Charter’s Guarded Optimism That This Time a Merger Will Clear

In Charter’s case, as in Comcast’s, the government is likely to focus less on what the merger would mean for cable TV packages and more on what it would mean for the public’s high-speed Internet access.

Had the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal been approved, a single company would have controlled about 57 percent of that access. For its part, Charter would end up with under 30 percent of the country’s high-speed Internet market, less than Comcast currently holds. But if we learned anything from the government’s handling of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, it is that antitrust oversight has been reinvigorated in Washington, and those who enforce it are not afraid to say no to powerful cable companies. Also, in the largely unsettled realm of Internet regulation, the winds can shift very quickly. The Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal would have combined the nation’s two largest cable companies. This one would bring together the fourth-largest, Charter, and the second-largest. Still, like Comcast’s, this merger debate will almost inevitably become part of a larger one over America’s nascent Internet policy.