Comcast hits back at merger critics

Comcast is firing back at a coalition of industry and advocacy groups critical of its $45 billion merger proposal. The cable company issued a formal retort to a Federal Communications Commission filing from the Stop Mega Comcast coalition, which was launched in December to urge regulators to kill the deal. “Like a lot of the work of this group, this latest attempt was just a series of what can charitably be called factual inaccuracies,” Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice wrote in a blog post.

In their filing earlier in March, the anti-merger coalition warned the FCC that its tough new net neutrality rules would not dispel the potential harms that would emerge from approving the merger of the nation's two biggest cable company, and told regulations that “no set of conditions can alleviate” their concerns. In a response filed on March 11, Comcast accused the group of repeating “tired arguments” that its members have been making for months. “In short, this ‘white paper’ is simply a compilation of invective, unsupported and unsupportable economic and legal theories, and a hodgepodge of self-contradictory predictions,” it retorted. The deal would bring “enormous benefits” to many consumers, it added.