Consolidation Foes Use Bloomberg Complaint Against SpectrumCo Deal

Groups opposed to further media consolidation used Bloomberg's charges of Comcast non-compliance, and Federal Communications Commission non-enforcement, of an NBC-Comcast deal condition on news neighborhooding to argue against allowing the MSO and other cable companies to sell their spectrum to Verizon.

On a conference call about Bloomberg's charges, Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, and Joel Kelsey, policy adviser at Free Press, said that the FCC's failure to decide Bloomberg's complaint 14 months after the deal closed [though only 10 months since the complaint was formally filed] called into question its ability to enforce conditions on that or any other deal. The other deal that is top of mind: Verizon's proposed $3.9 billion purchase of spectrum from SpectrumCo., and the associated cross-marketing deals Sohn described as cable and phone competitors laying down their arms and embracing. She asked whether the FCC could be trusted to prevent those competitors from stifling competition through exclusive agreements to market services and jointly develop technologies to integrate wired and wireless video, voice and data? She said if the FCC's inaction on enforcing the neighborhooding condition is any indication, the answer is "definitely no."