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.'"

Comments

Re:Ok

[hey!]

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.

Re:Ok

[morgauxo]

I suspect that only people who live in an area with fiber would say that a LOT of places have fiber.

Re:Ok

[desertfool]

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.