Comcast-TWC Merger in Jeopardy
The proposed marriage of the country’s two biggest cable companies is stumbling on its way to the altar, said Alex Sherman in Bloomberg.com. Comcast executives met with antitrust officials at the Justice Department this week for the first time to make the case for the company’s $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable. But government attorneys who have scrutinized the deal for the past year will reportedly recommend that the union be blocked, on the grounds that it would harm consumers. Six senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), echoed that argument this week, writing to regulators that an enlarged Comcast would “drive out competitors.”
Antitrust officials are “unlikely to be appeased” by Comcast’s promises that it won’t abuse its dominant market position after the merger, said Brent Kendall and Shalini Ramachandran in The Wall Street Journal. Thecombined Comcast-TWC would control as much as 57 percent of the national broadband market and 30 percent of the cable market. When the government considers mergers problematic, it typically demands structural changes to the deal. But Comcast “may not have a lot of wiggle room to offer” regulators, such as selling off “existing businesses or other assets to rivals to preserve competition,” before the TWC acquisition “becomes less attractive.”
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