2.5 Blunders in an Otherwise Flawless Comcast Charm Offensive

[Commentary] Comcast has executed a near-perfect strategy to convince the Justice Department, Federal Communications Commission and public that the merger with Time Warner has great benefits. However, the company has not achieved perfection. Set out below are 2.5 mistakes that the company could have easily avoided.

• A Temporary Improvement in Customer Service and Tactics
• Not Carrying Narrow Niche Networks Even in a Costly and Obscure Tier: Clearly Comcast has bandwidth available to carry RFD and ample funds to pay the few cents per subscriber the network would qualify to receive. Instead a company official, who should know better, accused RFD of driving “a wedge between Comcast and rural viewers as a means to promote your own business interests is unfair and grossly inaccurate.”
• Comcast’s "Vigorous" Support for Network Neutrality: Wasn’t this the company that successfully sued the FCC on its creation of network neutrality rules? Well that was then and now embracing neutrality -- for a fixed time period no doubt -- comes across as noble.