Slashdot Mirror
US Justice Dept Approves Charter's Time Warner Cable Purchase With Conditions (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Justice Department has approved Charter Communications Inc's proposed purchase of Time Warner Cable Inc and Bright House networks, which would create the second-largest broadband provider and third largest video-provider. The Justice Department valued the purchase of Time Warner Cable at $78 billion and Bright House at $10.4 billion. Under terms, New Charter has agreed to refrain from telling its content providers that they cannot also sell shows online. The deal must also be approved by the Federal Communications Commission. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Monday he circulated an order seeking approval of the merger with conditions that "will directly benefit consumers by bringing and protecting competition to the video marketplace and increasing broadband deployment."
No caps = higher base price / forced hardware rent
don't ask don't tell
their entire monopoly areas? Comcast has a government-granted monopoly over most of Seattle, but they don't offer service to a lot of Capitol Hill or many poor or mostly minority areas. If you think cable companies are bad, imagine not even having the option of getting cable TV or Internet from them. I probably wouldn't buy from them, but it would be nice to have an option.
Marrying the least ugly sister is still marrying an ugly girl!
Townsfolk: There's a dragon attacking the city!
Dragon Patrol: That is troubling, if true.
Townfolk: You can see it flying from here! And burning! He's going to destroy everything!
Dragon Patrol: I know it seems that way on the face of it, but as yet we have no hard evidence that that's the case.
Townsfolk: Please do something, it's your job!
Dragon Patrol: Very well, we'll schedule an investigation for next week.
Townsfolk: AAAAAGH!! OH GOD WE'RE BURNING AAAAGH!
[Six months later...]
City Watch: After a thorough investigation, we have concluded that this dragon attack is really an actionable issue. Everything and everyone that could be burned already has been. And it's a good thing, in a lot of ways. For example, the dragon has given us, the Dragon Patrol, a portion of the proceeds from burning down the city down and looting its riches. We consider this case closed.
Prices will go up. Quality will go down. How else can they pay the banks and investors who are underwriting this merger? Subscriptions per capita appear to be declining for both cable TV and cable internet. Together this indicates a possible death spiral. A good reason for the banks and the investors to try to get their pay out UP FRONT.
227-3517
Wasn't Charter recently in bankruptcy?
Still a bad idea, because there are two sides to this market:
1) Consumers getting data
2) Cable companies negotiating with everyone else (content providers, other internet peers, etc.)
Consumers can still get shafted because of #2.
FCC just won in the Olympics of logical reasoning.
Less competition means protection of competition.
Less competition does not mean there will be more broadband deployment. In the past there was a theoretical chance for competition. With two companies merging to two: not a chance
New Charter has agreed to refrain from telling its content providers. Well... by this time we already know that it is not always necessary to speak to get your message across.
Body language, mimic, sometimes a tone contradicting the main message can be very very informational.
Long story short: I will never get optic fiber internet below $50 in my town.
So, how long till the current head of the DoJ announces he is resigning his current position to join the Board of Directors of Time Warner?
Well, obviously if its not at least 1gbps and free then we are just out to sc^ew those poor people!
The terms are the person who approved the merger then "retires" and takes a new high paid executive job at TW/Charters.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
No caps = higher base price / forced hardware rent
My price went down with the plan change that got rid of caps at Charter, and my speed went up from 30 to 100mb/s. They require you use their modem but they don't charge a fee for it. Charter hasn't been all that bad, at least by comparison to other cable companies. Hope TWC doesn't rub off on them.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I'm not a fan of Time Warner Cable already. I'm concerned about Charter taking over.
Same here. The article has this ; "We are confident New Charter will be a leading competitor in the broadband and video markets," the company said in a statement.
Being leader in both seems like a conflict of interest.
Only because they want to get that sweet profit margin no matter what.
Winter is Coming.
The US government should tell all the cable companies that they can only merge with each other and get bigger if they agree to end ALL efforts to stop last mile competition in any form.
So that means no more monopoly deals with local government that prevents competing providers. No more pushing for legislation at any level of government that outlaws competition. No more doing deals with competitors not to roll out competing last mile offerings (i.e. the deal done with Verizon not to roll out more FiOS). No more fighting against efforts by Google and others (including local municipalities) to roll out fast broadband.
Still getting laid is still getting laid. :)
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
As a TWC customer, I don't like this idea. But seeing as Google is installing fiber here in San Antonio, hopefully I can get switched over before the tumor begins.
I've had a decent time with them, and so have my family, but they still have issues every night where YouTube, Netflix, or Hulu will randomly buffer. Mostly good, but periodic drops in performance. Starting a video stream also takes a bit to get going. I no longer have them, and I have fiber Internet and have no buffering anymore.
One annoying issue with Charter was the random monthly internet drop out. Worse is you try contacting customer support and they say your connection looks fine from their end. After 10-15 minutes of them trying to have you reboot your modem, computer, and light bulbs, they go "ohh, yeah, we can't contact your modem". WTF did you mean by "your connection looks fine" if you can't fk'n communicate with it?!
have you not heard? there are at least 2 benefits to marrying an ugly girl:
1) no one would steal her
and
2) if they do, WHO CARES!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So, how long till the current head of the DoJ announces he is resigning his current position to join the Board of Directors of Time Warner?
