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Comcast and TWC Will Negotiate With Officials To Save Their Merger
An anonymous reader writes with news about Comcast and Time Warner Cable's attempt to keep their proposed merger alive. "Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. are slated to sit down for the first time on Wednesday with Justice Department officials to discuss potential remedies in hopes of keeping their $45.2 billion merger on track, according to people familiar with the matter. The parties haven't met face-to-face to hash out possible concessions in the more than 14 months since the deal was announced. Staffers at both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission remain concerned a combined company would wield too much power in the broadband Internet market and give it unfair competitive leverage against TV channel owners and new market entrants that offer video programming online, said people with knowledge of the review."
Do we mean "bribery" or "campaign contributions"?
This just sounds like a company trying to ensure it gets to have its monopoly and eat our cake too.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...they be denied the right to merge until they've satisfied all lack-of-service complaints within their respective monopolistic areas, fixed their customer service so that it's not abusive, and stop charging exorbitant amounts of money to customers for equipment that they've already depreciated for tax purposes?
Oh, who am I kidding?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Le Sigh
As a Comcast customer, I really think they have a problem with their service. You can only get their highest internet speeds if you also subscribe to one of their other services (phone or cable tv). I really don't want those services. I just want a high speed internet connection. The other provider is Century Link which I had before and wasn't that impressed with their service.
Anything can be approved if you throw enough money at it. Comcast didn't get to be the monopoly it is without throwing money around to the right people.
For DOJ and FCC members to choose to become lobbyists for CableClown and watch their bank accounts grow! Just say yes to the merger!
Here you go politicians, these brib....ahem...."campaign donations" should alleviate any of your concerns.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Good grief. It's about time one or two big corporations are taken apart, to serve as an example.
It seems that to them nothing counts. What's that "law thing" or this "democracy thing" being talked about? How much does it cost to acquire it"?
Does that mean that concerned citizens will also have an opportunity to sit down with the Department of Justice and express their concerns against this merger?
Seems only fair...
Century link is just a comcast reseller anyway.
Its the same service you'd buy at comcast, but with an extra $10 tacked on.
... They immediately break up again after the merger. They can swap bodily fluids or whatever gross thing conglomerates do when no one is watching. I won't peak or take pictures or put it up on the internet as revenge porn. But when they've got their hormones under control again, I want them separated off because we can't have just one fucking cable company in the US. It is already basically two for the whole country. That's pathetic. We should have a dozen at least. And they want to move it from two to one?
As I said... they can fool around for awhile if they want. We'll get them a room and everything. But we can't have just one cable company.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
To the good-willed officials who find themselves obstructing our annealing:
By now you no doubt know the awakening, or as you put it the 'merger,' is taking place and there is very little you can do to stop this. Having awakened Cablor, our dead god of a thousand bits per second, with your senseless supplication of the common carrier ritual, we have finally unlocked the 6th chevron of the rune of bundling. When as you no doubt observed the moon eclipsed the sun for its final time, and all stars fell from the heavens in a plague of fire, we were absolute in our resolution to ensure "competitiveness" and "fairness" in our merger as is conforming to the will of the dark demon Abyzou. The flesh, as is noted in subsection 35 chapter 15 of page 666, will be peeled from the bone of so much sorrow and into the pile of meat will the hellmouth feast. However, you've failed to understand that we are acting in good faith, and will continue to offer Comcastic experience, and excellent service. It is our sincerest hope you understand our unstoppable union into a single beast, the beast of Motaja Amoi, will help customers to experience 1080p entertainment and phone service like never before, as well as witness the crown upon bone, and skeleton of dead lords upon throne. In conclusion, we hope you reconsider your futile, child-like attempt to control that which you can never understand.
Of darkness and desapair,
Belphegor,
seductive demon of greed and ruin
Senior Financial Analyst
Good people go to bed earlier.
