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Comment by renata | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure this is as much of a problem as he makes it out to be - if anything, we should be disturbed that the merger is being allowed to go through in the first place. Separating out some customers to prevent a monopoly is a good thing, if anything, and has been done before - when Verizon acquired Alltel, they were required to let AT&T buy the North Dakota portion of Alltel so there wouldn't be a Verizon monopoly here.

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I agree that the merger approval is the original and bigger problem at large, however, unlike AT&T/Alltel this does not seem like 'monopoly prevention' but in fact just the opposite. Calling it 'saving-face' doesn't even do the situation justice.

Sure, Comcast sells off 1.4 million viewers. The gap from No.1 to No.2 post-merge then grows from ~11m subscribers to nearly ~25m. Not only that, but as the LA Times article points out, this is "a fast-evolving industry that requires huge capital investments to maintain..."

Competitors will be reluctant to enter an industry with such significant capital barriers, and why would they? Comcast owns their customers before they've even started.

Based on what I've seen and heard, Comcast has history of doing things like this. They have entered in contract with apartment complex across the nation and have mandated each apartment to have their service. The consumers have been at their mercy whether they like their content or not or even want it. Comcast has gotten too large, it is very dangerous when one company controls so much of media in the country. Where are the regulators?

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