#69: TWC-Charter Merger and FCC Extortion

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2016

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, the Department of Justice approved the merger of Charter and Time Warner Cable, the sixth and third biggest broadband providers in America. If the agency thinks the merger will benefit consumers without harming competition, why is the FCC attaching conditions to the deal? Is this consumer protection? Or regulation by extortion? Evan and Berin discuss. For more, see our statement.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan SportsTrober, your host. On today's show, Time Warner Cable merges with Charter.
0:15.0	Yesterday, the Department of Justice approved the merger, and today, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler reportedly circulated a proposed order
0:22.0	approving the transaction with a whole host of conditions, and we'll get into those. But joining me to
0:26.9	discuss this is mindless cable shill, Baron Soka, president of Tech Freedom, who's going to tell us
0:31.1	why giant cable companies are wonderful and great for consumers. Thank you for joining us,
0:34.8	for the second show in a row. Yes, of course.
0:41.3	You wouldn't be a shill if you only did it once, right? But let's get right into this. So, Barron, the merger was approved, which means what? What does this mean for consumers?
0:47.4	Okay, so bottom line, so the combined company is now the second largest broadband company in America.
0:54.0	It's still smaller than
0:55.4	Comcast by about two and a half million subscribers and it'll have about a 21% market share nationwide.
1:02.0	If you define the market more narrowly to faster 25 megabit per second broadband, it's about 30%.
1:09.3	So that's the combined company. Now, that will sound
1:12.5	scary to some people, but we have antitrust laws for a reason. We have careful people,
1:19.3	the Department of Justice, who review deals like this. And the deal was changed so that a lot of
1:25.3	the customers were actually spun off to a third company called Bright House
1:29.5	networks to keep the total company relatively small. So the bottom line is the Department of Justice
1:36.5	took a hard look at this. They are no friends of cable companies, but they've also in the
1:41.9	past been smart, and they recognize that you need
1:45.3	scale to do infrastructure investment. And that this market, as the FCC itself actually
1:50.6	has said in other circumstances, is increasingly competitive, despite all the hysteria about
1:56.3	the cable monopoly, cable companies across America are facing stiffer competition with each passing year
2:02.9	from telephone companies who are deploying fiber to the home service in major cities, the way
	...

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