At a time when the excesses of American industry scream for some kind of regulation and control, Comcast wants to buy NBC/Universal. The purchase flies in the face of network neutrality and will, if permitted, allow Comcast to control the content that travels in their network. The big keep getting bigger.
Karoli has an informative post about Comcast’s amoeba-like feeding on the industries around it. (See Comcast: All your media are belong to us. Your internets and your politics, too).
I am afraid that the United States of America today lacks any meaningful regulation of capital. If it profits the shareholders of Comcast to own NBC/Universal, who is to stand in their way? The old anti-trust laws were written to prevent monopolies from forming to control an industry. The old “trust busters” are long gone. The Clayton Act doesn’t address the kind of integration of products and services that Karoli describes.
We need legislation that will force the divestiture of properties held in conflict of public interest, and we need to get the giant communications companies, AT&T and Comcast, under the control of FCC and various state Public Utilities Commissions.
