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Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
On its face, this is the sort of toll booth between residential subscribers and the content of their choice that a Net Neutrality rule is supposed to prohibit. In addition, this is exactly the sort of anticompetitive harm that opponents of Comcast’s merger with NBC-Universal have warned would happen — that Comcast would leverage its network to harm distribution of competitive video services, while raising prices on its own customers.Susan Crawford wrote a lengthier piece about Comcast, Netflix, network neutrality, set-top boxes and NBC that is well worth reading (as is just about anything she writes). However, for the purposes of this post, we will assume the 5x traffic imbalance is true (and unique and that Comcast has no ulterior motive for charging Level 3 (and its partners like Netflix) a fee for anti-competitive reasons (like its own TV Everywhere service). I want to explore the world in which Comcast has pure motives to explain why even in that world, policy should address the market power of Comcast. Comcast wants to charge Level 3 for access to their customers, which means that content distributed by Netflix has a disadvantage relative to content distributed by Comcast. Even before buying NBC (does anyone really expect the Obama Administration to halt this terrible merger?), Comcast owned content creators. In fact, it has long used its market power as a massive cable distributor to acquire a stake in channels -- as detailed here and here. As a Comcast customer, it becomes harder and harder for me to choose content not owned by Comcast. Even if Comcast does not act anti-competitively, the content it owns is simply easier for me to find and access. This creates a barrier for new content providers (and encourages Netflix to give Comcast a stake in the company). These inevitable barriers to entry, even when Comcast is not abusing its power exemplify the problems of massive scale for a company that owns both content and the (increasingly sole) means of transmitting it. A far better arrangement is structural separation, where the network owner has no stake in the content transferred. This observation informs our preference for community owned networks -- ideally open access networks with a multitude of independent service providers. Even if Comcast behaves itself, it has too much control over the future of content -- from web sites to television programming.