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America already had too little TV and Internet competition. The government must veto this deal.

“As Comcast pushes regulators to approve its  just-announced deal to buy out  Time Warner Cable, it’ll make one essential point: the acquisition won’t visibly change the competitive landscape for TV and  internetcustomers.

“Nice try. Regulators and competition authorities are supposed to consider the public interest when looking at such deals. In no way does the public interest benefit from this one.

“We’re talking immense scale with this deal. Comcast – which  completed its takeover of NBC Universal a year ago in a deal that never should have been allowed in the first place – is the nation’s biggest cable company, with about 21m subscribers. Time Warner Cable, the second largest, has 11m.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the combined company will sell off what amounts to 3m of those subscribers in order to keep its overall market share slightly below a mythical threshold that raises worries about too much market power.

“The public interest is not served when a company that provides one-third of all cable TV service in America replaces two smaller ones (which were plenty big in the first place). It is not served when that company already owns one of the four major broadcast networks, a major movie studio, several cable channels (including CNBC, which will assuredly be boosterish) and other properties.”

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