Former FCC boss turned top cable lobbyist Michael Powell has a relatively amusing interview over at Fierce Cable in which Powell touches on the net neutrality debate, the general dislike of cable companies, and the attention Google Fiber is getting for disrupting the market. Needless to say, Powell isn't all that impressed with Google, and strongly implies that net neutrality is an unfair, coordinated assault on a cable industry that gets an unjustified bad rap.
When asked why cable operators are so disliked right now, Powell offers up a relatively meandering explanation involving the fact that cable companies have to bill you and come to your house:
quote:
We come into your house and do the difficult work of running wires and drilling holes. And unlike Google, we have to send you a bill--a bill to pay for the broadband infrastructure that Google and others profit handsomely from, but don't support directly. Yes, they have ways they support the network, too, but they don't have to directly bill their customer for tripling and quadrupling speeds. A lot of those fantastic companies that don't have to bill you may be selling your identity up, down and sideways, which we may come to regret. But Google has an 80 percent approval rating.
While Google's core business and cable's core business are notably different, Powell forgets that Google's also now an ISP, and by all accounts doing a better job of it than the cable industry. Google's obviously no saint on the privacy front, and despite Powell's suggestion -- they were
notably absent during the latest net neutrality fight. As Google gets bigger and focuses on turf protection, their behavior will inevitably get worse.
However, that doesn't magically explain away the fact that the cable industry has some of the worst-ranked customer service not only in telecom --
but in any industry.
In Powell's mind, it's Comcast that is the little guy, undeserving of the scorn heaped upon them for being powerful "gatekeepers" to the Internet:
quote:
Many of these tech companies are dramatically bigger than us. Comcast and Time Warner Cable pale in size when compared to Google, Facebook and Amazon. These are not multinationals. They're domestic American companies. In fact, there not even national companies--Comcast doesn't serve every customer in the United States ... We're called 'the gatekeepers' when companies that control 90 percent of the search market are not. I think this is misguided in ways that don't lead to constructive outcomes, but rather bad policy outcomes like net neutrality.
Of course the real reason people generally don't like cable companies is quite simple. In the quest for improved quarter over quarter earnings the industry has consistently trimmed back its customer service budgets, making them
unpleasant for most people to interact with. That's it. They're annoying to deal with because they're frequently unwilling (and see too little competition) to spend enough money on customer service.And unlike Google, people often
don't have a choice of broadband providers, so cable customers not only are treated poorly, they tend to feel like a captive audience. It seems like the cable industry would go a long away toward bridging this brand perception gap by simply shoring up customer service -- instead of just
constantly paying empty lip service to shoring up customer service. Pointing at Google and trying to claim "there's a bigger, meaner villain over there," likely isn't going to win any consumer hearts.
·
·
