Open Internet Rules Can't Address Comcast/TWC Harms, Says Stop Mega Comcast

Comcast's planned buy of Time Warner Cable threatens competition in ways beyond the scope of the FCC net neutrality order, said Stop Mega Comcast in an ex parte filing posted Friday in docket 14-57. “Neither the 2010 nor the 2014 open Internet rules address Comcast’s core incentive to harm OVDs [online video distributors], and neither can adequately address the numerous ways in which Comcast can act on that incentive,” said the group, composed of Consumers Union, Dish Network, Public Knowledge and other companies and associations. In a recent response to critics of the deal, Comcast disagreed that it has incentive to foreclose OVD competitors, and pointed to conditions from the NBCUniversal deal as constraining it from doing so. Comcast has “shown a propensity” to work around merger conditions and the competitive harms of the deal go beyond the broadband focus of the Open Internet Order, the filing said. “Even for those harms that the open Internet rules are meant to address, Mega-Comcast will have the incentive to design around particular regulations, interpret them narrowly, and litigate them for years, as it has done in the past.”