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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."
This is a goof, but it doesn't reveal anything interesting. The note says that they have to make sure that the number of places where they compete with Time Warner for the same customers really is zero and not just very low.
What is more revealing is the statement which stayed in: that the market is not competitive.
Right now the only thing that has pushed the cable companies to innovate are the likes of Google Fiber and Netflix and Amazon. The don't really compete with each other. Fiber threatens them directly on internet while Netflix and Amazon competes with them on content. This merger would all grant enormous market power for one company. Before they might have competed for the same geographic region. Now, not so much.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I hate Comcast as much as the next guy, but I don't see how this is that bad. They don't think there will be reduction in competition, but they're double-checking to make sure that's true, and if it isn't, they'll have to be less bold with their language. Isn't that the right thing to do?
So, the post got made without double-checking that there was no counter-example to the depressingly likely "Eh, it's not like we were competing anyway?" That's complaining about the wrong part. It's like being upset that the governor misspelled your middle name on the execution notice.
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Why just today, we clicked the wrong button! Instead of deleting Bennett Hasselton's inane ramblings, it got pushed to the slashdice front page! Our bad! We were going to fire samzenpus but it turns out he's just a perl script and the perl programmers we hired from dice.com were actually pearl brogrammers and can't figure out how to fix it.
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When any company can come in and lay down lines and provide service without having to pay off the City Council/County Supervisors/State Legislatures, THEN there will be real competition.
Render all cable franchise agreements null and void. Let the providers beat a path to my TV/Internet.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
well, it could go into the negative competition, but what would that be?
Cable Companies: Would you like a piece of candy?
Stewie: I smell death on you
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
The cheapest offer of "broadband" to my father who is outside of a 40k population town by 6 miles is 180 per month satellite with a 2GB per month limit at 3mbps speeds. You're very wrong.
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.
that they take their regulators and public statements like they take their customer complaints... with a wave of the hand, and "Bah." all they want is negotiable checks, and everything else is crap to ignore.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Well just so you know, I tried DSL via POTS and gave up (with full refund) because I couldn't get more that a few hundred kbps. I have no other cable internet vendor option other than comcast. So I'm in that category of "competition will not decrease" because there currently is no competition. (Actually the FCC probably counts my neighborhood as having DSL access, but it is a fiction.)
False equivalency. The latency over satellite internet makes it entirely not equivalent to wired internet.
And if Comcast is allowed to expand it's empire, that will only ensure that US consumers have even less options in the future (for cable providers anyway).
That's not true. That's the point of the statement that Comcast and Time Warner don't compete against each other in any markets. If you live in a Comcast service area, you get to choose Comcast for wired television service. If you live in a TW area, you get to choose TW. One choice each. When TW and C merge, you still get one choice in either area -- ComTime. One equals one.
What this allegedly damning bit of evidence does NOT say, however, is that Comcast and TimeWarner have no competition at all. They just don't compete against each other. If you don't like Comcast now, you can choose Dish, DirecTV, etc. If you don't like CTW then, you still get to choose Dish, DirecTV, etc. Same choices among non-wireline services, not less.
You can't lose a customer if you're the only viable game in town.
That's already the status quo. A merger doesn't change that. They cannot today lose customers to each other, and after a merger they still will not be able to lose customers to "each other" (which would actually be "themselves" if I wanted to abandon the parallel construction of that sentence.)
Now, what a merger would do is create a huge monolithic customer for content services. If CTW decides to tell a content provider that they have to lower rates if they want to be seen, the provider has much more interest in obeying. Today, if Comcast says "jump" and the provider doesn't, the provider loses 40% of its eyes. In a CTW world, they'd lose 80% of them (assuming Dish, DirecTV, etc have 20% of the market.)
So "loss of competition" is a losing argument against the merger. One choice before, one choice after. It doesn't matter that it's the same company after and two before since you cannot use the fact it was two to actually make a different choice. Unless, of course, you think moving is a reasonable way to increase your cable television choices. Even then, you can still move to a Charter service area.
i'm very wrong because your father has a very affordable and very usable service available to him?
...
AC industry shill. Color me surprised.
$180/month for a 3mbs link is a monthly charge of $60 per mbps. The EU average for this service unit is $3.50. Also a 2 GB monthly cap is "very usable"?! The average home use consumes about 25 GB of bandwidth monthly, the average mobile phone user is hitting 2 GB/month right now.
So the AC Shill, paying 17 times a competitive world service rate for only 8% of what a typical American consumes in bandwidth is "very affordable and very usable". But to anyone not taking industry astro-turf cash it is a rip-off.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age