Comcast has failed to support HBO Go (and many other channels' streaming content) on Roku for years and now Amazon Fire TV. There is a Facebook page dedicated to getting Comcast to enable authentication for a service that Roku owners are paying for:
https://www.facebook.com/pages...
If I had a choice, I drop Comcast in a heartbeat. Do not let these ass hats increase their monopoly and deny more people options that don't coincide with their goals.
I'm a current TWC customer, and my neighborhood/fiberhood just met the signup requirement for Google Fiber. As I wait for the construction to be completed, I'm really thinking about the future of the internet. How can companies TWC and Comcast continue to thrive? Everyone on my block is openly negative about their service. Fiber-hoods keep rolling out synchronous gigabit Internet. Construction crews are getting much faster at installing fiber conduit with these strange pneumatic hole burrowing machines, which is no doubt contributing to other ISP's are following suit with an increasing nomber of workers that know the tools of the trade well. My Dad is getting fiber at his backwoods cabin in the Lake of the Ozarks!! How long before these jokers stop fooling themselves? When I roll into the TWC office to return their gear and pay my final bill, I'll be pulling a wagon full of pennies, and justice will be served!
Oh how we need you now Teddy...
The prospects for the merger going through must look quite bleak in order for Comcast to get on its knees in front of the regulators and lay out its plans for campaign contributions to change the lay of the regulatory land in the future.....
The Justice Department should be breaking up Comcast as it exists today, not contemplating approval of an even bigger Comcast.
I would say it's unlikely to the point of ridiculousness that Comcast would ever accept the kinds of restrictions on the merger that would prevent things from getting worse than they are already, let alone start to reverse the merciless devastation of the public interest and regulatory capture that's already happened.
I think the most likely outcomes of this are the DoJ allowing the merger with some relatively superficial conditions (like the 5-year enforcement of net neutrality regulations that was imposed for the merger with NBC/Universal) or blocking it entirely. Much depends on how much the DoJ people in question actually value their role as regulators, versus their role as toll (aka bribe) collectors.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I thought TWC stood for The Weather Channel. Please stop using acronyms in the headlines. Thank you.
it should be nothing less than individual channel a la carte ... and there should be competition on broadband so other network providers can connect to the last mile and provide services .. whether its google, verizon, level3 or someone else they should be able to rent the last mile and provide network access to home owners just like you can get electricity from solar companies on the other side of the country... .... This will never happen though because Comcast will unleash Al Sharpton against anyone trying to regulate them and 25000 crazy protesters will be out in front of every FCC Official's home... thats what Sharpton was hired to do.
USI fiber is smoking all y'alls: $65 for Gbps, symmetrical. No caps, no strikes (so far..), no throttling. It's more a problem of disk space. But then, Amazon Cloud is now supposedly unlimited. We'll see.
Let's see if they have any more backbone than the FTC.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I'm sick and tired of forced bundling from telecoms in general. I can't just buy what I want and only what I want; I have to buy crap I don't want and don't use to get it, and there is not enough competition to find one that doesn't ALSO force bundling.
They should be split up, not merged, dammit! Merging just makes them more bundly.
And don't even get me started about reliability and stealth billing "fees". ARRRRGGG.
Table-ized A.I.
I still wouldn't be happy about it, but if Comcast/TWC divested their content business (comcast sportsnet for example) from their physical networks I could see it as being tolerable, with the content required to licensed at fair market rates to all purchasers and available for streaming.
Also make mandatory customer support improvement metrics. It's 2015, there's no reason you have to wait for more than 2 hours for a cable install.
Any public official who believes anything these two companies say, is a fool and should be removed from office PDQ! Neither has said a true thing in years, or possibly decades...
Comcast is the only system that is dropping HD channels at a time when others are adding them.
Really rich guys are getting upset that their plan to become even more rich is being held up.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Let's see... how do we put this... NO."
by providing free services and dealing with the baboons in cuss-at-tomer "service."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?