Comcast CEO Brian Roberts: It’s time to pay the postman. (Just FYI: I am the new postman)

Faced with difficult questions about his company’s pending takeover of Time Warner Cable -- which would combine the two largest cable Internet providers in the US into a company consumers will likely hate twice as much -- Comcast CEO Brian Roberts made one thing very clear: his company is determined to sit directly in the middle of the tech world.

Roberts said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once told him that Comcast “should be the best dumb pipe,” a common sentiment in the tech industry that Internet service providers should get out of the way of the content and device industries and just provide reliable broadband service. But avoiding that low-margin fate has been a telecommunications vow for decades, and Roberts made it very clear that Comcast wants to be “the best pipe.” That means it wants to preserve a gatekeeper role.

In a series of analogies, Roberts likened his company’s role to that of a postmaster, pointing out that Netflix pays hundreds of millions of dollars to mail DVDs to its customers but now expects to be able to deliver the same content over the Internet for free.