1) Americans can expect some of the worst Cable price gouging they have ever seen
2) NetFlix, Amazon Prime et al will become really popular as a result of all the customers saying "FU ComcastWarner"
I agree with your first point, but your second point doesn't follow. If anything, Comcast will price gouge Netflix out of business, and we'll be back to being stuck watching their awful "On Demand" instead.
They can do this, because Comcast owns the content (NBC), the delivery mechanism for said content (cable TV), and the only delivery mechanism (broadband Internet) for their competitor (Netflix/Amazon Prime).
On the other hand, the (failed) merger attempt between AT&T and T-Mobile was the best thing to happen to consumers in a long time, due to the breakup fee that AT&T had o pay T-Mobile($1+ billion worth of spectrum).
I'm trying to imagine a similar silver lining that could happen here, though I can't think of any.
So tell me - how does this 'FU ComcastWarner' gonna work? Move to the one or two towns that have alternative internet (e.g. Fibre)?
What they do is they build public roads. You wouldn't allow a company to build a public road, and then go:
"Safeway trucks get a free pass, cause we have a deal with them; everyone else, $5 per vehicle. Except for you, Best Buy, you pay $25 - except Saturday and Sunday, when you may not pass at all."
I agree with your position, but I think your analogy is tortured.
Secondly, if you think the "no trucks over 3 tons" signs impinge on your "liberty", then go ahead and drive a 25 ton truck down that road, see what happens. I'm having this discussion about "liberty" versus common sense with my 3rd grade son all the time.
I recommend blind trust in nobody, as a rule. But with the government, at least there's the option of voting against the current office holders. Whereas when a Comcast-TimeWarner super-juggernaut takes over the whole market, what are my options? My lawyers versus theirs? Yeah, that would end up "well".
Or I could choose to not buy, therefore starving myself of the resources they provide. That's even better!
EDIT: This is the behavior of "rational economic actors", IMHO. If the benefit you get from the expensive Internet they offer is bigger than the cost, it's rational to take it. If it isn't, then it's rational to pass on it. If enough people do this, then the corporation realizes they get more customers by lowering prices (if they also act as "rational actors").
The 'rational actor' model is to economics what spherical cows [1] are to dairy farms. It is a simplifying assumption that is useful for certain general cases, but if you ever find yourself depending upon it in an argument, you're working at too shallow a level.
In this case, though, even if the rational-actor model were valid, you'd be wrong. In the case of monopolies and oligopolies, the rational-actor approach is to, basically, let yourself be screwed by the monopolist.
For example, in my case I'm in an area where I pay more money for worse broadband (ADSL) because I hate monopolists like Comcast. From an economics perspective, I'm an irrational actor, because I'm not optimizing for my own interests.
Work and school are economic investments with concrete returns; financially, you get more out of Internet access than you pay. If you didn't need Internet for either of these, and just used it for Netflix or World of Warcraft (or any kind of recreation), would you reconsider paying for it?
One fat wallet, one million votes.
Makes me wonder if it'll have to get to the point that a municipality says fuck you to both the broadband provider suing them and the county/state courts that allow such nonsense to implement their broadband anyway.
That being said, Targa is famous for playing for a while via a 4g connection in Australia. So playing the game well is certainly possible.
Tripilolopopy
Besides, if it doesn't equal bittorrent, what is an amoral person going to choose? I think I'll choose s/stealing/borrowing/.
The best way I can explain it is that it's putting the accent more on "free" than on "market", and it's a 14-year-old's definition of free: "You can't make me do anything! YOU'RE NOT MY DAD!"
However, I worry that the more accurate explanation is that it is a neofeudal structure cloaked in free-market terms.
The competition here is from Local Loop Unbundling [1], where the non-ISP part of BT, BT Openreach, works on the exchanges and cabinets. Rollout stats [2], compare Scotland and London for the rural/city development. There's up to 9 choices in London, I would expect iPlayer would work on all of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom#... https://www.samknows.com/broadband/statistics/regional
You forgot Universal, which together still amounts to only a fraction of Netflix's content. There's a reason that Netflix doesn't carry many titles in their streaming service: it's already too costly to acquire the rights to stream them all. If Comcast were to raise the price on that content, Comcast could simply stop streaming those movies/shows. Given the size of their library at this point, I doubt any of this would be missed. The "content" you mention is no longer as critical to Netflix's business strategy as it used to be, especially as they move to more original content.
It's not like many of their users could opt for a different service, anyway.
I'm not understanding your point about an alternate universe in your statement. I must be missing something.
If Netflix et al want to survive, they have to evolve from being mere middlemen, funneling someone else's content through someone else's pipes.
