My op-ed today in The Hill (see “The Winter of Our Content,”) argues against those who want to derail the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. I don’t know enough to say whether the deal makes good business sense—that’s for the companies’ shareholders to decide in any case. But I do know that every media or communications merger of the last twenty years has been resisted for the same reason—that the combined entity will both have and exercise excessive market power to the detriment of consumers.
That argument has turned out to be wrong every time. It will be here as well.
As is typical in industries undergoing wrenching and dramatic consolidation and reallocation of assets, the urge to merge is a function of three principal forces. These forces—globalization, digitization, and deregulation—are themselves a function of the profound technological innovation that all of us know as consumers of devices, services, and products that didn’t exist just a few years ago.
For more, see "Comcast: The New Forces at Work".