently wondered aloud about Comcast’s $45 billion bid for TWC,“How can the largest cable company in the country bid to buy the second-largest and gain control over 19 of the country’s top 20 markets — corralling a 30 percent market share in cable and a 40 percent share in broadband — and there be no serious questions?”
How monopolistic would the new Comcast-TWC company be? Susan Crawford, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, estimates that the “network would pass nearly two-thirds of American households (meaning that those homes could be connected to the company’s network without any further extension of the network). The company would have just one direct competitor: Verizon’s FiOS service, which would overlap with just 15 percent of the new company’s territory.”
Consumers Union warns that “Comcast owns a wide assortment of content and television channels as a result of its previous merger with NBC Universal. By owning a massive network of cable and broadband pipelines and significant content, Comcast would have the ability to control the speed, quality, and type of programming for an unprecedented number of consumers.”
But it’s not just consumers that could get the short end of the stick.
“In a future without Net Neutrality, Comcast would be free to act as the Internet’s editor-in-chief, choosing what content and services get attention, and what doesn’t — what content gets to pass through its pipes, and what content gets blocked,” says Free Press’s Tim Kar. “This would not only snub out any online innovation that Comcast doesn’t control, it would also threaten the free speech rights of all online users, including journalists.”
Ironically, Comcast is arguing today that buying TWC would be good for consumers, but it made the opposite argument in 2010 — that keeping TWC as a competitor would prevent anti-competitive behavior following its purchase of NBCUniversal. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this month, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) pointed out this hypocrisy:
Comcast has argued that there’s nothing to worry about here because it doesn’t compete with Time Warner Cable in any ZIP code … When Comcast wanted to acquire NBCUniversal, Comcast’s CEO told this committee not to worry about it because there were still other robust distributors, and he specifically named Time Warner Cable, which would prevent Comcast from setting anti-competitive prices for Comcast content.
The point was that Comcast couldn’t get away with that sort of behavior because distributors including Time Warner Cable wouldn’t stand for it, and they could go to the FCC and complain about it, too. Later in the hearing, Comcast’s CEO also told us, ‘We are not getting any larger in cable distribution here.’ Well, if this deal goes through, Comcast will become larger in cable distribution, and if this deal goes through, Comcast never again will have to negotiate with Time Warner Cable when it comes to setting prices for NBC content. And NBC content, everyone should remember, is 20-some networks.
Comcast can’t have it both ways. It can’t say that the existence of competition among distributors including Time Warner Cable was a reason to approve the NBC deal in 2010 and then turn around a few years later and say that the absence of competition with Time Warner Cable is a reason to approve this deal.
But as is often the case in Washington, the arguments publicly made are just the tip of the iceberg in the push for policy changes.
