Here’s Why the Comcast-Time Warner Merger is Bad

[Commentary] Among the many threats to the future of Internet access in the United States, nothing tops Comcast’s proposed $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. The combined company would be in a position to provide high-capacity data services to almost two-thirds of American households and to tightly control everything flowing over its pipe.

An episode from Comcast’s past shows why this plan is worrisome. Just two decades ago, Comcast distrusted the idea of giving one company the sort of power that Comcast now aims to amass. The consolidation and geographic clustering that swept the cable industry in the late 1990s eventually destroyed the compact among TCI, Comcast, and Cox that had made @Home possible. Comcast and Cox grew big enough that they didn’t feel the need to cooperate with TCI any more, and by 2002 the @Home company was no more.

But now the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable can be understood as the execution -- at long last -- of the @Home business plan. The result might feel just like the Internet -- but it won’t be the Internet. It will be AOL and @Home all over again. But this time there will be no .Com Committee constraining how ComcastTimeWarner treats different streams of bits.

Comcast’s recent interconnection tussle with Netflix, its strong support for Streampix, and the rumor that it is planning to license its X1 platform for free to all other cable operators foreshadow the curated walled garden that we have to look forward to.

[Crawford is a professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law]