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Charter Strikes $56B Deal For Time Warner Cable
mpicpp writes with word that Charter Communications has struck a $56 billion deal to buy Time Warner Cable; if the deal goes through (which the article says is likely, according to Macquarie Research analyst Amy Yong -- at least more likely than the recently scotched Comcast-Time Warner deal), it would mean that the second- and third-largest U.S. cable companies would share a letterhead, and more than 20 percent of the country's ISP market.
From the linked Reuters article: The Federal Communications Commission immediately served notice that it would closely scrutinize the deal, focusing not only on absence of harm but benefits to the public. Charter, in which Malone-chaired Liberty Broadband Corp owns about 26 percent, is offering about $195.71 in cash-and-stock for each Time Warner Cable share, based on Charter's closing price on May 20. Including debt, the deal values Time Warner Cable at $78.7 billion. A key area of regulatory concern would be competition in broadband Internet.
The second angel billowed and something as a great mountain of ember and smoke was doused in the oceans and seas of the Earth and a third of the world's water became blood, a third of life living within them was annihilated; and a third of the ships were destroyed - the souls scattered to the wind....
The merger is a bad idea, Charter is a poorly managed company and has been for a long time. Management treats their technical employees with callous disregard for personal boundaries, does not recognize or reward technical expertise or professionalism and in my case, is in the habit of lying to job reference inquiries to the point of being criminal. This is just scratching the surface of what is wrong with this company. As an internet service provider, they are sub standard in terms of providing working, reliable equipment and they are notoriously slapdash with protecting their customer's privacy and options to protect their own privacy.
My bad experience at the company aside, if an entity cannot handle and demonstrate integrity in small things, it follows that they should not be trusted with larger responsibilities.
This has been my proposal for a while now. It would solve, or at least provide choice in "Net Neutrality" issues, like that of Comcast v Netflix.
The problem is that nobody really wants to tackle the FIOS rollout that would be needed to make this work. However, I do believe it would work, and a small municipality, one that is geographically isolated, would be a great case study in how it would work.
The thing I believe most about this scenario is that we'll start to see new products and new services that are currently missing like "a la carte" ordering.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's easy to be cynical about this, but Time Warner is so customer surly that a ultra-huge mega-merger might actually be better for existing Time Warner customers.
For example: Time Warner abuses the broadcast flag / CCI DRM schemes to flag everything they legally can as "copy-once", locking out lots of DVR competition because the additional features don't work. Charter does not do this, and only flags content as "copy-once" or "do-not-copy" as contractually required by the content providers.
A Charter merger with Time Warner would make my service better and more enjoyable the instant they flip that bit to comply with Charter's current policy regarding CCI tagging because I would no longer be required to watch content only on the device that recorded it.
Time Warner is the worst cable company out there from a customer perspective. When the best news you get about someone providing you a service is that they are selling out to competition, that tells you how bad the service is.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Government is NOT the answer in most cases
Most cases of what? Infrastructure? Government is the ONLY practical solution for a wide array of infrastructure projects. Roads, airports, passenger rail, ports, are all done primarily through governments. Telecom companies and utilities are typically private but heavily regulated. Power generation? Regulated. Bridges and dams? Regulated and contracted out. The blanket assertion that government is never the best option is not supported by the actual facts. Governments are often the best solution for when market incentives fail and they often fail in infrastructure which is what the internet has become.
Having government manage a rapidly change highly technical bit of infrastructure does not seem like a good idea to me.
That's why governments rarely do such things themselves. What happens is you pay taxes to the government and the government contracts out the services to a competitive bidding process among private companies. The government doesn't pave your roads (usually), it manages the company that does. The advantage of this is that the government's incentives are (more) aligned with the taxpayer and it provides a means to accomplish things that otherwise either wouldn't get done or would be done insufficiently or badly if profit motives were the only factor in play.