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" Cable companies are just sexier utilities. It costs so much money and hassle to lay all the fiber necessary to reach people&amp;#039;s homes that each major market basically gets one provider that competes for customers with satellite providers and telecoms but not each other, as the knowledgeable Peter Kafka explains at Re/Code. If you live in Time Warner Cable land or Comcast land, you&amp;#039;re already suffering from bad customer service and limited options. Regulated monopolies that will never lose their positions can get away with that. If the Feds allow Comcast, the owner of NBC, to gobble up Time Warner for $45 billion, it will be because regulators will see it as no big deal on the consumer front. Comcast can&amp;#039;t abuse Time Warner&amp;#039;s customers any more than Time Warner already does.  Comcast&amp;#039;s executives are experienced at getting federal approval for controversial mergers. To avoid regulatory interference in its acquisition of NBCUniversal, it agreed to abide by the now defunct &amp;quot;Open Internet&amp;quot; rules that the FCC had in place to defend net neutrality. In this case, Comcast seems ready to get rid of some customers so that the national market share of the combined companies totals less than 30 percent. The idea here is to make a few concessions for show so that the regulators can bless the deal. Of course, national market share is somewhat meaningless. The cable company in Chicago doesn&amp;#039;t compete with the cable company in Seattle and nobody moves cities to get a better cable package. But the concession, such as it is, will give the Feds cover to look the other way. Oh, and that net neutrality concession that Comcast made to acquire NBC? Well, the neutrality rules were overturned by a federal court in December and now, says Netflix, Comcast is delivering the streaming movie service at slower speeds.  The fear is that Comcast will eventually move to tiered pricing, forcing bandwidth dependent companies like Netflix to pay more to have their movies streamed over Comcast&amp;#039;s pipes, which will give NBC&amp;#039;s streaming services a cost advantage. Unless the FCC can devise some net neutrality rules that will survive a court challenge, this is inevitable. The bigger Comcast grows through mergers and acquisitions, the more it can bully the content companies. Ultimately, regulators are unlikely care. The cable business is like a utility in form and function, but it isn&amp;#039;t a utility. The government errs on the side of inaction and you can&amp;#039;t expect the Department of Justice to go to the mat in defense of a digital yuppie&amp;#039;s right to binge watch House of Cards for $8 a month. Consumers face two problems dealing with cable companies. The first is lousy service, support and limited choices in terms of buying channels and shows. The second is the influence these companies wield back stage with the content providers. The Comcast/Time Warner combination makes neither problem appreciably worse because, in their local markets, the cable companies are already too large.  The real solution is a political and legal non-starter, but here we go: Over many years the cable companies scraped and borrowed to build the pipes in the right places and they now have exclusive access to them. We must acknowledge that granting these companies the exclusive use of the fiber they put in our collective land is ultimately bad for society. Just as drug patents expire and the local electric company has to let competitors transmit over its lines, the fiber in our soil needs to be opened for the public good. The big deals may make headlines, but it&amp;#039;s time to break up the local monopolies. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a27317/time-warner-cable-antitrust/?click=feed&src=spr_FBPAGE&spr_id=1456_44004712>