Comcast: Profits Behind Net-Neutrality Fight

COHEN: PROFITS BEHIND NET-NEUTRALITY FIGHT
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: Ted Hearn]
Companies like Google and Yahoo advocate regulation of broadband-access providers primarily in efforts to protect their profits in a fast-moving and disruptive e-commerce market, said Comcast executive vice president David Cohen. He said that although net-neutrality proponents claim that Internet regulation is needed to assist “the next Google,” they really intend to stop high-speed-data-network owners like cable and phone companies from making reasonable returns on their heavy capital investments. “When you cut through the rhetoric, what they want from the federal government is new regulations that would guarantee them below cost-access to the broadband networks that carry most of the Internet content in this country,” Cohen said in a speech to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company, is headquartered in Philadelphia. “Mr. Cohen's speech is wrong in almost every aspect of his analysis of net neutrality,” Public Knowledge communications director Art Brodsky said. “His biggest omission is that his company -- part of an industry whose rates are increasing faster than inflation -- wants to have control over the delivery of content on the Internet. It wants to play favorites and cut deals that would deny some Internet users the benefit of the current Web experience they have in favor of a lesser one.” Brodsky added, “Net neutrality is about restricting the ability of monopolists to play favorites with a medium everyone needs and uses. Cable refuses to commit to an open Internet.”
http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6433522.html?rssid=108