The long-rumored merger of Comcast and NBC has taken quite a long time to make it through the process, but it’s finally happened. The Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division have officially approved of the merger between NBC Universal and Comcast, creating one of the largest media empires in memory. Of course, there are conditions to prevent Comcast from getting too power-mad, but good luck enforcing them.
The only dissenting vote on the counsel was that of Democratic Commissioner Michael J. Copps, who argued that the bill made Comcast too powerful and that such a merger, “reaches into virtually every corner of our media and digital landscapes and will affect every citizen in the land. All the majority’s efforts — diligent though they were — to ameliorate these harms cannot mask the truth that this Comcast-NBCU joint venture grievously fails the public interest.”
Let’s see, giving control of dozens of channels to a cable company so poorly regarded that they’ve had to change their name to escape bad press and who issues punitive charges to those who compete with them via streaming content online? Yeah, that seems like it fails the public interest to me, too. Yet here we are, and there’s NBCU-Comcast.
Tags: NBC Universal, Comcast, NBC merger with Comcast approved, Federal Communications Commission, Justice Department, FCC approves NBC and Comcast merger, mergers, NBC Comcast, NBC Universal-Comcast merger, Comcast-NBCU, television, cable television, television network merges with cable provider, Michael J. Copps