In most areas cable has already won the broadband wars, with inexpensive DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades allowing them to offer speeds that cash-strapped, smaller telcos simply can't match. As I noted the other day, things are looking even brighter for most cable operators given that AT&T and Verizon have all-but stopped next gen upgrades, and are willfully driving DSL customers they don't want to cable, strengthening cable's dominance across most of America over the next five to ten years.

This is all before you factor in the fact that the cable industry appears poised for a new round of consolidation, with Liberty's John Malone clamoring for a series of deals that could include a Charter acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Cox, or a Time Warner Cable acquisition of Cablevision.

While the industry is delivering the usual speech about how this market domination will usher forth a new era of "innovation," what it will likely usher forth is what you always get with monopoly domination: poor(er) service and higher prices.

In a piece over at Wired, Susan Crawford sees the writing on the wall courtsey of recent Malone comments, noting how that with their competitors all but dead and cable operators working in unison, cable will be renewing their effort to make metered broadband billing mainstream;

quote:

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In a non-competitive local market, data caps are excellent tools with which to make as much money as possible from an existing monopoly facility. Although cable distributors could charge end-users a low flat fee for high download speeds — and Malone is confident that he’ll get his systems to gigabit downloads with very little investment — they have no reason to.

So Malone’s planning a use-based program that goes into broadband connectivity, "so that, you know, Reed [Hastings, CEO of Netflix] has to bear in his economic model some of the capacity that he’s burning … And essentially the retail marketplace will have to reflect the true costs of these various delivery mechanisms and investments."

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As we've long noted, metered billing has never been about "fairness," congestion, or financial necessity, it simply allows a monopoly operator to further dominate the pipe; protecting TV revenues from Internet video while getting their pound of flesh at the same time. With Verizon and AT&T backing out of many markets and smaller telcos usually too cheap or incompetent to upgrade their networks, Crawford believes we're looking at a new age of cable dominance with low caps and high per gig overages as the main entree.

Maybe. Keep in mind the only thing that stopped Time Warner Cable from imposing ridiculously expensive new metered plans was customer outrage and bad PR, since the cable company doesn't really face any serious competition in its territories. Even with their choices limited, consumers still have a very loud voice in this equation, and when it comes to charging an arm and a leg for broadband that's increasingly cheaper to provide, the facts are on their side.

(As an aside, I have to note that if Susan Crawford really wants to stop this kind of market domination, perhaps she shouldn't throw her support behind appointing former cable lobbyists to head the FCC).