Is the Era of Local Cable Broadband Monopoly Ending?

For years cable companies have been bundling in phone and internet service with their traditional TV offerings. If AT&T’s proposed purchase of Time Warner goes through, it will be the first telecom to to begin nationwide competition in the opposite direction. The Wall Street Journal explains what the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger would mean.

The Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 power grab over the internet is premised on the need for government to allocate broadband scarcity. So much for that. AT&T ’s $85.4 billion weekend bid to buy Time Warner is the latest bet, and a very big one, that technology is making wireless broadband ubiquitous despite regulatory obstacles.

As usual, the media and political classes are preoccupied with the hole instead of the donut. They’re worried about whether AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, the empire builder driving the merger, will preserve the “independence” of such supposedly sainted Time Warner properties as CNN and HBO.

That’s hilarious. Time Warner’s properties all march in the same political direction now—toward Democrats and the left.

The AT&T-Time Warner tie-up is signaling that the era of the local cable broadband monopoly is ending. As Saturday’s merger press release put it, “With a mobile network that covers more than 315 million people in the United States, the combined company will strive to become the first U.S. mobile provider to compete nationwide with cable companies in the provision of bundled mobile broadband and video.”