Can the DoJ keep broadband competitive?

[Commentary] Verizon’s expanding its fiber-to-the-home empire has goaded the cable companies to constantly boost their broadband speeds, but if the Verizon-SpectrumCo deal gets approved that competitive dynamic disappears.

It also means cable companies might not sign partnerships with smaller, or hungrier wireless companies such as T-Mobile or Sprint. So far, the idea is that the Department of Justice and/or the Federal Communications Commission could put some conditions on the deal’s joint-operating entity (JOE) to prevent collusion among the cable companies and Verizon as well as try to extract concessions related to guaranteed speed improvements, but those conditions would then require dogged enforcement and only last so long. If there is any doubt in the regulators’ minds that this deal is primarily about airwaves, they should put the kibosh on the marketing and joint operating entity associated with the deal and watch the cable companies renege on the deal. Nationwide licenses with 20 to 30 MHz of spectrum for $4 billion is pretty cheap. My hunch is if the marketing agreements and JOE were killed, we’d see the cable companies try to back out and get the true value of those airwaves.