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Cable Companies Free To Grow, Grow, Grow
Dasheiff writes: "A federal appeals court [NYTimes, free reg. req. [?] ] struck down a set of regulations today that had prevented the nation's largest cable companies from growing beyond serving more than 30 percent of the cable and satellite market's subscribers and providing more than 40 percent of its channels with programming from its affiliated companies. In other words AT&T and AOL Time Warner can now continue to expand their monopoly. However it's not clear if this is a bad thing, if shows continue to be poor people will not watch them. Companies need to compete with the viewer more than the other companies." So, were those limits actually doing customers good or not? And will this make high-speed access (even if AOL-TW dominated) available in many places it's not right now?
You laugh, but Vulcan Ventures, the investment vehicle for Paul Allen (you know, Microsoft Co-Founder) has been buying up lots of cable companies over the last few years.
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Here's just one story talking about it (the first good one that came up in google):
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2
Now, Allen isn't as tight with MS as he once was, but perhaps there is more to your parody than even you realize...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Oh dear. While the poster does a good job of explaining how collusive oligopolies can be thought of as monopolies, this post does not deserve a +5 score.
The problem is that cable companies don't acheive their monopolies through collusion but rather through spatial monopolies. For instance, here in Canada, there are a number of cable companies: Rogers, Shaw, Videotron, etc. However, my only choice in cable company is Rogers Cable or no cable.
The problem is that Shaw and Videotron only have cable running to people's houses in their territories. The situation is no different in the US (or for that matter, pretty much anywhere in the developed world). If you have AT&T you can't pick TW. This is a monopoly.
Are these monopolies dangerous? In some sense, because they do control the flow of information into households, this might be a problem. However, as time goes on, there are more and more sources of information (ie dialup internet, satellite TV & internet, not to mention newspapers, magazines, etc).
Oh, and BTW, check out AT&T's website. There you'll see that, far from being in danger of buying more cable networks, the US's largest cable system is actually selling off parts of it's network.
Dude, are you new to Slashdot or something? 'Monopoly' has nothing to do with marketshare. It is fair game to use on any company which is really trendy to hate (i.e. any company which is actually successful). For example, everybody knows that all five (!) major record companies are monopolies, since they put only one good song per album. Similarly, Intel is a monopoly, since they make better products than Via, Transmeta, and AMD. Lastly, the cable companies are all monopolies, since they deliver high bandwidth data at affordable prices. Got it now?
The only solution to this is to have the government impose restrictions. Like the article submitter said, the government should choose what cable companies you should be allowed and not allowed to subscribe to, by putting caps on the marketshare of each company. The government always knows what's best for us. We're not smart enough to make decisions for ourselves, and the only solution is a massive, overreaching government beauracracy to control every aspect of our spending decisions (which, as we all know, are much more friendly and efficient than all of those evil, big, bad corporations).
I'm sorry you're getting such shitty bandwidth, but I'm afraid it depends almost completely on the company rather than the technology.
I have been a faithful and happy customer of MediaOne (now AT&T, who would have thought I'd *ever* say something like that?) for about 2 years now. The reason is that my cable modem has consistently given me speeds to rival those of a T1 on downloads and about half that on uploads. When downloading from university ftp sites, I will consistently get speeds of approx. 1.5 Mb/s. As far os uploads go, the best indicator I've seen is Napster uploads; people get transfer rates of about 120 KB/s (Yes, I'm pretty sure that's Bytes not bits, feel free to correct me, I don't feel like firing up napster to check which units it uses).
On the other side, I used to work for Bell Atlantic/Verizon in their DSL department, and I can attest that it is about the shittiest broadband service I have ever seen. I know however that there are many good DSL providers out there (although I don't think any of their customers get speeds like mine). It all depends on the company.
Now to keep the post at least moderately on-topic; this business with allowing Cable providers over *40* percent market penetration seems completely insane. Do people have no memories? Well, stupid question...
