So the big news this week is that Comcast wants to buy Time Warner Cable. Announced Thursday, all-stock deal, $45.2 billion, and every tech and business site I read had some version of the same headline by Friday morning. I wasn't going to write about it at all because honestly, what's left to say that CNBC hasn't already said forty times with a chyron under it. But then I tried to explain to my mother on the phone why this matters and realized I actually do have an opinion, it's just not really about the deal itself.
Here's the thing nobody seems to be saying out loud in the coverage: this merger barely changes anything for most of us, because Comcast and TWC don't even compete in the same cities. That's literally part of their pitch to regulators — "don't worry, we're not removing a competitor, we never competed with each other in the first place." Which is true! And also the whole problem. I've had exactly one option for cable internet at every address I've lived in for the last six years. Not "one good option." One option, period. If I want more than 15mbps where I live now, it's Comcast or it's nothing, and Comcast knows it, and the pricing reflects that they know it.
I called them in December about a random $12 charge that showed up on my bill (turned out to be a "broadcast TV fee," which as far as I can tell is just the price of the thing I already pay for, but itemized separately so it doesn't count against the number they advertise). Forty minutes on hold, transferred twice, and the rep who finally fixed it told me flat out that it wasn't going away, they'd just remove it as a one-time credit "as a courtesy." That's the kind of company about to get 30% bigger.
The deal still has to clear DOJ and FCC review, which everyone's saying could take a year, maybe more, and there's a decent chance it gets modified or conditioned into something unrecognizable before it closes, if it closes at all. Charter had already been circling TWC since January with a much smaller offer that TWC's board turned down as insulting, so this Comcast number is really Comcast making sure Charter doesn't get there first, more than it is some grand strategic vision. Combined company would cover something like 30 million subscribers. For comparison, AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS combined don't come close to that in cable-equivalent footprint, which is exactly why there's no real competitive pressure keeping prices sane in most markets to begin with.
I also want to mention, because it's been quietly happening for a couple years now and gets buried under bigger news like this: Comcast has been testing usage caps in some markets, 300GB a month with overage charges past that, framed as a "trial." I don't hit anywhere close to that on a normal month, but the direction of travel is obvious once a company doesn't have to worry about you switching providers out of frustration. Why would you cap usage in a market where customers have an alternative? You wouldn't. You'd lose them.
None of this is really about whether the merger gets approved. It's more that the merger announcement made visible something that was already true before Thursday and will still be true whether the deal happens or not — that a huge number of us are functionally captive customers of whichever cable company happened to lay wire in our neighborhood decades ago, and nothing on the horizon changes that math. Google Fiber is real but it's in like two cities. Everyone else gets to pick between bad and worse, if they get to pick at all.
Anyway. I don't have a tidy point to land on here, I just wanted it written down somewhere that isn't a comments section, because in a year when people ask "wait, didn't Comcast used to be a totally different size" I want to remember what this actually felt like from the customer side of the phone call.