Comcast challenging FCC’s ownership limits
Ars Technica is carrying an article about Comcast’s FCC filing requesting a change in the ownership limits that restrict a single company from owning more than 30% of the market on a national basis.
Originally designed to prevent a national cable monopoly, this limit is significant to Comcast which is currently has over 28% of the nearly 100 million cable subscribers nationwide. Comcast is arguing that, given AT&T and Verizon’s recent entry into the market and a variety of online outlets for video content, this limit is antiquated.
It’s a tough call. As Ars noted,
So far, the FCC’s moves towards deregulation have arguably had a negative impact on consumers, especially when it comes to broadband.
Still, by and large, having multiple cable companies does little to create competition since they rarely compete in the same geographical area. In the end, having one or one hundred different cable providers on a nationwide basis gives most individual the exact same level of choice–one provider for cable television. In the end, the infrastructure costs create a natural monopoly, meaning that competition in voice, video, and Internet will be between different technologies (ie cable, telco, and wireless), not different implementations of the same technology.
Given that the FCC allowed the recent AT&T and BellSouth merger–and telcos DO compete against each other on a national basis for business-class services–it only seems fair to allow similar consolidation on the cable side. As noted above, it really doesn’t hurt the consumer to allow consolidation within a given technology. What the FCC really should be concerned about– and has paid little attention to–is consolidations among technologies. Recent expansions of AT&T into wireless Internet or AT&T/Cingular’s eventual cellular Internet rollout (on a mass-market basis–you know its coming) does far more to harm competition than national franchises in a single technology. A national broadband policy mindful of creating true competition would be prudent to make sure that various technologies ARE encouraged to create competition since there will never be significant competition otherwise.