Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, ACQUISITIONS & MERGERS NEWS: Industry, Consumer groups urge rejection of Comcast-TWC merger, (Apr 20, 2015)
Organizations Mentioned:Comcast | Computer & Communications Industry Association | Consumer Federation of America | Dish Network | Public Knowledge | Time Warner Cable, Inc.
By Lynn Stanton,TRDaily
More than three-dozen industry trade associations, companies, public interest groups, and other organizations told FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler that “the only way to protect [the] competitive future” on which he has “staked” his chairmanship “is to reject the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger outright—no conditions, no side deals—no merger, period.”
“As the record demonstrates, and particularly for a company with a track record of disregarding conditions from its last major acquisition, Comcast cannot be relied upon to comply with new conditions that run counter to its built-in incentives to exploit the new market power it would gain from the proposed merger,” Comptel, NTCA, Consumers Union, and the East and West branches of the Writers Guild of America, along with 32 other organizations, told Chairman Wheeler in an ex parte letter dated today and submitted in Media Bureau docket 14-57.
“[T]he sheer size and scope of a combined Comcast/Time Warner Cable, coupled with its incentive to protect its core video business from innovative ‘over-the-top’ online video providers, would allow it to threaten nascent competition in so many different ways. If the Commission approves the merger believing that conditions can somehow prevent or address these harms, there is no going back,” they continued.
“Your steadfast commitment to competition would risk being eviscerated if Comcast were allowed to control over 50% of high-speed residential broadband connections nationwide. No condition, including but not limited to a ‘net neutrality’ provision modeled on the Open Internet order, can address the myriad ways a combined Comcast/Time Warner Cable would be able to thwart competition and convert its massive network into a closed system of preferential treatment for its own content or the content of a select few,” they added.
Among the other parties signing the letter were Common Cause, the Benton Foundation, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the Consumer Federation of America, Dish Network, Free Press, ITTA, New America’s Open Technology Institute, the Parents Television Council, and Public Knowledge.
News: AcquisitionsMergers Antitrust