Don't let Comcast Reign Over Cable Industry

[Commentary] It's clearly in Comcast's interest to make this titanic, unprecedented merger between content and distribution seem inevitable. The company has done a smoothly professional job of hiring former government employees – almost 80 of them at last count – to help it ensure that the merger doesn't run up against any political obstacles.

Approval of the Comcast-NBC Universal merger would bless the creation of a vertically and horizontally integrated communications giant that would have crushing market power. With the addition of NBC programming – most importantly, NBC's category-killing cable channels USA and CNBC and NBC's rights to broadcast the Super Bowl and the Olympics – Comcast will be able to ensure that no other provider of broadband services will be able to compete with it effectively. There will be no real constraint on Comcast's ability to raise its cable subscription prices. And Comcast will be setting the "market prices" for programming content distributed by competing cable and satellite systems – as the owner of NBC's content, it will make this calculation based on how much it is willing to shift from one of its pockets to another.

One pipe to rule them all: Comcast's version of Mordor. It is this last piece of the puzzle, the looming cable monopoly, which makes the seemingly inevitable approval of the Comcast-NBC merger surprising. What's really going on here is a fight over the future of the Internet. The cable industry has a strong interest – as do the oligopolistic programmers – in avoiding the destruction of their business model by the advent of a decentralized, non-prioritized, commoditized fast connection to the Internet. That's why they're steadfastly maintaining that cord-cutting isn't happening. They need to make a high-priced, densely bundled, sole-source subscription model for all the information and entertainment we watch seem inevitable.

That's why Comcast wants this merger, and that's why it shouldn't happen, absent conditions that ensure Comcast cannot discriminate in favor of its own programming or raise the costs of doing business of its distribution rivals.