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
Depending on which dictionary you go to, monopoly is either held exclusively by one company, or by a group. (Dictionary.com uses the word "group", while Merriam-Webster just refers to a single company.) The definition of "group" is what's important here. There are many instances in business history where competitors in one field got together to agree not to compete in certain ways -- most notably by price-fixing.
Free-market economic theory would indicate that CEOs would never do this, that they would decide to compete in any way possible to eke out more market share. Yet this does happen. We have documented cases of price-fixing across all sorts of industries: legal research, oil firms, even vitamin manufacturers. There are plenty of theories as to why it happens, though my personal favorite is psychological. I think that CEOs, when they're placed in charge of vast corporations they cannot entirely control or understand, become extremely risk-averse. This is why large corporations rarely innovate; it's also why a CEO might enter into a price-fixing agreement. It's just one less thing to worry about. At least for the CEO; everybody else usually suffers, in higher prices and poorer quality.
Do domain names matter?
It's also worth noting that many people now consider cable a common carrier. There are certain types of communications networks that are considered common carriers, in that they should only be built once and then opened on a non-monopolistic basis, because it would be economically wasteful to duplicate the network for the sake of competition on that level.
There was once a time, for example, when AT&T owned not just the phone network, but all local service and long-distance service. They argued that decoupling the network from the service didn't make any technical sense; the government eventually decided to break them up anyway. The fact that you can have a different long-distance carrier than AT&T now is a direct result of governmental interference, and I for one am happy about the results.
And guess what? AT&T's still around. They're not in such great shape -- in large part because they were a large bureaucracy, unfit to compete in a world where they no longer owned a monopolistic advantage over the phone networks -- but they're still around. I never understand why companies argue against fairness in the marketplace by saying "We're so ass-backwards here that without our unnatural monopolistic advantage, we'll perish." If I believed my company was that fucked, I'd leave and find another employer.
Do domain names matter?
You must be kidding. @home has me capped with an upload speed of about 16 Kiloytes per second. During the evening a 56K modem might be faster for DOWNLOADS.
The prospect of large cable companies is disheartening. Their customer service sucks because they do not have anything that approaches competition. They think they are entitled to my business and they act like it.
As soon as I can I am dropping Cable and looking at satellite access for my tv and as soon as DSL makes it here I am making the switch.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
The quality of the shows has little to do with it, my friend -- remember that AOLTW doesn't produce all the shows, other people have to pay them to get them to carry them. Also, broadband is a significant issue here.
People have a preconceived notion that large companies are bad. They are not inherently bad for several reasons.
1. Large companies are not bad if they are not hurting people or other businesses. Who says that by having a large market share is bad, only if you hurt consumers.
2. Large Companies are not bad if they are properly run and offer their services at the lowest cost to consumers.
3. The Bigger the company the more capital it has to expand to areas that they would not normally go to becuase of the cost to do so. Companies will offer services to people even if they lose money just to GET customers and know they will keep them. Small companies cannot do this.
4. AOL/Time Warner has the capability to become the consumers best friend by expanding broadband and expanding its cable and fiber optics to areas that cannot get them. If they do so and offer their services at a reasonable rate then they are helping consumers not hurting them.
I will agree 100% that if a company does hurt consumers and does hurt other competing business they should be find and or broken up by the government. Government is here for the People, By the people.
Let AOL/Time Warner expand and let AT&T expand and see what happens. If they do good, than things are ok, if they dont we have a recourse later.
Lord Arathres
stainless steel
name: allyourbaseare password: belongtous make your time....
Okay, so, big monopolistic cable companies are bad... but government regulation is also bad(unless you're British). I'd like to post the typical paranoid anti-establishment rant about the subject, but I'm not sure which one I'm supposed to hate. Can anyone help clear this up for me?
Yes. This is a common problem, not knowing which of the evil entities to blame, but wanting to post something suitably enraged at the injustice of the world.
The solution is instead of targetting either party involved, to instead set your sights on Microsoft. For example, a good response to this article might start something like this :
"So now there's nothing to stop Microsoft from starting a cable television company, taking over the entire market and making it a condition that everyone installs Windows if they want to watch television?"
You'd need to pad it out a bit but you get the general idea.
HTH