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Comcast Forgets To Delete Revealing Note From Blog Post
An anonymous reader notes that Comcast inadvertently posted a bit too much in a blog post today. Earlier today, Comcast published a blog post to criticize the newly announced coalition opposing its merger with Time Warner Cable and to cheer about the FCC's decision to restart the "shot clock" on that deal. But someone at Kabletown is probably getting a stern talking-to right now, after an accidental nugget of honesty made its way into that post. Comcast posted to their corporate blog today about the merger review process, reminding everyone why they think it will be so awesome and pointing to the pro-merger comments that have come in to the FCC. But they also left something else in. Near the end, the blog post reads, "Comcast and Time Warner Cable do not currently compete for customers anywhere in America. That means that if the proposed transaction goes through, consumers will not lose a choice of cable companies. Consumers will not lose a choice of broadband providers. And not a single market will see a reduction in competition. Those are simply the facts." The first version of the blog post, which was also sent out in an e-mail blast, then continues: "We are still working with a vendor to analyze the FCC spreadsheet but in case it shows that there are any consumers in census blocks that may lose a broadband choice, want to make sure these sentences are more nuanced." After that strange little note, the blog post carries on in praise of competition, saying, "There is a reason we want to provide our customers with better service, faster speeds, and a diverse choice of programming: we don't want to lose them."
In my area, my options are Comcast and DSL. I opted DSL because I didn't want to directly fund Comcast's vision for our future. DSL is not as fast as Comcast, but it's fast enough to stream video, play games and download large files overnight. We get by.
I type this as someone who lost a good ISP when it was bought out by Time Warner, and I've seen too many Comcast issues from people I game with to look forward to a merger.
The funny thing, though, is it is that passage that OP seems to be mostly about, when it is the earlier part that should most alarm everybody: they aren't competing.
And they aren't competing (this is just simple truth), because they have most of the country "divided up" between them: "You have this territory, and we have this territory."
But that's ILLEGAL. Dividing up the country between companies into non-competing regions is in violation of a Federal antitrust law that was passed clear back in 1926. It's just as bad in its own way as the "no compete for employees" agreement that Apple and other tech companies had. But they've practically bragged about it to the FCC!
And yet the FCC is looking entirely the other way. This is Obama's crony-capital government for you. I mean sure, Bush did it too, to a lesser extent. But this merger would never have been even CONSIDERED during the Bush years.