Comcast's Merger Support Filing: 337 Pages of Make Believe → Competition

No competition? And yet, we see countless articles and posts about how services like Netflix are allowing "increasing" numbers of cord-cutters and how cord-cutting is "real."

Which is it? No competition or "real" competition?

And let's face this: all the cable companies are pretty much tied at the bottom of the customer service rankings. What does this really tell us? Use some imagination. (Although I would never deny that Comcast customer service can stand a lot of improvement.)

Finally, most of the comments the FCC received are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of anti-trust law. As one commentator put it, "You can't deny a merger just because both companies suck."

Fixed

The cable companies have competition in companies like Netflix for video services. When it comes to wired broadband Internet access, though, there is almost no competition. Maybe FIOS in some areas, but that's about it. Google Fiber doesn't count since it only serves a very small number of cities. DSL is old, slower technology that the phone companies are eager to get rid of in favor of more expensive/profitable wireless.

The big problem is that the cable companies see nothing wrong in using their ISP monopoly to gain an advantage against their video competition. Everything from caps to fast lanes to not supporting faster Internet speeds. All this is designed to kill Internet Video before it takes off and to protect their cable TV business. It's as if the buggy whip manufacturers also controlled the roads and set up rules to favor their horse and buggies over automobiles.

It suggests that in most of the US regions, none of the cable conglomerates infringe upon the others turf, and they each enjoy dominance in their respective markets.

This decidedly anti-consumer situation affords the ISP the luxury of being able to artificially set their own pricing with little outside influence from their paying customers. It also allows them to use their captive customer base to degrade competing services and even to seek unethical compensations as a double dipping troll-toll to reach these customers.

And to some people that would not be a problem because to some people the private sector can do no wrong and if its good for the shareholders that is all that matters.

Shows the problem with business today, Screw the customer all hail Wall Street.

Comcast can easily be broken down into three components. Cable provider (which does compete with Netflix), ISP (which has little to no competition depending on the area) and content creator (which competes with Netflix again). If you add all the companies that compete with each part I am sure you will get a large number but the ISP section has little no to competition, which is the one that needs it the most and what they say has the most. I'm sure that it can be spun that Comcast is a competitor to Comcast because there are not many situations where 2 of these sections wont be at odds, which says a lot about it being too big already.

I'd love to see a condition of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger be the splitting of the resulting company into ISP and Cable TV components - each restricted from giving preferential treatment to the other. (Does Comcast or TWC have a content creation arm? If so, split that off also with the same conditions.)

Of course, this won't happen or, if it did, the resulting entities would be separate on paper only but would essentially operate as a single entity. (All the while, heavily lobbying politicians to make sure those merger conditions weren't enforced.)

I had assumed that NBC Universal was a content creation arm of Comcast in some form. Merger wishlist is no data cap/threshold/whatever and for it to be broken up into the three companies like you said but also like you said it probably wont happen or will be useless.

I can hear Comcast sucking the air out of the room now...