Sen Al Franken attacks Comcast merger

It’s Comcast vs. Sen Al Franken -- Round Two.

The Minnesota Democrat, who pilloried the telecommunications giant and its plans to purchase Time Warner Cable at a congressional hearing, continued his attack a day later -- stressing in an interview that the $45.2 billion megadeal threatens competition and could spike consumers’ cable rates.

Asked during the interview what he’d do with Comcast’s merger, the senator added, “The first thing I would do is not let the largest cable TV company buy the second-largest cable TV company.”

Sen Franken also repeated his criticism that Comcast hadn’t kept some of the promises it made to federal regulators during the company’s 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal. Specifically, Sen Franken said that Comcast hadn’t done enough to market its standalone broadband service to consumers. And he charged that Comcast had tried to shaft programmers like Bloomberg, which competes with Comcast’s own business offering, CNBC.