I love the irony of the FCC and its complete and utter lack of rationality. It continues to show its Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde personality. The very same week it allows two satellite radio companies — Sirrus & XM — to merge, overlooking its very own reservations, promoting monopoly in that business, it is telling Comcast to stop messing around with P2P traffic. There will be no fines for Comcast for blocking the traffic.
Now you know I don’t care much for Comcast’s traffic managing ways — having written about it time and again — but this just seeks like an opportunistic and populist-baiting move from an organization that has lately stopped putting people first and started bowing and kneeling to large corporations, instead. And why pick on just Comcast? Why not go after other players like Cox as well? Why doesn’t FCC intervene in the metered Internet issue – that isn’t good for consumers either. Does anyone else feel that FCC has started to display a bizzare streak that shames Roger Clemens?
“Promoting monopoly”, my ass.
Apart from the 800lb gorilla which is terrestrial radio, consolidated as all-get-out as it is, the merged Sirius-XM has to compete with terrestrial digital, internet radio, and podcasting – and that’s just for ad money. The listening pool’s also being ever-more diluted by off-radio listening in cars.
You’re an extremely smart person. Probably best not to give the opposite impression by writing about nonexistent radio monopolies without even thinking about it or — worse — parroting the NAB’s current lobbying cribnotes.
FCC is just “starting to” display a bizarre streak?
I wrote a state of the US telecom post below …most has happened under the watch of the FCC the last few years
http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2008/06/us-telecom-industry-unfairly-maligned.html
The most bizarre feature of the rumored Comcast decision is the demand that Comcast stop throttling P2P and to also tell the FCC how it’s been managing its network. First the hanging, then the trial.
@Richard…. Are you surprised by this hanging-first approach? Most politically compromised-motivated decisions are like that. FCC has become increasingly useless in that sense.
The FCC seems to be harder on cable than other industries like sat radio and the telecoms (where it has regulatory authority). I’m not seeing anything different here.