A top economist told Congress on Thursday that the success of the proposed Comcast/NBC merger is based on “educated guesses.” “No one fully understands where today’s tide is headed,” Thomas Hazlett warned, as video markets “jump from platform to platform.”
…many have condemned it,” Hazlett, former chief economist for the FCC, told the Committee. “‘Didn’t they learn anything from the failed AOL/Time Warner merger?’ is a fairly popular reaction.”
Big risks anywhere
As we’ve reported, a new Congressional Research Service paper on the merger offers a similar impression. “The recent history of failed megamergers in the communications sector suggests,” CRS observed, “that the vertically integrated postmerger entity may have so many pieces with conflicting market incentives that it proves impossible for executives to craft an internally consistent profit-maximizing business strategy, much less exploit market power to undermine competition.”
It’s worth briefly recalling what some critics think went wrong with the AOL/Time Warner venture. “The vision,” market analyst Bill Whyman explained in 2002, was “AOL anywhere that consumers would go home, see AOL on their TV with Time Warner content, they would go to the supermarket and get messages on a cell phone with AOL…
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Congress told that Comcast/NBC merger a big crapshoot
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