14 DAY TRIAL // New Yorkers are begging regulators not to allow Comcast to purchase Time Warner Cable, a deal that is valued at $45.2 billion (€33.1 billion) and which is being scrutinized by federal officials. Aside from the nation-wide nod, the deal also has to receive approval at state level, something that citizens don’t want to happen.
In fact, hundreds of Time Warner Cable customers have called on the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) asking for regulators to block the sale. There are over 2.2 million people using TWC’s services, which include cable TV, Internet and phone line.
“Both Time Warner Cable and Comcast already have monopolies in each and every territory in which they do business today, and combining the companies will reinforce those individual territorial monopolies under a single corporate umbrella, with NBC-Universal thrown in to boot,” said one user in a comment to the PSC.
The customer also explains that the constant, yearly rate increases imposed by TWC are already ”outrageous, outsized, and unwarranted.”
Another complains that Time Warner has already raised the rates three times over the past couple of years, with no service improvement to speak of. He believes that the merger will end up destroying even the little competition that exists in the Internet delivery service and raising everyone’s bills.
There are over 2,000 comments on the topic of the merger, most of which demand the blocking of the fusion.
The customers are not the only ones having such concerns about the effects the deal would have on them, as even members of the commission looking into the merger proposal have pointed out that, just a few years back, Comcast put Time Warner Cable on the list of enemy companies because it was trying to merge with yet another telecommunications company.
Nowadays, Comcast argues that the likes of Google and Netflix are going to come in and swipe everyone off their feet and damage their success, which is why the merger needs to take place.
While Google has indeed been slowly expanding its Fiber network in the United States, it’s still far away from becoming a real threat to Comcast or Time Warner Cable.
What Google does stand a threat to is the business model adopted by these ISPs, who will rather have companies such as Netflix pay for access to a fictional “fast lane,” that's actually the regular bandwidth that the ISP keeps throttling with.
Considering the fact that Google provides exponentially higher speeds at rates that Comcast and TWC provide a fraction of the speed, the Internet giant truly is a threat to them, but not in the way they’d like everyone else to believe.