Comcast proposed to buy Time Warner Cable today for $45 billion. This isn't going to make cable or Internet competition any worse in America, so we should pretty much consider it a done deal. The question we should all be asking is: what can we get for it?
Consumer advocates Free Press and Public Knowledge have, of course, come out against the merger. But they're lamenting competition that already doesn't exist: the incumbent cable companies have carved up the country between them, gingerly declining to actually compete for customers anywhere at all. From consumers' perspective, Comcast and Time Warner might already be the same thing, just two faces of the Cable Monopoly. No consumer gets to choose between them, and they aren't changing their prices or services to compete with each other.
So if we're going to have cable monopolies, let them be regulated monopolies for the common good.
Comcast has shown a willingness to sign up for conditions to get what it wants: when it bought NBC, it agreed to enforce net neutrality until 2018. Extending that agreement further (maybe to 2025?) could be table stakes here. Comcast cites "Apple, Google, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix" as competitors to its TV service, so let's make sure Comcast Internet offers gold-plated, quality service to those competitors, with no shenanigans.
