Comcast, a company so widely hated that a popular uprising prevented it from merging with Time Warner Cable, may offer cell phone service and buy up major new media companies next year. This will probably fail, but it's only one front where Comcast is trying to own your Internet access and what you see online.

According to Bloomberg, Comcast might offer a hybrid Wi-Fi/cellular voice calling service as a virtual operator on Verizon's network. If the company gets the taste for mobile networks, it might even buy T-Mobile US, Re/code says. Various Twitter pundits have even suggested that a way to turn around Comcast's abysmal public image, which is for most Americans somewhere between an unlicensed dentist and ISIS, would be to appoint T-Mobile's maverick John Legere as a new Comcast CEO.

Comcast probably will not do very well in mobile, because the company's network division is not used to competing. According to the FCC, as quoted in Quartz, nearly a third of Americans only have one choice for high-speed home broadband, and our prices are some of the highest in the developed world. The cable Internet business is a high-margin business based on rent-seeking, double-dipping, and local quasi-monopolies. "The cable distribution giants like Time Warner Cable and Comcast are already making a 97 percent margin on their almost comically profitable Internet services," the MIT Technology Review reported in 2013.

Wireless, on the other hand, has gotten wonderfully and brutally competitive in the U.S. recently, largely thanks to Legere, who led the industry to break two-year contracts and bring down service prices.

Comcast isn't going to get down and dirty in wireless. Rather, it's looking to reap some more dollars through a "quadruple play," offering wireless service to existing cable customers the way the company currently offers phone service. There is a long history of cable companies wanting to do this. Comcast bundled its service with Verizon Wireless in 2012, but that effort never made much of an impact. From 2005-2008, meanwhile, Comcast and two other cable companies tried and failed to start a joint venture with Sprint called Pivot. Cablevision also has a failing Wi-Fi-only phone system called Freewheel. (AT&T and Verizon are exceptions, because they're more phone companies than cable companies in the first place.)

Comcast has some good technology. Its Xfinity X1 platform is widely seen as the most advanced set-top box in the stultified U.S. cable industry. As a home ISP, its speeds are competitive, according to our Fastest ISPs study.

But Comcast's continually rising prices and notoriously awful customer service show the rot at the heart of U.S. broadband. With 30 percent of Americans only having one choice for fast home broadband, companies like Comcast can truly take their customers for granted. As they get bigger, they have even more power to elbow out potential rivals using tools like temporarily discounted service bundles and exclusive deals for desirable content.

Your Web, Brought to You by Comcast and Verizon

There's another horror looming, too. Comcast already owns NBC Universal. In August, the company dropped $400 million to invest in Vox and BuzzFeed, two of the largest online media companies. (They're each bigger than our parent, Ziff Davis Media.) BuzzFeed, as far as I know, doesn't want to be bought outright. But according to The Wall Street Journal, that investment will create content partnerships, and Comcast will likely sit on both companies' boards.

With Verizon buying AOL outright, Comcast buying Vox is not out of the picture. And once more, even at its current level of investment, the companies are seeing some integration, Quartz says. "Since its second investment in the company, Comcast has viewed Vox Media as something like a digital laboratory from which its other media properties, largely part of NBCUniversal, could learn. Executives and editors from Vox Media paid visits to the staff of many of NBC's websites," Quartz reported.

Related Americans Get Their Revenge on Comcast

Let's bring all of these stories together and say that things are getting a little bit too cozy up in here. Comcast and Verizon are supposed to compete providing home broadband to Americans, but with this wireless partnership, they'll have strong corporate reasons not to interfere in each others' business.

And that ginger treatment may infect the companies' giant content businesses, too. I don't think Dieter Bohn at The Verge is going to stop badmouthing Comcast if it buys his company, but corporate executives don't care about us columnists. The bigger issue is whether more subtly positive Comcast sponsored content will seep into its partially owned media channels, and then whether those media brands (such as the commanding power of BuzzFeed) will be used to drive Comcast's other brands (such as NBC) in a way that prevents newer, smaller competitors from rising.

This all goes beyond traditional net neutrality concerns. It's about a small enough number of companies owning enough of the Internet access and media landscape that they don't want to rock their own boats, or each other's. Their priorities then become leveraging the connections within their businesses to protect their huge fiefdoms from upstarts that don't have those advantages.

Eternal vigilance is the price of not waking up tomorrow with the entire economy owned by a handful of companies. I'm pretty sure this Comcast cell-phone service will fail, as few people will probably want to extend their lovely Comcast experience to mobile phones when other competitive options are available. But we need to keep an eye on these giants. We stopped Comcast from merging with Time Warner. We need to not fall asleep the next time it tries to swallow something huge, further warping the Internet we get and how we get it.

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