When Comcast announced its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable, it said the merger would bring significant cost savings and efficiencies that would "ultimately benefit customers."

But Comcast doesn't expect these savings to bring price decreases, or even cause prices to rise less rapidly.

"The impact on customer bills is always hard to quantify. We're certainly not promising that customer bills are going to go down or even increase less rapidly," Comcast Executive VP David Cohen said in a conference call today in response to a question on price. "Frankly, most of the factors that go into customer bills are factors beyond our control."

Cohen didn't elaborate on those "factors beyond our control," but he said the promised benefits to consumers will come via "quality of service, by quality of offerings, by technological innovations." Finally, Cohen said, "I don't believe there's any way to argue that [consumers are] going to be hurt from a price perspective as a result of this transaction." Presumably then, prices would continue to take their natural path regardless of whether the transaction is approved by US regulatory authorities.

The $45.2 billion merger will get scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice. Senators will also weigh in.

“This proposed merger could have a significant impact on the cable industry and affect consumers across the country,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) said in a statement quoted by several media outlets. “As chair of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, I plan to hold a hearing to carefully scrutinize the details of this merger and its potential consequences for both consumers and competition.”

Copps: Kill the deal

Michael Copps, an FCC commissioner from 2001 to 2011 who now leads the Media and Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause, said the merger is "so over the top that it ought to be dead on arrival at the FCC."

Copps was the only commission member to vote against the Comcast/NBC Universal merger in 2011.

"I thought the Comcast/NBCU merger was beyond the pale," Copps told Ars. "I was just stunned to see a couple years later they come back and they have $45 billion to pick up the second largest cable company."

Comcast argued that the deal isn't anti-competitive because Comcast and Time Warner don't compete against each other for cable and Internet subscribers in any individual cities or towns, but Copps isn't buying that argument.

"I think we need to look at it in the context of the one big media ecosystem we have in this country, which is broadband, broadcast, old media, and new media, and you have one player, one power that you're according massive influence and gatekeeping control, and that's just plain bad for consumers and just plain bad for democracy," he said.

Copps said the merger could give companies seeking to buy advertising less choice and could harm journalism.

"Journalism has suffered tremendously as a result of all this consolidation in the newsroom, cutbacks that seem to follow so many of these transactions, and that's bad news for our democratic dialogue and our civic dialogue and our ability to govern ourselves," he said.

Comcast said it hopes to complete the transaction by the end of the year. Cohen characterized negative reaction to the deal as "hysteria."

"Putting these two companies together will not deprive a single consumer in America of a choice he or she will have today," he said.

There are plenty of good reasons to object to the deal, according to Susan Crawford, a former tech policy advisor to President Obama and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry & Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

"The reason this deal is scary is that for the vast majority of businesses in 19 of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the country, their only choice for a high-capacity wired connection will be Comcast," Crawford wrote on Bloomberg today. "Comcast, in turn, has its own built-in conflicts of interest: It will be serving the interests of its shareholders by keeping investments in its network as low as possible—in particular, making no move to provide the world-class fiber-optic connections that are now standard and cheap in other countries—and extracting as much rent as it can, in all kinds of ways. Comcast, for purposes of today's public, is calling itself a 'cable company.' It no longer is. Comcast sells infrastructure subject to neither competition nor a cop on the beat."

Net neutrality

As we noted earlier today, the deal would impose net neutrality obligations to Time Warner until 2018. That's because in order to complete the NBCUniversal merger, Comcast agreed to abide by the FCC's Open Internet Order for seven years, even if that order was overturned in court. The order's rules against ISPs blocking or discriminating against applications were overturned in a lawsuit filed by Verizon, but Comcast and Time Warner would still be bound by the rules for a few more years.

"We helped to negotiate the Open Internet Order, we had no problems with the Open Internet Order, we did not litigate to get rid of the Open Internet Order," Cohen said.

Cohen did not answer directly when asked why Comcast didn't offer to extend its net neutrality obligations beyond 2018.

"One of my refrains whenever I talk to the press about this subject is it's hard enough to negotiate with the government, I'd rather not negotiate with the press as well as the government," he said. "We're confident we're going to have a negotiation with the government over this. We're very comfortable with the case we have."

Comcast promised to divest itself of three million subscribers to appease regulatory concerns over one company owning too much of the pay-TV market. Even with the divestitures, Comcast's subscriber base would balloon from 22 million to 30 million, a bit less than 30 percent of the overall market.

Cohen was asked which markets Comcast will give up in its divestitures, but he said that won't be decided until later in the process. Comcast executives "haven't had a single conversation about which systems might be divested," he said.