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Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

All in all this article seems to defend the deal more than anything. Regardless of your beliefs on monopolies/regulation/whatever, it seems particularly silly and irrelevant to use potential reach as a marker of anything. 0% of Americans are "out of Apple's Reach", so what? That has nothing to do with monopolies. You can have 99% of Americans outside your reach and still be a monopoly in your area. You can have 0% of Americans Out of your reach and be in a highly competitive space. The article seems to kind of point this out by showing that its still the case that only 9% of Americans "wouldn't have a choice". The actual interesting question is how that compares to today. From what I've read there wasn't much overlap so its theoretically not much different.

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I think the "within reach" angle makes more sense here because there is often a lack of choice for most Americans when they look at who offers cable/internet in their area (e.g., only Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, etc.). I think this will get better as things like FiOS and uVerse expand (hopefully), but for right now many of us are "stuck" with a provider.

Yes, but this is specifically separately covered is my point. If you take two disjoint areas and combine them, you have not changed the "choice" landscape at all. If anything the arguments that should be made is that this makes Comcast/TimeWarner more powerful in the net-neutrality debates (which I think is actually a very strong and much more meaningful potential result), not that it is somehow affecting actual monopolistic realities for most Americans (or at the very least, this should be conclusively shown as opposed to listing verifiably unrelated statistics). I guess my position is that this is setting up this debate for failure. If you make the unsubstantiated claim that less Americans will have choice, and they can actually prove that its not practically different from today, it makes this argument not very effective.

>I think the "within reach" angle makes more sense here because there is often a lack of choice for most Americans when they look at who offers cable/internet in their area (e.g., only Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, etc.).

Then let's measure what really matters - the number (or percentage) of people who are served by Comcast only. My guess is between competing cable companies, FIOS, and DSL it's a pretty small number and wouldn't generate any clicks.

EDIT: Other people are saying 9% don't have other choices. But even then I'll bet they're not include mobile phone companies, and everybody has access to satellite.

1. Cable companies do not compete. They serve non-overlapping areas.

2. FiOS has a very small footprint.

3. DSL can barely be considered adequate anymore, and doesn't even meet the FCC's definition of broadband.

4. Wireless broadband has very low data caps, and high latency.

5. Satellite internet (it can't even be considered broadband) has even lower data caps, and even higher latency.

>Cable companies do not compete. They serve non-overlapping areas.

Not true. In my area there are two cable companies that cover the whole city.

>FiOS has a very small footprint.

15 million households isn't a small footprint.

>DSL can barely be considered adequate anymore, and doesn't even meet the FCC's definition of broadband.

Adequate for what? DSL is fine for streaming video.

>Wireless broadband has very low data caps, and high latency.

That's temporary. They're still building out the 4G networks. When they're done they'll have to increase caps substantially to compete. And 4G has very low latency.

>Satellite internet (it can't even be considered broadband) has even lower data caps, and even higher latency.

Granted, satellite wouldn't be my first choice.

Also brings up the question why they are so big and not competing? Maybe the deal should be rejected and investigated why they aren't competing for customers. They should be at each other's throats and not making nice nice!

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