Why Comcast Will Be Allowed to Buy Time Warner Cable and Kill Net Neutrality
Five registered lobbyists at Comcast have spent time at the FCC. One of the last FCC Commissioners is one of them. One chart describes it all.
By Ben Collins on April 23, 2014
Mark Wilson/Getty Images News
Executives for Comcast, Time Warner Cable and others are sworn into a hearing about the two companies' proposed merger at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
For the past three years, Comcast's Senior VP of Governmental Affairs has been Meredith Baker. Baker's last job was the Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, where she signed off on the controversial
NBCUniversal sale to Comcast in 2009.
Now we know that Baker, the former FCC Commissioner and a public official, was around to
help make sure net neutrality died so Internet costs could soar, and that Time Warner Cable would be allowed to fold into Comcast, despite claims that the new megacorp might violate antitrust laws.
Neither the new net neutrality rules nor a Time Warner Cable sale to Comcast could possibly benefit an average consumer or a small business. Both are likely to pass anyway.
Today, the FCC announced it will allow
for a euphemistic "Fast Lane on the web," demolishing Net Neutrality, and allowing content providers to charge both consumers and companies more if they don't want speed to their website or service artificially throttled.
It's a plan
universally reviled by tech companies, who believe the low barrier to entry of a speedbump-free web allowed for the innovation boon that created the successes of Google, Twitter and Facebook.
Comcast is attempting to purchase TWC for $45 million, and they'll need approval from the FCC to do it. That's where Baker comes in.
Critics of the deal, like
Slate's Matthew Yglesias, argue that the purchase of the country's second-largest cable operator by the biggest cable operator "will in effect turn two medium-size regional monopolists into a big sprawling monopolist. But in terms of consumer-facing competition, you're going from zero to two times zero."
Baker, by the way, wasn't legally allowed to lobby the FCC until 2013, but she lobbied for Comcast on 21 bills in 2013. FCC Chairman from 1997 to 2005 Michael Powell is now lobbying for a TWC-Comcast merger with the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, as well.
And that's just the start of it, according to
opensecrets.org.
Four other former FCC employees have followed Baker's path to Comcast. They include
Rudy Brioche, who worked as an advisor to former commissioner Adelstein before moving to Comcast as its senior director of external affairs and public policy counsel in 2009. Brioche was so valued by the FCC, in fact, that he was brought in to
join the commission's Advisory Committee for Diversity in the Digital Age in 2011.
18 people have both lobbied for Comcast and spent time in the public sector. Of those, 12 are currently registered lobbyists for Comcast, with five of them having spent time at the FCC.
Baker is leaving her Comcast position to become
the president and CEO of a wireless lobby in June.
In order to skirt monopoly laws, Comcast is working out a deal to
sell 4 million subscribers to Charter Communications if the Time Warner Cable purchase is completed.
Netflix
came out against the Comcast-TWC merger this week, saying the combined company would "possess anti-competitive leverage." And
forecasters believe that Netflix will have to raise costs to pay "speed tolls" to ISPs, like Comcast and Verizon, if the new net neutrality rules become a reality.
Consumers will have to pay more for the service they already have, innovation on the Web will stagnate, and it's because a former public official successfully lobbied for all of it.
remember it's the government that's the problem not the corporation, they are totally different entities
.
