A Perfect Storm Of Comcast Unaccountability Is Brewing
from the utterly-Comcastic dept
If you've been napping, Comcast lobbyists recently convinced the government to kill net neutrality rules, dismantle broadband privacy protections, and bury efforts to make the cable box market more competitive. And they're just getting warmed up. Comcast lobbyists have also successfully convinced the Trump administration to eliminate nearly all state and federal oversight of large telecom monopolies. Should they be successful, consumers and innovators will face a massive new era of little to no accountability for one of the most despised, least-competitive business sectors in America.
This new wave of regulatory capture comes at an inopportune time for American consumers and the nation's startups. Comcast was already facing less broadband competition than ever in many markets thanks to incumbent telcos effectively giving up on upgrading millions of aging DSL lines. With neither government oversight nor healthy competition present to keep Comcast in check, the company's awful customer service has become legend, and the rise of arbitrary, unnecessary fees and usage caps have become the norm.
As an added bonus for Comcast, the conditions applied to the company's 2011 merger with NBC just expired over the weekend, raising additional concerns about the potential impact of an unshackled Comcast on the emerging streaming video market. Those conditions prohibited Comcast from charging streaming competitors unfair rates, or from meddling in Hulu management to prevent disruption of Comcast's own services. They also required Comcast adhere to some aspects of the FCC's 2010 net neutrality rules, even if they were dismantled in court (they were).
With the DOJ suing to block AT&T's own media megamerger, some FCC Commissioners are wondering why Comcast gets a free pass here:
Tomorrow the merger conditions preventing Comcast-NBCU from discriminating against competitors will expire. Now 7 yrs later, @TheJusticeDept is challenging ATT’s merger w/ TW on the same grounds that led @FCC to impose conditions on Comcast. Has anything really changed?
— Mignon Clyburn (@MClyburnFCC) January 19, 2018
On the one hand, several of the conditions didn't mean all that much, since voluntarily proposing your own meaningless conditions is a long-standing tradition in the telecom space. And in many instances Comcast was found to have ignored them completely, a lack of trust in Comcast's word being one of the reasons that regulators blocked Comcast's attempted acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Still, some of the conditions were important, and last year analysts warned that their expiration could allow Comcast to find new, creative ways to screw over competitors and consumers:
"The conditions have served as backstop against any concern about anti-competitive behavior that would have arisen,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst at MoffettNathanson LLC.. "All those concerns will be front and center again if Comcast is completely unshackled from these rules."
Comcast, for its part, unsurprisingly argues that oversight of Comcast is no longer needed because the streaming video market is just so damn competitive:
"All of the market segments in which we do business are more robust and more competitive now than they were before our NBCUniversal transaction, including the explosive growth of online video distributors," a company spokeswoman said.
But again, we're not just talking about the death of NBC merger conditions. Should Comcast's assault on net neutrality survive the courts, and should ISPs be successful in gutting FCC, FTC, and state oversight of ISPs, things could get cumulatively very stupid, very quickly. There could soon be literally almost nothing standing between Comcast and an ocean of anti-competitive possibilities, whether that's using unnecessary usage caps to make streaming video from competitors be more expensive, or using licensing restrictions to try and drive competing services out of business.
Under this new zero-oversight scenario, Comcast could easily use interconnection shenanigans to drive up rates for competing content companies. It could engage in paid prioritization, giving Comcast and Comcast's partner's content an unfair leg up in the market. Comcast could ramp up use of zero rating to penalize competitors. And, under Comcast lobbyists planned scenario, there's not much the FCC, FTC, or states could do about it.
There's still a segment of folks that believe that eliminating all regulation in the telecom sector somehow magically results in Utopia. And while this deregulatory approach may work in more functional, competitive markets, that's simply not how the telecom sector (where Comcast holds a natural monopoly over the last mile) works. You need either healthy competition or objective, sensible regulatory oversight to prevent abuse. If you hadn't noticed, we've got neither. And instead of fixing the problem, we're doubling down on letting Comcast run roughshod over an already very broken market.
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Filed Under: competition, merger conditions
Companies: comcast
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Meanwhile we should all buy Comcast shares because it seems it will be a nice year. If you can connect, of course.
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Re: Bottoming out
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Re: Re: Bottoming out
FCCs drive up costs for everybody so much that no investments are made in ISP infrastructure at all"
BS. If there is really no place to grow then they would just GTFO. As stated here in Techdirt before, they can argue these or those rules are hurting investment, but their reports (obligation by law) to shareholders have a different story, investement has grown up, even with "all those rules".
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Re:
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Last mile
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Re: Last mile
Comcast, or the companies Comcast has bought out, have spent the better part of half a century building infrastructure that connects pretty much everywhere. If you want to compete with Comcast, you're going to need enough money to build that same infrastructure in 10% of the time, and do it while fighting through every roadblock Comcast can think of to slow you down.
