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Comment by sandworm | Hacker News Reader

Give them a couple years. After a few more "government is bad" TV spots, and under a republican president, they will try again. Whether they merge today or then doesn't really matter.

They are effectively merged already. They stay away from each other, treating customers like each other's property, and offer comparable services at comparable prices. They aren't in any real competition with each other. I'm not saying that they should merge. Rather, I'm saying that them not merging isn't a quick fix of the underlying issue. Americans need actual choice of providers within a given technology.

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> under a republican president

Democrat or Republican doesn't matter. Lobbying and who is offered and receives campaign contributions, etc. matter. It's about manipulation, money and power/getting re-elected, plain and simple.

Notice the Reps and Dems on this list of campaign contributions from Comcast: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000461

Top Recipients from Comcast:

National Republican Congressional Cmte, John Boehner (R-OH), National Republican Senatorial Cmte, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte, DNC Services Corp, Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte, Ed Markey (D-MA), Democratic Municipal Officials, Cory Booker (D-NJ), Fred Upton (R-MI)

Comcast spent $16,970,000 on lobbying in 2014. They likely lobbied both Reps and Dems.

Those noted who own Comcast shares:

Barber, Ron (D-AZ) Boehner, John (R-OH) Cohen, Steve (D-TN) Collins, Susan M (R-ME) Cooper, Jim (D-TN) Dingell, John D (D-MI) Frankel, Lois J (D-FL) Frelinghuysen, Rodney (R-NJ) Hagan, Kay R (D-NC) Hanna, Richard (R-NY) Heck, Dennis (D-WA) Holding, George (R-NC) Isakson, Johnny (R-GA) Kelly, Mike (R-PA) Marchant, Kenny (R-TX) McCaul, Michael (R-TX) McDermott, Jim (D-WA) Pelosi, Nancy (D-CA)

Note that Comcast, as a corporation, is prohibited from donating money to political campaigns: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/04/07/supre....

OpenSecrets has been sweeping that disclaimer more and more under the rug, to the point where now I'd accuse them of lying.

Is this a matter of direct contributions versus PAC contributions?

Corporations cannot donate money to campaigns at all, either directly or through PACs. A corporation can have a "captive" PAC whose expenses it can pay (for example, letting it operate out of their corporate offices), but all donations that pass through to a campaigh must come from individuals.

When you hear that "Company X gave money to candidates", what you're really hearing is "people who reported that they work for Company X gave money to candidates."

A corporation being prohibited from donating is entirely irrelevant as we saw in the Sony leaks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392872

True, but it was never the end users who were going to be affected by this deal. It was the suppliers and vendors and other service providers who were going to be hurt because there were going to be fewer and fewer clients that they could work with.

Bingo.

There were precisely zero content providers (outside NBC) who were looking forward to dealing with a monopsony that also owned a direct competitor.

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