Former Obama advisor argues Comcast is a threat to the open Internet

[Commentary] Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard and a former advisor to President Obama, was not a fan of Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal. In fact, Crawford was so appalled by the transaction that she made the fight over the merger the focus of her book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. But Crawford's beef isn't only with Comcast. She sees the cable giant's growing size as a symptom of much larger problems with the telecommunications, media, and technology sectors.

In her view, these communications industries fester with monopolies, collusion, and consumer-hostile business practices. A few big companies—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, Apple, Google, and Microsoft—"tacitly cooperate by carving out their separate areas of expertise," leaving customers with low quality and high prices. Crawford's skepticism of the Comcast deal is well-founded, but her broader critique of the modern media landscape misses the mark. The sorry state of the residential broadband market is a genuine problem that calls for creative policy solutions, but the wireless, media, and online sectors of the economy are more competitive—and more consumer-friendly—than she admits. Crawford's over-diagnosis of what's wrong with the modern communications sector leads her to go overboard with her policy proposals. Rather than advocating a focus on constraining the power of broadband duopolists, she calls for a broad increase in government involvement in the communications industry. That approach didn't work very well the last time we tried it in the mid-20th Century. And it would likely work even worse today.