As media multi-conglomerate and Mammon of our era Comcast moves forward with the 100% acquisition of Time Warner announced in February, several competing and tangential companies have come forward with formal complaints. Last night, at the midnight deadline, the worst company in America filed its response with the FCC, and it is so bitchy and dumb.
Part of the terms of this $45.2 billion acquisition have to do with letting us, the viewers (and Comcast's fellow incorporated persons), lodge our complaints about the deal with the FCC. (That's the thing John Oliver broke earlier this summer.) After pages and pages listing the blatantly invested lobbies, astroturf PACs and tiny companies it was able to intimidate into agreeing without reservation to the deal, the response turned on its competitors and other interested parties (including Netflix, Discovery and Dish Network) to whine about how Some Companies are just concerned about their own profits! A moral failing by any measure!
Netflix recycles prior claims about its interconnection agreement with Comcast–something that is plainly not transaction-specific, since it predates this proceeding by months, features in Netflix's nearly identical advocacy in the Commission's unrelated Open Internet proceeding, and mirrors Netflix's incessant complaints about its agreements with other ISPs. What its comments and trumped-up economic theories here show is that Netflix will use any proceeding, in any context, to try to shift the costs for carrying its content onto the backs of others – a great business result for Netflix, but one that would increase prices to consumers and disserve the public interest.
In other words: "Boo hoo hoo, Netflix won't roll over and let us acquire the means to throttle their bandwidth in whatever market and whenever the fuck we feel like it! They're such dicks! You can tell by how they apply the same self-serving strategy universally, to every vendor that threatens them in precisely this way!"
Discovery, like many other programmers, is improperly using this proceeding to promote its own financial interests. In fact, Discovery demanded unwarranted business concessions from Comcast as a condition of Discovery's non-opposition to the Transaction. Such extortionate demands are patently improper. As the self-proclaimed "#1 Pay-TV Programmer in the World," Discovery does not need additional regulatory help to succeed in the marketplace.
Translation: "Whaa wahh, Discovery (Univision too, for starters) keep pointing out how our facile dedication to diversity masks a complete disinterest in—and opposition to—diversity! Why won't they let us crush them? They are so mean to treat this like an antitrust situation when all we want to do is create a monopoly one billion-dollar merger at a time!"
Dish claims that the Transaction will create... potential "chokepoints" in the combined company's broadband services. Dish is wrong...
Ugh, bullshit. "Bleedle deedle, why won't anybody talk about how Disney still gets live numbers out of ESPN because all sports reveal their secret boringness moments after airing? They're just as bad as we are, except for how they aren't! How can all these companies so blithely accuse us of the things that we are doing?"
And that's before the finger-wagging tattletaling begins, as Comcast goes full Nellie Oleson about how each of the companies was willing to negotiate private agreements with this behemoth:
Indeed, their claims are even more unfounded here because many of them are being made only because Comcast refused to grant various self-interested requests that were made directly to Comcast soon after the Transaction was announced – almost always with an express or at least an implicit offer to support the Transaction (or stand down, at minimum) if the requester's demands were met.
The urpy, disingenuous wording here, my God. Like Wall Street calling the Occupiers selfish for eating food and owning clothes: "Can you believe they didn't even stand by this ideology we have invented and ascribed to them? It's almost like they all have different dogs in the fight or something."
Gross, like those repulsive mudslinging fights you get every time there's a conflict between, say AMC and any given cable provider, right before a new season of a hot show, both of 'em acting fools like something out of the Gold Rush days, all Colonel Sanders ribbon-ties and giant Yosemite Sam moustachios and this "Why, that esteemed gentleman to my right is a purveyor of nothing more than snake oil!" bullshit... but even worse, it's just bread and circuses, shadow cabinetry and political theater of merger complaints and character assassination, to keep you off the scent of what's really being fought for here.
Net neutrality is, as usual in this stuff, the endpoint of almost all these kinds of machinations, which is why it's almost always better to side with whatever the online companies are saying, over a Designated Marketing Area-focused, ad-based company. When there are no heroes, it's the dinosaurs that fight for life the hardest, and they're the quickest to embarrass themselves.
Make no mistake, this merger will go through. Our country was bought and sold a long time ago by these fuckers to make sure as little law regulated their activity as possible. But that doesn't mean you should stop paying attention: It's the reasons and the words behind the drama that are the most interesting and will inform and affect your future the most.
Here's the John Oliver video again, just in case you need a refresher on the actual goal and endpoint of all this shadowboxing:
If Comcast were a person, it would be Donald Trump: The worst example of a garbage person in a sea of garbage people, but only by a fractional degree; whining about other people doing the exact same things he is doing, confusing hypocrisy with theater and profit with virtue. Specifically though, in this case, we're talking about a deal that is so transparently about setting up the chess pieces to kill net neutrality not even the players are keeping a straight face about it.
[Image of both companies' Exec VPs swearing before Congress, looking trustworthy, looking not at all like the comical henchmen of an underworld crime lord, via Getty]
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