Comcast Corporation is America’s biggest cable company, its biggest internet-service provider, and its third-biggest home-telephone provider. As the owner of NBCUniversal, it’s also one of the largest producers of programming for film, cable, and television; on NBC’s networks, it is currently showing the Olympics. It’s not just big by American standards. It’s the largest media company in the world. In 2013, it took in $64.67 billion, generating $13.6 billion in operating income and $7.1 billion in net profits.

Now this behemoth wants to get even bigger, and you have to give its C.E.O., Brian Roberts, some marks for chutzpah. In announcing Comcast’s intention to swallow up Time Warner Cable, the second-biggest cable company in the country, he brushed aside concerns that the regulators and anti-trust authorities might veto the deal, describing it as “pro-consumer, pro-competitive, and strongly in the public interest.”

As you digest these words, it is well to set them in a broader perspective. As residents of the country that came up with Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the Internet, we like to think that we lead the world in communications and entertainment. And we’re certainly ahead in one way: we pay far more for broadband Internet access, cable television, and home phone lines than people in many other advanced countries, even though the services we get aren’t any better. All too often, they are worse.

Take the “triple-play” packages—cable, phone, and high-speed Internet access—that tens of millions of Americans buy from companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable. In France, a country often portrayed as an economic and technological laggard, the monthly cost of these packages is roughly forty dollars a month—about a quarter of what we Americans pay. And, unlike in the United States, France’s triple-play packages include free telephone calls to anywhere in the world. Moreover, the French get faster Internet service: ten times faster for downloading information, and twenty times faster for uploading it.

These figures are taken from an informative 2012 book, “The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use ‘Plain English’ to Rob You Blind,” by David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning financial reporter. In response to Johnston and other critics, the cable and telecommunications industry commissioned its own research, which, predictably enough, made the U.S. performance look a bit better. But more recent independent reports, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the New America Foundation, have confirmed what anybody who has spent some time abroad already knows. “Americans in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC are paying higher prices for slower Internet service.”

In Seoul, triple-play packages start at about fifteen dollars a month—yes, fifteen. In Zurich, otherwise a pretty expensive place to live, they start at thirty dollars. When it comes to stand-alone services, it’s a similar story. In Britain, for example, monthly cell-phone charges start at about fifteen dollars; unlimited broadband starts at about twenty-five dollars a month. And, if you buy a television that was built since 2008, you get access to Freeview, a digital television service that provides more than sixty television channels, about thirty radio channels, and about a dozen streaming Internet channels, all at no cost.

Why are things so different, and so expensive, in the United States? There are various answers, but by far the most important ones are competition and competition policy. In countries like the U.K., regulators forced incumbent cable and telephone operators to lease their networks to competitors at cost, which enabled new providers to enter the market and brought down prices dramatically. The incumbents—the local versions of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and AT&T—didn’t like this policy at all, but the regulators held firm and forced them to accept genuine competition. “The prices were too high,” one of the regulators explained to the media writer Rick Karr. “There were huge barriers to entry.”

That quote accurately describes the situation in the United States today, where vigorous competition is almost non-existent. In some big cities, broadband consumers have a choice between a cable operator, such as Comcast, and a telephone provider, such as Verizon. But that’s practically no choice at all. Although the cable and telephone companies spend huge sums of money on advertising trying to lure each others customers, they rarely compete on price. To use the economic jargon, they act as a cozy “duopoly,” keeping prices well above their costs. Many people, myself included, don’t even have two options to choose from. On my block in Brooklyn, Verizon’s high-speed FiOS service isn’t available yet, so I’m stuck with Time Warner. (And, no, they don’t rush out to repair the frequent outages.)

This sorry situation isn’t an accident. It’s the predictable outcome of Congress bowing to the monopolists, or quasi-monopolists, and allowing them to squelch potential competitors. “Americans pay so much because they don’t have a choice,” Susan Crawford, a former adviser to President Obama on science and innovation, and the author of a recent book, “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age,” told the BBC. “We deregulated high-speed internet access ten years ago and since then we’ve seen enormous consolidation and monopolies… Left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight.”

Comcast, which is based in Philadelphia, is one of the big consolidators and overchargers. In 2005, it teamed up with Time Warner to buy Adelphia Communications, which was then the fifth-biggest cable company. In 2011, it bought fifty-one per cent of NBCUniversal from G.E., and last year it bought the other forty-nine per cent. If it succeeds in buying Time Warner Cable, it will have about thirty million subscribers, with systems in almost all the country’s major media markets. In order to avoid going above thirty per cent of over-all market share (the limit once imposed by the Federal Communications Commission), it has said that it will divest a few of Time Warner Cable’s systems, but doing that would wouldn’t make much difference. In the words of Public Knowledge, a Washington-based public-interest group that has called upon Congress to block the merger, “Comcast would become even more powerful, harming consumers and innovators by further limiting competition in a market with very few competitors and ever-rising prices.”

During the coming months, as regulators consider the deal, the two big cable companies and their defenders will make the argument that an enlarged Comcast, despite its size, would remain vulnerable to new competitors, such as Netflix and Apple. But that’s an old and tired argument. I’ve been writing about the cable industry since the late nineteen-eighties, and something has always been about to destroy it. For a time, the threat was satellite television; then it was the Web; now it’s Netflix or YouTube. But it never materializes. With their quasi-monopoly franchises, and the ability to charge their customers for everything from voice mail to remote controls—look closely at your cable bill—the cable companies get bigger and more profitable every year. No wonder Comcast’s stock price has quintupled since 2009. (Time Warner Cable’s stock has gone up even more.)