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FCC Clears Comcast Purchase Of AT&T Broadband
Torgo's Pizza writes "The FCC just granted final approval for Comcast to complete its $30.5 billion purchase of AT&T Broadband. Despite consumer worries of increased rates and clear domination of the market, Chairman Michael Powell stated, "The benefits of this transaction are considerable, the potential harms negligible.""
Comcast has this f*cking webpage without an useful abuse report address/form. They do not have postmaster@ or webmaster@ addresses. Obviously they aren't able to administer such services well :-/
And now they get another large chunk of the internet.. that's bad news, even for us guys overseas
Comcast is paying way too much, sounds familiar? We all know what happened to the dot coms, don't we? But CEOs can fix anything by "cost control" (read "laying off enough people"). Then they increase your dues, since they are now a monopoly. Then 5 year later, they go bankrupt because after all 30 billion was too much and because high speed wireless beat them to a pulp. But by this time the CEOs are gone and are laughing from their golden parachutes. Anyway, by this time, no one remembers that it was done on Bush's guard. This is called win-win for the CEOs and the politicians.
What he's really saying:
The benefits to Comcast are considerable, the potential harms to the users are not a consideration because their political donations aren't as large as Comcast's, now are they.
Chairman Michael Powell stated, "The benefits of this transaction are considerable, the potential harms negligible
Allow me to provide a translation:
The benefits of this transaction are considerable: I'm receiving plenty of "benefits" (read: bribes) from the companies involved. All I have to do in return is not throw antitrust laws at them.
the potential harms negligible: Who cares about the consumer? As long as I'm not harmed, all is good.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
They allow 2 monoplies to merge, even though ti violates the laws (30%), it brings no customer relief or competition.
Yet, they stop the merger of dish and hughes, and echo offered to sell off part their equipment, and spots to allow for another company.
Guess which the FCC allows?
Like the bush league, it follows the money.
No more AT&T Broadband commercials being broadcasted to AT&T Broadband subscribers. Maybe better management will end the brilliant advertizing.
The difference is that (in most if not all markets) they dont compete with each other. Most people only have the choice of on cable provider.
On the other hand, you do have the choice of Dish vs. DirectTV no matter where you are.
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
Because there is a difference between 90+% of a market (DirecTV and Dish), and 10-15% of a market (Comcast + ATT).
27 million Comcast/AT&T subscribers still leaves almost 50 million households getting their cable from elsewhere.
If DirecTV and Dish Network merged, the new company would have over 80% of the US DBS marketmore than enough to claim monopoly status. Satellite TV may not matter to you if you live in a city, but for folks in rural areas, DBS is the only way to receive "cable" channels.
This is not my sandwich.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
if you want your call escalated to higher tiers they always ask you waht operating system.. i even had one tier 3 guy ask me for my email address so he could ask me networking questions after i explained to him what NAT was and that I was using OpenBSD (and that the problem was on their end) and after much cajoling i got him to escalate me against his bosses orders to The People Who Actually Know Shit Dept and I got my issues resolved with in 5 minutes of talking to the "Engineer"... companies are totally unwilling to accept that you are not a moron adn their support monkeys are all scripted and know nothing at all.. so basically if your shit doesn't work and you don't have a *supported* platform you're on your own..
Anyway, so what's up with this? It's like when AT&T got chopped up, but all that did was create a bunch of little baby monopolies that didn't compete with each other, or anyone else.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Of course consolidating DSS services into One is bad, but consolidating cable internet into One is okay.
Makes no sense to me. If the FCC wants to block monopolies, fine, just do it consistenly.
Yeah I know that there is still more than one cable internet service but for how long?
What is not being advertised is that those people who are current local phone (over digital cable) customers of AT&T broadband (Comcast does not do phone over cable) are going to be quietly ignored. Comcast does NOT want to support local phone service; local phone service will cease to be advertised, sold, pushed, etc.; they're hoping for slow attrition of existing customers once the merger is done.
As for moving the high speed users between networks - it shouldn't be as much as a clusterfuck as the @Home move was; they have all of the data this time and they control the networks.
One other clarifications:
Michael Armstrong is moving to Comcast. Plus Armstrong is looking a little better (not much, but a little) now that it's been revealed that QWest and WorldCom were fudging their numbers in a big way, while AT&T didn't play that game. (Interesting muse: what would have happened to AT&T if the other companies had not, well, lied? Wall Street forced AT&T's stock price into the toilet because they were comparing the T to companies that were pulling numbers out of their ass)
I think many of us are protesting the wrong crime.
Allowing Comcast to buy AT&T Broadband is not a major crime. This is just replacing one bad monopolist with another -- the two firms weren't explicitly competing against each other so there is no serious concern that the merger will lead to higher prices, lower quality. Ask yourselves: what was preventing AT&T or Comcast from unilaterally offering more expensive, crummy service? It sure wasn't the "threat" of competition from each other. If anything, it was the threat that consumers would get fed up and revolt or the government would actually be forced to respond to consumer outrage. A merger doesn't affect either constraints - if anything, the merger makes the joint firm more vulnerable to such outrage and government scrutiny.
The real crime is the fact that we tolerate and allow these regional monopolies to prosper under government protection.
...it's the money. It isn't that they don't want you using VPNs on their service, they don't want you using them on their home service. If you get the service that costs twice as much, you are free to use VPNs. In fact they list it as a feature!
You're forgetting the other half of the cable biz, which is selling advertising, and bundling and packaging channels. Cable companies are ultimately the brokers between advertisers and viewers. So they have a powerful affect on advertising markets. Plus, how cable channels are packaged, and their content, is also controlled by cable companies. If you're HBO and you only have to satisfy one buyer instead of two, that buyer can pretty much dictate what he wants. Even if it's five buyers instead of six, putting so much influence in the hands of so few is not healthy. Think about all this next time your "national network" station is replaced by infomercials on a Sunday afternoon.
It happened, but I think it was before the eighties, I remember buying them in the early eighties. Rental was a PITA, because it was really expensive. This was one of the ways AT&T collected their monopoly rents. Where do you think all the money came from to throw at things like Bell Labs, its obvious that Lucent never made any money once the monopoly teat was taken away. Western Electric was the AT&T company that made the phones you had to rent. I believe that you were allowed to own a phone, but it wasn't allowed ot interfere with the network, and ma' bell was pretty slow to approve any phones that wouldn't interfere with the network.
They did similar things to the long distance companies, preventing them from accessing their local networks without costly equipment, but that is what brought about the lawsuit that ended with the breakup agreement. Of course those were the days, when long distance calls were more of a luxury. Its ironic that AT&T more or less got to decide how to split up the company, but still gave away all the powerful parts of the monopoly. They kept the then profitable long distance business, Bell Labs, and NCR. Only after it became appearant that the local loops were where the monopoly power was, did AT&T start buying cable companies for rich valuations, hoping to create a local network to compete with the companies they gave away in the settlement.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell, is the chairman of the FCC, the government agency that is supposed to be regulating this field. supposed to be.