Map of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Charter coverage areas before and after the merger. Under the proposed deal, 3 million Time Warner subscribers would go to Charter, 1.6 million Charter customers would go to Time Warner, and 2.5 million customers would go to a new company, referred to as SpinCo in filings, which would be owned 67 percent by Comcast shareholders and 33 percent by a Charter-owned holding company. In the end, a combined Comcast-Time Warner would have 30 million subscribers, while Charter would be the next-largest cable company with 8.2 million subscribers, including the ones it will manage through SpinCo. Data on the divested subscribers is sourced from public filings. Coverage areas are based on broadband coverage areas from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, cross-referenced with public filings, and are accurate to the nearest zip code. Comcast has not released the exact breakdown of subscribers included in the divestiture transaction. As a result, dots indicate which designated market area subscribers belong to, but do not indicate the number of subscribers included in the transaction. Map by Ryan Mark.

The deal would double Charter’s subscriber base, while keeping Comcast’s market share under 30 percent in order to appeal to regulators. Everybody wins — except, maybe, the customer.

While they don’t compete with each other, cable companies do face competition from satellite, DSL, and 3G and 4G wireless providers. Unfortunately for customers, those technologies are far inferior. Satellite television is unreliable in bad weather, and unavailable in areas blocked by trees or buildings. Meanwhile, existing DSL and wireless services are frustratingly slow for modern internet uses like streaming video, transferring files, and loading web applications for professionals.

"The other options are hardly worth the money," says Bonnie Smalley, who worked in customer service at Comcast and won an award for her work tweeting as @ComcastBonnie. She quit in 2011. "Right now, [Comcast] has little incentive to provide you with decent service. Who are you going to run to when you disconnect your service? Nobody, and they know it."

In other countries, regulation has forced cable companies to compete with each other. In the early 2000s, France ordered state-owned monopoly France Telecom to lease the use of its network to competitors at regulated rates. This "local loop unbundling" supercharged competition. New companies entered the market by piggybacking on France Telecom’s network, then built their own.

The French typically pay about a quarter of what Americans shell out for a "triple play" phone, TV, and internet package

As a result, the French typically pay about a quarter of what Americans shell out for a "triple play" phone, TV, and internet package, according to a 2012 book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning financial reporter David Cay Johnston.

The US tried to implement similar unbundling regulations in the mid-’90s, but incumbent cable companies repeatedly challenged them in court, set prohibitively high prices for the use of their networks, and applied pressure on politicians. Eventually, government officials were forced to reverse the policy.

Today, Comcast is the seventh-largest single source of lobbying dollars on Capitol Hill, spending $18.8 million to lobby Congress and federal agencies. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which spends $19.8 million, is the fifth. The cable industry has also had success lobbying on a local level, in order to prevent cities from building their own broadband networks that would compete with cable.

In Comcasted, a book by Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Joseph DiStefano, an early cable investor describes how the Comcast founders achieved their success. "They have minded their business exceptionally well," he says. "Fundamentally, though, they are monopolists."

Comcast and the internet

When Comcast was acquiring cable companies in the ’90s and early 2000s, their emphasis was on television. "[Their philosophy was], ‘We’re a cable TV company, everything else is ancillary to cable TV," says a technician who worked at AT&T Broadband when it was bought by Comcast in 2002.

The rise of American cable monopolies When the first cable entrepreneurs were wiring cities, local governments typically granted a single franchise for each community, or divided the territory among a few companies. In Philadelphia in the late ’80s, for example, neighborhoods were divided up among four cable providers (Comcast had the Northeast). Because of infrastructure costs, and because some cities didn’t want to grant multiple franchises, each company stayed on its own turf. They competed for franchises, but once granted, the companies started looking for a new community that hadn’t been wired yet. Once every community was wired, cable companies still didn’t compete — instead, they opted to consolidate. As a result, most American cities are now served by only one cable company. Competition is further discouraged by a patchwork of local regulations that require permits and access to public rights of way. (Google declined to build out its fiber network in California, for example, because of complex environmental regulations.) Around the world, things are different. Unbundling policies, which required incumbents to lease their networks to competitors at fair prices, spurred competition in France, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Unbundling isn’t a "magic bullet," says the Open Technology Institute, which issued a report on telecom policies around the world. In the UK, the unbundling policy was ineffective until the government forced BT, the dominant cable provider, to create a separate unit dedicated to selling network access to BT and its competitors. But when combined with other measures such as price transparency, "dig once" policies that encourage planning for future infrastructure, and city-owned networks that can be leased to private companies, unbundling leads to lower prices and faster speeds.

That’s no longer true. If current trends continue, internet will soon be the cable industry’s primary business. Comcast’s residential internet subscriptions now bring in half as much money as its TV subscriptions and could eclipse TV by 2015. Meanwhile, the cable industry just had its first (small) net loss in TV subscribers ever, which analysts attributed to customers watching shows online rather than on TV.

The most vocal opposition to the Comcast-Time Warner deal therefore comes from internet advocates, who are worried about three things: persistently slow and expensive service across the United States; higher barriers to entry for new internet-based companies; and Comcast’s ability to control what customers see and do on the internet.

In 2008, the FCC warned Comcast for blocking access to the file-sharing site BitTorrent, which is notorious for facilitating internet piracy but also has many legitimate uses. Meanwhile, Comcast’s size enables it to extract fees that smaller cable providers can’t; for example, Netflix now pays what it calls an "arbitrary tax" to ensure high quality for its video streams.

Unless the FCC writes new rules, there will be nothing to stop Comcast and other giant internet providers from selectively boosting speeds in the future

Weakened net neutrality rules —which require that all content transmitted over the internet be treated equally — have broadband advocates worried about the power companies like Comcast wield.

Under the terms of its merger with NBCUniversal, Comcast is prohibited from blocking websites or selectively slowing traffic until 2018. But the company hasn’t said what will happen after that.

And unless the FCC writes new rules, there will be nothing to stop Comcast and other giant internet providers from selectively boosting speeds in the future. Once its NBCUniversal obligations expire, Comcast could decide to prioritize its own video-streaming service, Streampix, while asking companies like Google, Skype, BitTorrent, and Facebook to pay to have their bits fast-tracked. Any startup that wants to compete with those incumbents will have to pay fees as well or be relegated to the second-rate public internet.