A familiar question has taken on new urgency among media policymakers in Washington, but this time with a twist.
After spending decades debating whether cable companies should be treated as local monopolies that determine what you see on TV and how much you pay for it, lawmakers and regulators are beginning to wonder: Do cable companies now have a similar power to determine who gets high-speed Internet and at what speed and price?
Several industry critics say they do: With 55 percent of the USA’s 76 million high-speed Internet customers, in addition to 63 percent of the 98 million pay-TV subscribers, cable companies’ “market power is increasing, not decreasing — and they flex it aggressively,” says Consumer Federation of America Research Director Mark Cooper.
The Federal Communications Commission seems to share that concern. On Tuesday, the agency said that it will continue its effort to promote “a free and open Internet” after the U.S. Court of Appeals sided with Comcast in a controversial case that challenged the FCC’s authority to regulate high-speed Internet, known as broadband.
The court said that the FCC’s power to set rules for cable TV and telephone services doesn’t give it the right to also regulate broadband.
If cable’s critics are right — cable companies say they aren’t — then the industry’s power in broadband and TV could have far-reaching implications for consumers at a time the federal government says that high-speed Internet is critical to the country’s economic development.
Some examples:
*Comcast, Time Warner Cable and others raised high-speed Internet prices by as much as 7.3 percent in some markets in 2010, possibly to cover expected increases in their television programming costs, Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett said earlier this year.
Cable, satellite and telephone company TV providers say they’re under pressure because local broadcast stations, suffering from…