PITTSBURGH, September 25, 2014 – American Cable Association President and CEO Matthew M. Polka issued the following statement regarding Comcast’s attack on critics of its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable:
“Comcast’s high-handed dismissal of legitimate concerns raised by ACA and others at the Federal Communications Commission about the Time Warner Cable transaction is yet another example of Comcast’s ‘It’s good to be the king’ attitude that this market-dominating company parades in its business relationships with partners and rivals.
“In its FCC filing, Comcast repeated the old, tired, and hard-to-believe arguments from its initial comments about how this business deal will change the lives of consumers for the better. However, while criticizing and dismissing its critics, Comcast refused to address directly the important public interest concerns raised by parties about the big cable deal’s harms to competition and consumers and the lack of remedies available to address these harms. We think most people will see that Comcast is engaging in a distraction campaign, because the facts and the law favor the other side.
“If this is how Comcast acts before receiving merger approval, just think how the company will act in the market if the merger with Time Warner Cable is approved without adequate remedies and its market power is allowed to grow even larger.
“Comcast acts as if an FCC merger review is a Lockean state of nature, a place where Comcast, by virtue of its power, gets to define what is and what isn’t a valid merger-specific criticism. If Comcast can get away with that, does the FCC’s public interest standard even exist?”
About the American Cable Association: Based in Pittsburgh, the American Cable Association is a trade organization representing about 850 smaller and medium-sized, independent cable companies who provide broadband services for nearly 7 million cable subscribers primarily located in rural and smaller suburban markets across America. Through active participation in the regulatory and legislative process in Washington, D.C., ACA’s members work together to advance the interests of their customers and ensure the future competitiveness and viability of their business. For more information, visit https://acaconnects.org/