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Re: Re: Last mile
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Re: Re: Last mile
"that connects pretty much everywhere"... No they don't, that is why there is still so many areas and persons with bad connection or none at all.
"If you want to compete with Comcast, you're going to need enough money to build that same infrastructure"
No you don't. Just some rules need to be changed, so you can hang form the same poles as they do. As per your own comment: "They don't [own the poles], but they have managed to get a bunch of rules in place that make it difficult and expensive for anyone else to attach wires to those same poles."
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Re: Re: Re: Last mile
Go ahead, change them. Oh, wait - Ajit Pai did that for you.
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FUN TIME
Lets do this RIGHT..
STOP ALL RULES/LAWS/REGULATIONS for corporate protection..
ALL OF THEM..
INCLUDING STOCK MARKET PROTECTIONS..
THEN lets TELL them that ALL stocks must be paid back.. the STOCK MARKET ISNT A BANK, and SHOULD NOT BE USED AS SUCH..
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Re: FUN TIME
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Re: Re: FUN TIME
Oh, you from Oceania, you double minus learnt a thing.
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Re: Re: FUN TIME
In America these are called Libertarians. Whenever a corporation needs to get around some sort of pesky BS like not polluting, treating your workers fairly, not paying taxes, etc... they bring out the useful idiots, who talk about their libertarian gospel along with the church of the CATO think tank.
The end result is ALWAYS that a/the corporation gets a profitable new entitlement.
For instance, here we are talking about Comcast and AT&T as if they are real companies, which they aren't.
They are government backed duopolies who do little to nothing that they aren't forced to. To hear these people talk about having choices when the only choice is AT&T or Spectrum is like talking a crazy street preacher. Pointless.
well that's not "reeeeeeeel libertarianism" bla bla bla...
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Talk about specific (real) persons, with names and last names, the director of this or that department of said companies, or whoever leads the charge in any of these cases.
That goes for countries too.
Say names bitches, names!
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LLC was designed for startup and small companies..
LARGE CORPS DEMEANED..to have the same..
Look up what a LLC is,..then continue your comment.
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President Trump is a reasonable man...
Oh....wait a second..nevermind. I forgot, 'you people' are too busy 'resisting' and yacking about the Russians, and violently shaming any business or technology leader who dares advise his administration.
In other words, you got exactly what you wanted...
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Re: President Trump is a reasonable man...
There's an expression on the Internet that you're supposed to say when you dismiss somebody, right? Can't seem to remember it. Tip of my tongue...
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Re: Re: President Trump is a reasonable man...
CEO's and other leaders who were asked by the president to serve in his administration, were SHAMED AND ATTACKED AND THREATENED with weaponized lawsuits.
SO WHAT THE HELL DID YOU MORONS EXPECT TO HAPPEN!?!?
The president is an executive, one who makes decisions based on the advise and expertise of others.
YOU SHAMED THE EXPERTS AWWAY!
GOOD JOB! Now you have exactly what you deserve.
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Re: Re: Re: President Trump is a reasonable man...
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Re: Re: Re: President Trump is a reasonable man...
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Re: Re: Re: President Trump is a reasonable man...
EXPERT...
IN MY OPINION is someone who knows TECHNOLOGY..not the person that is the boss...the person who knows HOW it works..
A REAL TECH PERSON...in ANY business knows about HOW it works, why it works HOW to improve it..and all this other stuff..
He IS NOT the person that has NEVER SEEN THE BACK END OF A TRUCK or wonders what that BELT is around your waist..
He is GENERALLY not the person WHO HIRES others to water his lawn..
99% of the CORPORATE MONGRELS...CONTROLLING THE companies.. DONT KNOW HOW ANYTHING WORKS..
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Re: Re: Re: Re: President Trump is a reasonable man...
I mean, to be clear, the parts after the first 5, that's called a headline or title.
Anyway, I can't respond to you, because honestly, I don't know wtf you are even talking about?
But I will try. Sure, i would say, somewhere on the order of half of all CEO's & Boards of Directors, are clueless idiots who inherited their positions thanks to friends and has nothing to do with their abilities or skills.
(for example Chelsea Clinton sitting on the board of directors for two companies, is an example cronyism, which infects a large number of corporations today...)
HOWEVER, the other half are people of ability. For instance, Elon Musk is just plain fucking brilliant, and deserves everything he has worked to build. Same thing goes for Peter Theil. Unfortunately, many of those leaders weren't there to advise Trump, EVEN from the periphery, because of the toxic environment created by the new Democratic Party, headed by George Soros, and the other less visible large donors.
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Re: Re: President Trump is a reasonable man...
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Re: Re: Re: President Trump is a reasonable man...
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but I would stil like to know what this means?
> the traditional sound-effect of someone hitting the bottom of one's killfile is "plonk"."
Were you saying that this shill has run out of anti-trumpisms and refuses to self-examine his own role in the destruction of net neutrality?
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Re: Re: Re: President Trump is a reasonable man...
Take another look at the name of the user I was responding to.
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