The tech policy arena in recent days has understandably been dominated by two issues in the news – the proposed Comcast\/Time-Warner Cable merger and the refusal of Net “Neutrality” proponents to allow that pernicious campaign to finally die a justified death.<\/p>\n
Regarding the Comcast\/Time-Warner\u00a0 Cable merger, the Heritage Foundation’s James Gattuso offers one of the better primers<\/a>.\u00a0 He rightly criticizes the anti-merger hyperbole, and notes that the agreement is actually a sign of increased competition, not diminishing competition:<\/p>\n To begin with, these companies do not compete with each other.\u00a0 Comcast and Time-Warner Cable (not to be confused with Time-Warner, the media firm from which TWC was hived off in 2009) operate in geographically distinct cable TV franchises around the country.\u00a0 They do not overlap.<\/p>\n Moreover, while they are the largest and second-largest cable TV firms nationally, that metric is largely meaningless.\u00a0 The paid television marketplace includes many other competitors, ranging from telecommunications firms such as Verizon and AT&T to satellite providers such as DIRECTV, to a growing band of Internet TV providers such as Netflix and Apple TV.\u00a0 It\u2019s a diverse marketplace, in which Comcast and TWC together serve barely 30 percent of subscribers. (In fact, Comcast has pledged to divest cable systems to keep the share below that figure). “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Wall Street Journal<\/em> provided the same reassurance<\/a>, confirming that “a merged Comcast and TWC still has plenty of competition”:<\/p>\n [U]nlike the markets for beer, air travel and wireless, cable companies don’t compete with each other.\u00a0 They have local franchises and compete against telephone, wireless and satellite companies.\u00a0 So there’s no market overlap between systems owned by Comcast and those of Time Warner Cable.\u00a0 Comcast, which is dominant in Philadelphia, will get millions of new customers in New York and Los Angeles.\u00a0 But how can dominance in one geographic region give Comcast new pricing power in a different area?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And the following day, the\u00a0 Journal’s<\/em> Holman Jenkins<\/a> takes a nice swipe at the toxic un-dead specter of Net “Neutrality” as it relates to the proposed merger:<\/p>\n But standing in the way is the tired concept of ‘net neutrality,’ beloved by regulators and mau-mau groups but never enacted by Congress and frequently questioned by the courts. Yet now, thanks to America’s deranged merger approval process, Time Warner and Comcast risk having just such rules imposed on them (and no one else) as extortion for regulators approving their deal.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n With federal overregulation already exacerbating what has been the most sluggish<\/a> economic recovery in recorded U.S. history, and with the American public listing big government as the nation’s foremost threat<\/a>, the bottom line is that bureaucratic interference via Net “Neutrality” or in the private proposed merger of Comcast and Time-Warner remains a bad idea.<\/p>\n