Comcast-TWC Merger Review On Hold

An anonymous reader writes: When the U.S. Federal Communications Commission began reviewing the merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, it imposed a 180-day deadline on the review process. The agency has now pushed that deadline back a few weeks after learning that TWC withheld over 7,000 documents they shouldn't have. TWC originally claimed the documents fall under attorney-client privilege, but that appears not to be the case.

Perhaps more disturbing, the article says another 31,000 documents "went missing" because of a vendor error. (Perhaps even more disturbing is that this is a drop in the bucket compared to the sum total of information TWC dumped on the FCC — apparently over 5 million pages. How they can be expected to properly review that much material is beyond me.)

The FCC is also ready to close the public comment period for the merger, during which over 600,000 comments were filed. Critics are making their final arguments and Comcast is tallying up all the nice things people (and paid public relations agencies) had to say.

Comments

Oligopolies usually suck

[Tablizer]

Somebody please provide ONE case of a merger making a bad company better.

Re:Oligopolies usually suck

[binarylarry]

The apple next acqusition didn't matter much until apple mattered again with the iphone.

Steve Jobs even admitted the iphone was somewhat of a hail mary play.

Re:Oligopolies usually suck

[jmac_the_man]

The American Football League and the National Football League's merger combined the AFL's innovative rule and strategy changes with the marketing, history, and business relationships of the NFL. At the time of the merger, pro football was a mere sideshow in popularity to the college game. (Super Bowl III, the last game played before the merger was announced, was played in the afternoon on New Year's Day in 1969. They couldn't play in prime time because NBC didn't want to put the game on against the college football bowl game that night.)

Today, the NFL runs the most popular sport in the United States, and everyone involved makes a boatload of money.

Any good MBA would do this.

[EmperorOfCanada]

One of the things that they teach at MBA school is that long badgering documents can make up for things like facts and logical arguments. If you look at the documentation in MBA paradises such as military procurement it easily runs into millions of pages for even the simplest of military kit. Often these pages are generated from much more compact groupings of facts which then helps to obscure the reality that these projects are usually total BS. For a simple comparison someone who needs to get to the point where they have completed a doctorate in physics might have used portions of textbooks that totalled in the 100,000 page range. So short of records that simply were an endless list of telephone calls or some such that level of documentation is almost certain to be designed to overwhelm not illuminate.

When a company feels that they must stoop to such measures so as to bamboozle people like this they have made it clear that what they are doing is very very bad, legally, morally, ethically, and not acting in the public interest. This last bit is critical in that we allow them to use public goods such as the airways which are a limited good. I am sure that other companies could be found that would serve the public interest in a cleaner way. Simply put these companies should lose access to these public goods.