When Consumerist.Com tells you something is bad/scary/OMFG!, you know there are a few problems with it. And, boy, are they telling us a lot about this deal.
Read on…if you’re brave enough:
The Comcast Merger Isn’t About Lines On A Map; It’s About Controlling The Delivery Of Information
by Kate Cox
Comcast and proposed merger partner Time Warner Cable claim they don’t compete because their service areas don’t overlap, and that a combined company would happily divest itself of a few million customers to keeps its pay-TV market share below 30%, allowing other companies that don’t currently compete with Comcast to keep not competing with Comcast. This narrow, shortsighted view fails to take into account the full breadth of what’s involved in this merger — broadcast TV, cable TV, network technology, in-home technology, access to the Internet, and much more. In addition to asking whether or not regulators should permit Comcast to add 10-12 million customers, there is a more important question at the core of this deal: Should Comcast be allowed to control both what content you consume and how you get to consume it?
QUESTIONABLE COMPETITION
This week, Comcast and Time Warner Cable executives testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about why they think their merger is such a great idea.
In their joint testimony [PDF], the execs made a point of giving hearty shout-outs to anyone they perceive as a competitor, in order to claim that the merged company won’t be a monopoly. That list of competitors repeatedly named AT&T, Verizon, DirecTV, Dish, Amazon, Apple, Sony, Google, Netflix, and Facebook as chief concerns.
Some of those are easy to understand: the satellite companies directly compete with Comcast to get TV networks into peoples’ homes, for example, and the fiber companies do that plus broadband, too. But Apple and Sony? Amazon and Netflix? Facebook?
If Comcast is the company that plugs the broadband wire into your home, then why are they so concerned about whose devices and services you might use once you’ve got that connection?
Comcast is so concerned about all those other products explicitly because they aren’t just the company that plugs the broadband wire into your home. Comcast is already not only your carrier but also your content — and if they get their way they’ll become your gatekeeper to everyone else’s content, too.