Comcast-Time Warner Cable Merger Derailed

Today we’ve learned again that bureaucrats and their enormous kingdoms come before consumer welfare. 

The collapse of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger merely because of the interference of government, not because of actual market rejection, illustrates the overwhelming power of the modern state in undermining the advance of communications technologies and services specifically in this instance, and of free competitive enterprise generally. 

The proposed transaction was first announced well over a year ago, and as is now the unfortunate and disruptive norm, the parties had to await the verdicts of bureaucracies rather than set immediately about serving consumer markets. Now, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Communications Commission, whose edicts change the direction of entire industries with the slightest gesture, have decided to derail the deal.  

These bureaucrats have decided on our behalf that the merger wouldn’t help us. What they have really decided is that no competitor will need to react to the Comcast-TWC merger, and so competitors have been awarded a government-granted reprieve from the pressures of competition. Over and over, antitrust routinely harms consumers far more than any ordinary business transaction like this can ever do.

Sometimes mergers work, sometimes they don’t—like the failed AOL-Time Warner merger. But such matters should be settled in the marketplace, not by overlords in Washington who, if we are the slightest bit honest, are the real wielders of unchecked monopoly power over all industries, not just one sector like this.  

For an earlier discussion of this merger, here’s a column of mine in Forbes. “Why Organized Conservative Opposition To The Comcast Time Warner Deal Misfires.”

On the folly of antitrust regulation (and it is regulation), see my formal comments to the Federal Trade Commission’s Antitrust Modernization Commission.