Comcast Buys Elections To Prevent Competition In Seattle, Fort Collins

This election season, Comcast is once again devoting funds to an investment it considers necessary - influencing elections in Seattle (WA) and Fort Collins (CO).  In Seattle, Comcast and CenturyLink have donated $50,000 to a political action committee that supports a candidate opposed to publicly owned Internet infrastructure. In our analysis, we’ve run a range of possible scenarios and offered both a conservative Comcast loss estimate and figures based on higher loss of subscribership. For example, if 20 percent of the city’s 138,000 current Comcast Internet access subscribers choose to switch to some other ISP, the company could lose $1.38 million per month based on monthly rates of $50 per month. In Fort Collins, residents will vote on a ballot question that would authorize the city to build a broadband network. Comcast is a member of two groups that have collectively spent $210,000 to fund a campaign against the municipal broadband proposal.