May 2014

[Commentary] There are plenty of reasons to worry about the proposal to combine Comcast, America’s largest cable and broadband company, with Time Warner Cable, the second-largest cable firm and third-largest broadband provider.

For one, there’s ever more consolidated control over content. There’s also the possibility of certain types of content being given special (or worse) treatment based on the provider’s relationship with Comcast and Time Warner Cable. And there’s the prospect of even higher prices. Indeed a Comcast executive recently admitted that the company will not promise bills “are going to go down or even that they’re going to increase less rapidly.” In the capital of a properly functioning democracy, all of these concerns would prompt the federal government to block the deal. But Washington is an occupied city -- occupied by Comcast’s vast army.

As Time magazine recently reported, “The company has registered at least 76 lobbyists across 24 firms.” Those figures include neither telecommunications lobbyist turned FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler nor Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s chief of staff, who was a Comcast vice president and raked in $1.2 million in Comcast payments since taking his government job.

All of that political power is enhanced by the $9.3 million Comcast, Time Warner Cable and their affiliates have spent on campaign contributions to federal officials in just the last few years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. So, sure, it’s possible that Washington will block the merger, but it seems unlikely in a capital that most often follows the orders of its moneyed overlords.

[Sirota is a staff writer at PandoDaily]

The government may have to insist on conditions before approving deals such as Comcast’s planned acquisition of Time Warner Cable and AT&T’s with DirecTV the Time Warner CEO told investors.

He’s not concerned about the next few years. “In some ways it could help because they’ll be more effective distributors.”

But Jeff Bewkes wants assurance that the mergers won’t close doors for consumers who want his company’s content. ”It’s a question of what happens to innovation and technical advances,” he says. “Is it used to stifle competing products” such as set top boxes or user interfaces? It’s important that electronic distributors “offer a robust market that is not cut off to multiple sources for consumers to get at the programming.”

[Commentary] When SoftBank CEO and Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son gave a well-received talk on deplorable state of the Internet in the US, he never mentioned T-Mobile directly.

However, the subtext was there: if regulators let him get his hands on T-Mobile, he wouldn’t just make the US mobile landscape the competitive, but the entire realm of Internet access.

Give me T-Mobile and I’ll give you a competitor to Comcast-Time Warner, was the message Son delivered, and everybody seemed to eat it up.

I think Son is being pretty disingenuous here. He simply can’t deliver the network to meet those promises. Here’s why.

Mobile and wireline broadband networks are fundamentally different animals, and no matter how much wireless technology improves you’re never going to pump the same amount of capacity through a cellular connection that you would through its wireline equivalent. Son argued that today’s average LTE connection -- at 6 Mbps -- is just as fast as the home broadband speeds many Americans have today (though as The Verge’s Chris Ziegler pointed out, he seemed to be making up numbers), but Son is conflating speed with the cost of capacity. The way people use their home broadband connections simply can’t stand up to today’s mobile technology and today’s mobile business models.

When looking at the technology involved, Son also stands on tenuous ground. Mobile and wireless technologies will gradually get faster and more powerful, evolving to a point where we may some day be able to consume data over wireless connections as indifferently as we consume over the wireline connections. But that kind of scenario involves much more than the cellular networks Sprint could provide.

Prometheus Radio Project is suing the Federal Communications Commission over its latest attempt at resolving a congressionally-mandated media ownership rule review, including challenging its decision to limit joint sales agreements (JSA's) as arbitrary and capricious.

Prometheus filed its challenge with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which remanded the FCC's old media ownership rules back to the commission after Prometheus challenged the FCC's initial efforts to loosen its ownership rules back in 2002. Prometheus is challenging the Wheeler FCC's decision to combine the 2010 and 2014 quadrennial reviews into a single review, which won't be completed until 2016. At the same time the commission voted -- in a split decision -- to limit JSA's.

Prometheus argues that the FCC was arbitrary and capricious in not addressing whether to attribute sharing agreements. And while the FCC did adopt the limit on JSA's, making those of over 15% of a stations weekly ad time attributable under ownership limits, it did not explain why 15% is the appropriate threshold for TV (as it already is for radio), which Prometheus argues is arbitrary and capricious, as was the FCC’s decision to attribute JSA's but not other types of sharing agreements, as was the case in the agency’s decision to not require disclosure of SSAs.