The Federal Communications Commission has told the press that it will circulate a draft decision approving the union of Comcast and NBC Universal. The Wall Street Journal reports that the order will require the merged entity to make Comcast/NBCU video fare available to competitors at reasonable rates, and will also attach open Internet rules to the marriage—Comcast will agree to not prioritize its own network traffic over competitors like Netflix.
That second provision would presumably supplement the across-the-board net neutrality rules that the FCC released on Tuesday, for which Comcast offered cautious support. "While we look forward to reviewing the final order, the rules as described generally appear intended to strike a workable balance between the needs of the marketplace for certainty and everyone's desire that Internet openness be preserved," Comcast Vice President David Cohen declared in response to the announcement.
Comcast has been pushing for FCC and Department of Justice blessing of the proposed marriage for almost a year. Under the terms of the merger, Comcast would own 51 percent of the new media company while NBC's current proprietor General Electric would control the rest.
High and dry
The idea of attaching some net neutrality-related conditions to the merger has been at play for about six months, but the latest news drew an immediate response from the media reform group Free Press.
"Comcast's takeover of NBC would have a harmful impact on competition and consumers, particularly in the emerging online video market," Free Press's policy counsel Corie Wright warned. "The conditions reportedly proposed by the FCC chairman recognize this danger, but we have serious concerns that they will go far enough to protect the public from this unprecedented media behemoth.
"If this merger is approved, it will profoundly transform our media system. Comcast-NBC will control one in five television viewing hours, and it will have a stake in 125 cable channels, film studios, websites and other properties. Consumers are the ones who will be paying the price through higher bills and fewer choices, and they deserve a full and thorough review of the impact of this merger. We don't need another massive giveaway to big media that leaves consumers high and dry."
Other parties have proposed additional conditions for the union, among them a requirement that Comcast open its broadband network to smaller ISPs at wholesale rates, or baseball-style arbitration with smaller competing pay TV providers if private negotiations over content sharing fail.
In baseball-style talks, two parties submit their competing offers to a third-party mediator, who then picks one of the proposals.
Comcast VP Cohen seems happy with the latest news. "After nearly a year," he wrote on his blog, "with one of the longest public comment periods in transaction review history, the filing of thousands of substantive comments, and the production of over 500,000 pages of documents by Comcast, we look forward to an expeditious vote in January by the full Commission approving the transaction." [Ars Technica]
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