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Krugman: Say No To Comcast Acquisition of Time Warner
nbauman writes "In his column, 'Barons of Broadband' New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says: 'Comcast perfectly fits the old notion of monopolists as robber barons, so-called by analogy with medieval warlords who perched in their castles overlooking the Rhine, extracting tolls from all who passed. The Time Warner deal would in effect let Comcast strengthen its fortifications, which has to be a bad idea. Comcast's chief executive says not to worry: "It will not reduce competition in any relevant market because our companies do not overlap or compete with each other. In fact, we do not operate in any of the same ZIP codes." This is, however, transparently disingenuous. The big concern about making Comcast even bigger isn't reduced competition for customers in local markets — for one thing, there's hardly any effective competition at that level anyway. It is that Comcast would have even more power than it already does to dictate terms to the providers of content for its digital pipes — and that its ability to drive tough deals upstream would make it even harder for potential downstream rivals to challenge its local monopolies.'"
Well, in a lot of places they have competition from fiber, and places where they *don't* are places where building out a competitive network is unprofitable. Relinquishing the monopoly on cable would be no big deal.
Krugman's point is that consolidating all those places where cable is the only game in town gives them a powerful middleman position. The monopoly has done its damage as far as the market is concerned; you can take the legal monopoly away and the de facto monopoly on access to the market will remain.
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I disagree. The burden of proof is on those who want to interfere with the right of the rightful owners of these companies to dispose of their property as they damn well please.
De-regulation along the lines of the power companies? In other words, break apart "generation" and "distribution"......make TV/broadband one entity and then make the lines themselves a different entity. Have the distribution entity charge customers the same rate scale so that other companies can compete on equal footing.
The problem with this solution is that the cable system isn't designed that way. The electric grid is, in essence, wires. Generators put electrons onto the wire, customers pull them back off. You can't tell where an electron came from, but the utility company bills you for them at the rate of the company you choose (assuming that company has actually put enough electrons onto the wire to cover their customer's use.)
Cable TV isn't that way. You can't put two channel 5s on the same system. There is a limit to how much can be put on. A provider that gets to use channels 1-20, for example, prevents anyone else from using 1-20. How do you divvy up the limited space? Once you get 83 content providers, you've pretty much used up the full system. And multiple Internet providers would be even worse -- the space is smaller. (And before someone points out that under the wonderful new digital world anything can appear on your TV as "Channel 5", I'm talking about the frequencies and not the arbitrary digital channel id.)
I suspect that only people who live in an area with fiber would say that a LOT of places have fiber.
> Because the market isn't there.
Yet cities decide to take matters into the own hands only to be subjected to corruption of their own state government at the hands of the Robber Baron in question.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> I disagree. The burden of proof is on those who want to interfere with the right of the rightful owners of these companies to dispose of their property as they damn well please.
We already have experience in these areas. We even wrote a body of laws to address this particular problem. There is nothing new or interesting here.
We just have libertardians trying to pretend that history doesn't exist and these kinds of problems haven't happened before.
Your notion of capitalism is about 150 years out of date.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Time to kill my Karma....
I was living in Arizona at the time of the rolling blackouts in California. I remember newspaper stories about how APS and TEP (Arizona power companies) were planning to build power lines to northern Mexico to sell their excess power. Now, I don't know what power lines existed between Arizona and California at the time, but I would assume 2 big power companies with excess power (to the point they wanted to build lines across the border!) would have been able to add power to southern California.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
In my state they "deregulated" our Natural Gas supply. Now they've got about 2 dozen companies I can shop with -- only they cost about 5 times what we used to pay for Natural Gas. The same guys who install and cut off your gas are the same guys now -- only they have no job security and they can work for any of 2 dozen companies that someone has to bill and compensate them for. Same work, less pay.
You call them and get either a robot "Your call is important to us, press 3 if you would like another series of options" or you get someone after a long wait who is doing a passing job with English and can't solve any of your problems.
So one pipe, one gas supply, 24 different P.O. Boxes and bills that have "transfer fees" and every few months a new company runs a special because it's their turn.
I've got no interest in a pretend free market on one pipe without regulations.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"