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Time Warner Cable Customers Beg Regulators To Block Sale To Comcast
An anonymous reader sends this report from Ars Technica:
New York is shaping up as a major battleground for Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. While the $45.2 billion merger will be scrutinized by federal officials, it also needs approval at the state level. TWC has 2.2 million cable TV, Internet, and phone customers in 1,150 New York communities, and hundreds of them have called on the New York Public Service Commission to block the sale to Comcast. Comcast doesn't compete against TWC for subscribers, and its territory in New York is limited but includes a VoIP phone service offered to residential and business customers in 10 communities. "Both Time Warner Cable and Comcast already have monopolies in each and every territory in which they do business today, and combining the companies will reinforce those individual territorial monopolies under a single corporate umbrella, with NBC-Universal thrown in to boot," resident Frank Brice argued in a comment to the PSC posted yesterday.
Customers: Please don't!
FTC: Hmm, the customers seem vocal about this one.
Time Warner/Comcast to FTC: Don't you dare...
FTC: We'll need to study the issue.
(One U.S. election cycle passes)
New FTC Head: What's good for Time Warner/Comcast is good for America! Full steam ahead, job-producers!
The deal will indeed be scrutinized by federal officials, to ensure that campaign contributions are large enough.
Considering the whole Janet Jackson issue was due to 1(one) letter, maybe they will
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This is like reading the comments section of a Fox news story. So everyone on slashdot wants to believe their own myopic version of reality so badly they're willing to accept something that so obviously biased, so obviously skewed that it's not dis-similar to a lot of the anti-global warming stories I see elsewhere?
The Comcast/Time-warner merger involves 32,000,000 customers total. The FCC got a total of less than 2000 comments... good or bad. The article only mentions ONE PERSON that stood up and spoke out against the deal at the hearing. ONE.
Now, I don't dispute that if you asked the majority of customers they'd probably prefer this deal didn't happen. But to portray it as if there is this massive customer revolt? This submission and that article are, at the very least, intentionally misleading.
Free market capitalism is very beneficial to the consumers...when there is open competition. .
When did the free market have anything to do with the telecommunications industry? At least in the United States, it has been a regulated industry for as long as anyone alive can remember. I really wonder why we've let companies with a government created monopoly in one area (local cable monopolies) leverage that monopoly to improve their business position in another area (content creation).
no, we just need regulatory bodies that have some teeth and backbone enough to say no to lobbyists and bribes. If a company achieves monopoly status, break them up.
This HAS happened in the past, and all the laws to do it are on still on the books. The only reason it doesn't happen is dick douches like Wheeler get spun around the revolving door of government and corporate America.
Industry regulation does not constitute a non-free market, just as industry deregulation does not constitute a free market. I think you did not mean to suggest that regulation un-frees markets.
While the telecommunications industry has always been regulated, there are many very competitive industries that face regulation. The regulation, in effect, creates a more level playing field for all competitors within a market. For example, the contractor I know faces regulation. He has to register as a contractor and keep his registration current for each state in which he works. The money he pays into the state for that registration goes into a fund that will pay homeowners for botched jobs where the contracting firm goes bankrupt. Contractors are regulated by local laws to require a permit for the work that they do (these regulations also cross-regulate homeowners as well). Work must be subjected to inspection so that the work performed meets building codes. But nobody is saying that contractors have a monopoly, that there is no free market for contractors. Indeed, it's a pretty free market.
To suggest that any regulation makes a market "un-free" is to not understand regulation. Or free markets.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.