That is devil's idiot. I can choose between 4 different cell carriers and dozens of smartphone makers. Many people only have one option if they want >10Mbps internet.
Fortunately I get to choose between Optimum and FiOS. Optimum gives me 60/25 for the basic rate to keep me from switching to FiOS.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this coming soon to wireless. Imagine movie caching servers integrated into the backhaul network instead of going over the public internet. The improvement in QoS would make being a Netflix type entity untenable.
I also don't see how Samsung is vertically integrated. They don't make the OS, the App store, or have content/DRM. They have in-house manufacturing, but Apple doesn't. The two companies are vertically integrated in totally different ways, thus vertical integration is a weak argument for their success.
There is no use for Google to participate in long-haul wholesale. There is a lot of supply there. The real issue is last mile, where consumers have no choice.
But the rules just changed. It remains to be seen what those guys will do. But I agree that the last-mile competition, or lack of it is far more important.
I don't see how a monopoly helps anyone but the corporation, and even then just in dollars today. Strangling the entire market doesn't help anyone in the long run.
Comcast is different because it already operates as a monopoly in many areas, and it's trying to change the rules so that it can leverage that monopoly, to the detriment of everyone but themselves, and there's not really anything that anyone but the regulators can do about it.
Solution seems obvious.
You can if you corner the market and the good is required like food is.
Cable has a bit more leeway with the crowd I'd imagine, though there'd still definitely be consequences. Just not as dramatic consequences. I'd hope people protest gouged cable prices peacefully.
Comcast should have created the caching infrastructure that Akamai did. Comcast should have implemented cloud backup services. They have the capability to have 50+ Mbps from the customer to their datacenters. This is freak'n huge.
Why didn't comcast create a colo system so that providers could get as close as possible to the customer?
No, Comcast will go down with the Titanic with all of their riches. They have squandered more than they have protected.
what?? Does Apple or samsung have any control on how much carriers charge?
By your logic, ATT wireless, verizon wireless, and other cell carriers have to make their own cell phone and not just be a middlemen that funnel someone else's content on someone else's smartphone.
Not when they're direct competitors to Comcast, Comcast is the only ISP for most people, and Comcast can legally charge Netflix et al out of the market.
No throttling yet
I just hope it doesn't take 10 years for fiber to get to Chicago
Call me a pessimist but I think this will go through. Why? The lobbyists already sounded out (lobbied/paid-off/promised-job-in-future) enough people in govt to feel that this will go through, or at least there is enough chance of it happening.
I bet this will go through, especially using the point that they don't compete against each other (which would be stupid reason to accept by AntiTrust people). They were NOT designed to compete against each other in the first place. They were given geographic divisions by regulators for that very reason.
I don't think that follows. AT&T / TMobile gave it a shot a couple years ago, and that was shot down.
The FCC previously had a 30% coverage limit but that was struck down by the courts in 2009: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB125147230997266951
I think this will go through. Then they will have a huge "content and subscriber" stick to wave around at Aereo, Netflix, Apple and anyone else wanting to play the net content hero.
That's really the play here. Get a ton more captive users in order to better extort Netflix et al for access to those customers, and beat that stick until all their over the top service competitors are either out of business or uncompetitive. Then the real screwing of customers can commence in earnest.
1) More spectrum. But it's massively in demand (read: expensive), nobody wants to give any up, and even if you had "all" the spectrum there are still practical physical limits about how much data you can transmit without using a wavelength that won't penetrate walls.
2) More towers that each use lower power. This is the one that can get you almost arbitrarily large amounts of wireless bandwidth, but it's also the one whose cost converges on the cost of building a new fiber optic network as the number of towers you need approaches the number of users you have.
Neither one of those is going to make for an inexpensive roll out of a wireless network capable of handling Netflix's video traffic to millions of customers simultaneously in the same city.
So if whomever runs your sewer decides that they will not accept solid waste anymore, there is a regulator who will prohibit that from happening.
In many states, the Public Service Commission or similar entity has lots of regulatory authority over cable television, landline and electric rates, but no authority over cellular or broadband. Shockingly, the utilities have invested nothing in the regulated markets for 20 years.
Leasing infrastructure works great in lots of cases.
Places all over the US have already done so, but someone has to show there is local demand.
For cable, we have Netflix, Amazon, etc. as a possible alternative. And I guess for broadband internet, we always have DSL to fall back to.
But Google Fiber can't get here soon enough.
If anything, I'd expect prices to stay the same, because they have far greater leverage over the other media companies.
Obviously, I'm just speaking out from my experience, but how common it is that certain region is served by multiple cable operators? (And that you get to choose from?)