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Haydn W

Comcast-Time Warner Cable: How a monopoly can get even worse for you - latimes.com - 1 views

www.latimes.com/...nopoly-20140213,0,867041.story

Monopoly USA LA Times Market Cable

shared by Haydn W on 14 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Comcast's $45-billion offer for Time Warner Cable, a deal that will cement Comcast's position as the dominant cable operator in America.
  • The idea is that already the cable industry is a web of monopolies -- no neighborhood in the country has more than one cable operator to choose from.
  • the merger "will in effect turn two medium-size regional monopolists into a big sprawling monopolist.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Comcast CEO Brian Roberts tried to finesse the issue Thursday by arguing that the deal "does not reduce competition in any market or in any way,"
  • But the ramifications of the cable monopoly go beyond mere access to channels on your set-top box. As we observed back in August, the more damaging consequence of the cable monopoly is in broadband Internet access, where the power of the cable firms' monopolies is magnified by the lack of practical alternatives to their Internet services.
  • n general, the U.S. has the lowest connection speeds and the highest prices in the developed world. The New America Foundation serveyed the world in 2012 to determine what customers could get for the equivalent of $35 a month. In Hong Kong, they could download from the Internet at 500 megabits per second (a half a gigabit); in Tokyo 200 Mbps; in Seoul, Paris, Bucharest (Romania) and Berlin 100. In Los Angeles, 10. Los Angeles is a Time Warner Cable monopoly.
  • The constraint here isn't technological, but commercial. Our fat and secure cable monopolies simply don't feel competitive pressure to provide customers with the fastest speeds at reasonable, affordable rates.
  • We need more competition, not less; and allowing Comcast and Time Warner Cable to merge means much, much less.
  • Haydn W on 14 Feb 14
     
    This article discusses the ramifications of the Comcast - Time Warner Cable merger in America. The two biggest internet and cable providers in the country are set to merge effectively creating one monopoly firm. The market has the charactersists of a monopoly in the fact that new firms can not really enter, even huge phone providers like Verizon and Sprint are having to stop rolling out fibre optic broadband, meaning internet speeds for there customers are set to remain slow. The cable industry is often a typical example of a monopolistic market and it looks set to stay this way. 
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