With the public comment period elapsed for Comcast’s proposed $30 billion acquisition of NBC Universal, there was a final last flurry of opposition to the deal. Comcast took a shellacking from all corners, including a shocking accusation from a congresswoman.
Competitors like DirecTV and EarthLink are opposed. Some consumer groups and unions are also opposed, including Free Press, Common Cause, the National Consumers League and the Communications Workers of America.
Some opposition is provisional, seeking specific concessions from Comcast. Public Knowledge has asked for “strict non-discrimination rules that prevent the entity from interfering with the distribution of non-affiliated content through filtering, blocking or degrading distribution,” for example.
Affiliates of the other three major networks – ABC, CBS and Fox – will agree to the deal, with conditions, including assurances that the joint venture will not discriminate against them in favor of NBC affiliates. They want to bar Comcast from assigning less-appealing channel positions or lowering the signal quality for those affiliates. The filing came after lengthy negotiations with Comcast officials, reported The New York Times.
NBC’s own affiliates extracted a promise that Comcast will not move sports events like National Football League games and the major Olympics events from (free) NBC onto (pay) cable, according to the same NYTimes article.
And while Comcast might expect other cable operators to be natural allies, that’s not necessarily the case if the other operators are small. The American Cable Association filed another in a series of briefs that opposes the combination without new concessions from Comcast designed to protect its members from a merged entity the ACA fears will have far too much market power.
Comcast countered with a blog post, in which it provided a list of those that have come out in favor of the merger, including 46 of the 535 members of Congress.
The company clearly could use more congressional support. But it’s going to have to get over an incendiary accusation from one member. In a public hearing in California, Rep. Maxine Waters suggested that someone at Comcast tried to bribe her, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
According to the LA Times, Waters said she had received a call from “somebody at Comcast asking, ‘What do you want?'” Waters said she responded by mentioning the need for diversity in media and that the Comcast person replied, “I’m talking about, ‘What do you want?'”
One issue of concern is that the merger, the first of its kind to meld a major cable provider with a broadcast network, would be more media concentration, and therefore unacceptable.
Comcast’s response, earlier and again in its blog today, is that this is not “traditional” media consolidation. Rather, it is an example of vertical integration.
The ACA, for one, is not buying that argument. It has submitted a multipage document that argues the consolidation will constitute both vertical and horizontal consolidation.
The organization said the merger will give the joint venture “the incentive and ability to charge supra-competitive prices or otherwise exercise their market power to harm multi-channel video programming distributors (MVPDs). The public interest harms will be greatest for the smaller cable providers that comprise the ACA’s membership and for those areas where NBC’s Owned-and-Operated (O&O) stations and Comcast’s Regional Sports Networks (RSN) both are supplied.”
Comcast has provided some assurances that the merger will not create a greater competitive threat, but the ACA isn’t buying it. The ACA provided pages of documentation indicating that Comcast has been abusing its market power all along and concluded the assurances it has received so far from Comcast “would not remedy the horizontal and vertical harms that would result from the proposed transaction, especially for smaller MVPDs. The ACA thus calls on the applicants [Comcast and NBCU] to return to the drawing board and develop meaningful, enforceable commitments that address the risks of harms.”