The geek has tunnel vision.
There is more to the DOJ than Anti-trust.
[Lynch] joined the Eastern District as a drug and violent-crime prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's office in 1990. From 1994 to 1998, she served as the chief of the Long Island office and worked on several political corruption cases...
In 1999, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
2001, Lynch left the U.S. Attorney's office to become a partner at Hogan & Hartson (later Hogan Lovells). She remained there until January 20, 2010, when President Barack Obama nominated Lynch to again serve as United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. From 2003 to 2005, she was a member of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Hogan & Hartson has been around since 1904 and even before the merger was about as big and prestigious a law firm as you'll find anywhere in the world.
Lynch has far better options than TWC.
Lynch's office prosecuted Republican congressman Michael Grimm; prosecuted Democratic politicians Pedro Espada Jr. and William Boyland, Jr.; investigated Citigroup over mortgage securities sold by the bank, resulting in a US$7 billion settlement; and was involved in the US$1.2 billion settlement with HSBC over violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.
While Lynch was US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, she supervised the investigation into senior FIFA officials from its earliest stages. The investigation culminated in the indictment of 14 senior FIFA officials and sports marketing executives shortly after Lynch was confirmed as Attorney General. For her work in the 2015 FIFA corruption case, Lynch was presented with the 3rd annual Golden Blazer by Roger Bennett and Michael Davies.
Lynch is the second woman to become Attorney General and the first African-American woman to become Attorney General. Growing up, her mother was a school librarian and her father was a Baptist minister. Lynch earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and American literature from Harvard College in 1981 and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1984, where she was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.
Loretta Lynch
There are statutory prohibitions on a former government employee that generally prevent her from ''switching sides'' after leaving the government. The following are the main restrictions:
Lifetime Ban - An employee is prohibited from representing anyone else before the government on a particular matter involving specific parties in which she participated personally and substantially.
Two-Year Ban - An employee is prohibited for two years from representing another person on a particular matter involving specific parties which was pending under her responsibility during her last year of government service.
One-Year Ban - A senior employee includes Executive Level officials and all other employees whose rate of basic pay is equal to or greater than 86.5% of the rate for Level II of the Executive Schedule, which is $158,554.00 as of January 2015
Leaving Government -- Post-Employment Restrictions
I see the same thing using Firefox and have no explanation for it.
Charter has never lied to me, Comcast did all the time. The X1 platform is far superior to anything else I've seen though. It was really nice to not see the same awful interface every cable box has been using for 20+ years.
My biggest gripe is with Charter's OnDemand offerings. Shockingly slim pickings, inexplicably absent HD streams, no rewind... I'm hoping that's down to the "telling its content providers that they cannot also sell shows online" bit and that it will now change.
I believe Charter is the ONLY cable company that doesn't have a subsidized service for low-income families. They dropped their lower-cost packages years ago, and now their service STARTS at $40/mo.
Meanwhile, Time Warner still has a $15/mo plan, which is only 3/1Mbps, but you don't even need evidence of income. Time Warner is also one of the only cable companies that allows other service providers... If TW isn't doing a good job, you can switch to Earthlink service over the same coax.
I expect the merger with Charter is only going to ruin these TW benefits which aren't as profitable for the company as not offering them would be. The terms allowing the merger should really have forced these programs across Charter's network. Instead, soon it's going to be cheaper for light internet users to switch to cellular entirely.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
One annoying issue with Charter was the random monthly internet drop out. Worse is you try contacting customer support and they say your connection looks fine from their end. After 10-15 minutes of them trying to have you reboot your modem, computer, and light bulbs, they go "ohh, yeah, we can't contact your modem". WTF did you mean by "your connection looks fine" if you can't fk'n communicate with it?!
I read this and laughed, because that's my experience with them (random failures, etc). They suck on the internet side (lowest upstream of any provider other than DSL... even their 100mbit business plans only have 4mbit up) and they're even worse on the TV side.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Don't worry, Time Warner screws their customers in completely different ways that I'm hoping that Charter will remedy. Like their absolute abuse of the CCI flag on cable television that requires you to use either one of their absolutely terrible set top boxes, TiVo, or Windows Media Center (a dead product).
No other cable company does this, which leaves every other subscriber not paying Time Warner open to using the myriad of other roll-your-own DVR solutions out there with a CableCard and tuner.
If Charter wants to make me a happy customer, they can just stop flagging everything CopyOnce. In fact, if Time Warner wanted to make me a happy customer, they could do the same. And I've told them this on many occasions.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
How can there be more competition when there are less providers? If anything, Charter and TWC should be split up and allowed to compete in the same markets using a common network maintained by an independent third party. As it stands, consumers will have the choice between the one cable provider and that exact same provider. There is no competition because the US communications system is inherently broken.