The Comcast/TWC Merger Is About Controlling Information

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Consumerist: "Comcast and proposed merger partner Time Warner Cable claim they don't compete because their service areas don't overlap, and that a combined company would happily divest itself of a few million customers to keeps its pay-TV market share below 30%, allowing other companies that don't currently compete with Comcast to keep not competing with Comcast. This narrow, shortsighted view fails to take into account the full breadth of what's involved in this merger — broadcast TV, cable TV, network technology, in-home technology, access to the Internet, and much more. In addition to asking whether or not regulators should permit Comcast to add 10-12 million customers, there is a more important question at the core of this deal: Should Comcast be allowed to control both what content you consume and how you get to consume it?"

Comments

Right on

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as motion pictures were concerned this was decided in 1948 (Paramount vs United States). Simply put, movie studios can not own movie theaters. Another interesting anti-trust action was the dissolution of United Aircraft and Transportation into Boeing the aircraft manufacturer, Pratt and Whitney the aircraft engine manufacturer and most importantly United Airlines. So a single company can not both manufacture airplanes and run airlines. Unfortunately I fear our current political climate is so corrupted by the concentration of wealth that these actions could not occur today.