“Today, we move on,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement. Collapse of Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger shows limits of lobbying The companies spent $32 million to influence regulators and Congress, with nothing to show for it.

Telecom giants Comcast and Time Warner Cable spent more than $32 million influencing Washington over the past year, in large part to sell its $45 billion mega-merger.

In the end, they’re left with a dead deal, a sharp rebuke from regulators, and a harsh lesson that lobbying dollars only go so far.


“I think Comcast has some extraordinarily able, smart, effective advocates, but there were limits to what they could do with the merits of the case,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a critic of the deal. “At the end of the day, the arguments just fell [apart] … I’ve argued a lot of cases in court, and there are some cases that are just unwinnable.”

Comcast and its Washington chief, David Cohen, followed the company’s tried-and-true playbook, hoping free-flowing campaign donations and a ground assault could quiet congressional critics and win over the Federal Communications Commission and Justice Department — much as it had in 2011, when it bought NBCUniversal. Instead, opponents are hailing Comcast’s failed strategy as a welcome sign that money can’t buy everything in Washington.

“Comcast tried to follow the same playbook it used in [NBC], which was the same playbook that AT&T tried to use with T-Mobile, which is just to flood the zone politically,” said Arik Ben-Zvi, a managing director for Glover Park Group, which represented critics of the deal.

“And I think what we’re learning more and more is that model of campaigning has real diminishing returns,” he continued. “It’s transparent, it’s easy to expose.”

Comcast, which on Friday morning announced it had terminated the deal, did not return a request to comment for this story.

“Today, we move on,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement. “Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away.”

Comcast’s gambit for Time Warner Cable had been a tough pitch from the day the company announced it in February 2014. It would have combined the country’s No. 1 and No. 2 cable operators while greatly expanding Comcast’s broadband footprint. Opponents argued the combined company would have gained too much negotiating power over TV programmers like Disney or 21st Century Fox and feared Comcast would have the power to crowd out competition in the burgeoning online video industry.

To that end, Comcast worked from Day One to sweeten the pot for Washington. It offered an early concession to public interest groups, for example, promising to expand its broadband options for low-income customers. It appealed to the FCC with a pledge to adhere to the agency’s older net neutrality rules — the principle that all Web traffic should be treated equally — even though the order had been thrown out in court. And Comcast said it would divest some of its cable subscribers in a side deal with Charter Communications. The company ran radio, print and television ads specifically highlighting these commitments, as it tried to advance its case that the deal was in the public interest.

To broaden the deal’s appeal, Comcast touted support for its bid from a slew of diversity groups and local officials, including a letter from 50 local mayors signed by Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, where the company’s headquarters is based.

The companies also spent a lot of money. Comcast invested more than $4.6 million to lobby on the deal and other issues over the first three months of this year, according to disclosures filed this week, on top of the roughly $17 million it shelled out in 2014. Eight of the 12 new outside lobbying shops it registered from January 2014 to April 2015 explicitly indicated they would be working on issues related to the mega-merger or competition. Time Warner Cable, for its part, spent roughly $9.5 million to lobby over the life of the deal.

To some extent, the blitz approach worked. Key House and Senate committees convened hearings on the merger, but lawmakers didn’t criticize Comcast’s Time Warner Cable plans in the same way they had slammed the company’s purchase of NBCU only four years earlier. Only a handful of lawmakers, including Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Blumenthal, regularly took aim at the merger, penning a letter to the Obama administration just this week.

Comcast tamped down some of the criticism by reaching out directly to critics: Cohen, for example, met in December with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss diversity — a conversation that turned to the Time Warner Cable deal. Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.), a merger opponent, said the result of the full-court press was that few caucus members wanted to speak up about the merger.

“I realized there’s a lot of, I don’t know if you want to call it pressure, but there’s a lot going on out there that people just don’t seem to want to be publicly giving opinions about this,” Cárdenas said in an interview last month.

“I’ve had companies come and sit with me and they would tell me that, ‘Oh, we heard in the hallways that Comcast knew we were having this meeting today,’” he continued. “And my staff and I are looking at each other like, ‘We sure as hell didn’t tell them anything.’ But that’s how they’ve blanketed Washington.”

Meanwhile, the company fanned out its donations: All but three members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee took home a check from Comcast in the 2014 election cycle, according to an analysis of donor records. All but two members of both the Senate Commerce Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee received Comcast reelection support, either to their direct campaigns or to their leadership PACs, which allow members to donate to each other.

In total, Comcast shelled out $2.1 million in donations last cycle. Time Warner Cable spent more than $669,000 on federal candidates.

Cohen, a longtime Democratic funder who’s advising the party’s 2016 nominating convention in Philadelphia, chipped in plenty of his own money, too. He donated last year to lawmakers like Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the leader of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He gave big to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee too, writing a $22,400 check in October — and he even threw in $15,000 over the course of the year to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Merger opponents, though, had their own well-connected weapon fighting the deal. In December, a dozen companies and organizations launched the Stop Mega Comcast Coalition, run by the Glover Park Group. The group had Washington veterans pulling the strings, including Gregg Rothschild, GPG’s managing director and a well-known former telecom aide to House Democrats, and Gene Kimmelman, a former DOJ antitrust official and current head of liberal consumer group Public Knowledge.

Public Knowledge and Comcast rival DISH Network drove the group’s harsh rhetoric. Groups representing small and rural telecom firms, meanwhile, launched their own anti-merger crusade in February. Others like Free Press and Fight For The Future excoriated Comcast’s plans.

Increasingly, government officials appeared unconvinced that attaching conditions to the deal would alleviate the perceived competitive harms. Justice Department staff signaled last week they were ready to recommend blocking the merger. On Wednesday, Comcast’s lawyers met with the DOJ and FCC — and there was little sign of a truce. With FCC staff ready to urge the agency to send the review to an administrative law judge, a drawn-out process that is widely viewed as a deal killer, sources began to confirm the deal was off.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who is headed out the door after his successor Loretta Lynch was confirmed on Thursday, announced the death of the deal on Friday morning. He also gave a sharp rebuke to the companies.

“This is a victory not only for the Department of Justice, but also for providers of content and streaming services who work to bring innovative products to consumers across America and around the world,” Holder said.