If regulators believe they can turn Comcast and Time Warner Cable’s mega-merger into a consumer-friendly deal in the public interest, they are ignoring history.

No matter what conditions regulators place on Comcast to approve its merger with Time Warner Cable, they will be toothless, television industry insiders told the New York Post.

Insiders suggest the Federal Communications Commission has been largely impotent enforcing conditions it required in earlier merger deals, including those Comcast promised to fulfill in its earlier merger with NBC Universal.

Among Comcast’s broken promises cited by The Post:

• Comcast failed to live up to its promise to market its low-cost broadband service, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), an outspoken critic of the NBCU deal, told the FCC earlier this year;
• Comcast paid a fine for not marketing A standalone $50 broadband service widely enough;
• The giant cable provider’s hollow commitment to Net Neutrality didn’t stop it from excluding certain XFINITY video content from its data caps;
• They discriminate against non-Comcast owned cable channels, especially those that compete with network Comcast owns or controls. Examples include The Tennis Channel and Bloomberg TV.

Industry insiders claim the larger Comcast gets, the more the company spends on clever lawyering and lobbying to keep itself out of legal hot water with Congress and regulators. That has begun to worry programmers like Discovery Communications, who filed objections to the merger deal.

Discovery officials warned the FCC Comcast’s takeover of Time Warner Cable would deliver an NSA-like treasure trove of viewer data to the nation’s biggest cable company. Comcast already monitors its customers’ viewing habits with tracking software installed inside set-top boxes that monitors what customers are watching at any given time. Comcast has refused to share that data with outsiders, and uses it primarily to pitch potential advertisers.

Comcast’s size already gives the company unprecedented power over cable programming rates during negotiations. Making the company even larger worries Discovery, which expressed concern that:

• Comcast’s use of its bigger muscle to impose prices, terms and conditions that are overly favorable (for instance, preventing programmers from selling over-the-top rights or refusing to give competitors to its own services wide distribution);
• The possibility that the cable giant could impose broader “most favored nation” clauses in agreements;
• That Comcast could exercise control over national and local ad sales markets to the detriment of programers who also compete there.

du’s call center is 91% female and 100% staffed by citizens of the UAE. (Photo: The National)

Broadband users across the United Arab Emirates will soon find their Internet connections upgraded to 1Gbps as the country transforms its broadband services to deliver world-class speeds without steep price increases.

ISP du announced this month it had successfully completed tests to upgrade its network to deliver 1,000Mbps service to its customers, delivering a faster data experience over a substantially improved bandwidth backbone.

“Offering 1Gbps speeds is yet another incredible triumph of our team’s efforts and a significant milestone in our progression towards offering unmatched user experience,” said Saleem AlBalooshi, executive vice president of network development and operations at du. “As always, this is designed around our customers and they stand to benefit from this initiative.”

Customers in the United Arab Emirates already enjoy substantially better telecommunication service at a lower cost compared to North America.

UAE mobile users already receive VoLTE 4G service, which allows customers to talk and browse the Internet simultaneously on a substantially upgraded LTE network. The ISP has offered wireless customers HD Voice — a better quality voice calling experience — at no extra charge since 2012. The company has also extended the technology to its older 3G mobile networks and supports HD quality landlines as well. This year, the company will deploy its LTE-A Carrier Aggregation technology to combine bandwidth available at different frequency bands to improve wireless speeds and reliability.

In April, the country introduced new regulatory policies requiring providers to sell access to their networks at reasonable wholesale prices, spurring competition and letting residents choose between different providers for the first time. Despite the open access rules, investment continues to pour into the UAE’s telecom networks for expansion and upgrades, even as customers see their bills decline.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/UAE Weekly Interview Featuring Osman Sultan CEO du 4-20-14.mp4[/flv]

UAE Weekly features du’s CEO Osman Sultan who explains how du is very different from ISPs in other countries, especially in the USA and Canada. Sultan explains du doesn’t use offshore call centers, doesn’t frustrate customers with constant rate increases and usage restrictions, offers nationwide Wi-Fi, and believes in using competition to please customers, not alienate them with tricks and traps. From Dubai CITY TV-7. (April 21, 2014) (21:39)

(image: Ryan Singel)

Comcast has begun presenting intrusive advertising messages to users connected to any of its 3.5 million Wi-Fi hotspots nationwide, most hosted by customers paying more than $8 a month in leasing and electricity costs to provide a home for the company’s wireless gateways.

A Comcast spokesman confirmed to Ars Technica that Comcast began its ad insertions several months ago, ostensibly to alert users they are connected to an official Comcast Wi-Fi hotspot. But users report the company’s advertising messages go well beyond that, appearing about every seven minutes on every web page a customer visits. Some promote Comcast products and services, others invite customers to download the cable company’s apps. For now, they only appear on Comcast’s guest Wi-Fi network.

“We think it’s a courtesy, and it helps address some concerns that people might not be absolutely sure they’re on a hotspot from Comcast,” Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told Ars.

The most common ad seems to be a small banner dubbed “XFINITY Wi-Fi Peppy,” which can be closed by a user or eventually disappears on its own.

Although the ads are generally not exceptionally intrusive, often scooting across the bottom of web pages before disappearing, they are controversial because Comcast is injecting the advertising code into a third party’s website without permission.

Comcast is relying on JavaScript to insert its advertising and that has security experts concerned.

Seth Schoen, the senior staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars the interaction of Comcast’s JavaScript with websites could “create” security vulnerabilities in websites.

“Their code, or the interaction of code with other things, could potentially create new security vulnerabilities in sites that didn’t have them,” Schoen said in a telephone interview.

Dan Kaminsky added that Comcast’s JavaScript injection has the potential to break “all sorts of stuff, in that you no longer know as a website developer precisely what code is running in browsers out there. You didn’t send it, but your customers received it.”

Although Comcast is now using its ad insertion technology only to promote its own products and services, nothing legally precludes Comcast from selling ads it could insert on any web page it wishes. Current law doesn’t give the Federal Communications Commission authority to stop the practice. Only strong Net Neutrality protections made possible by a redefinition of broadband as a communications service would grant the FCC regulatory authority to forbid Internet providers from interfering with the integrity of third-party websites.

Money for some

Time Warner Cable will pay $416 million in retention bonuses to the company’s top and middle management to entice them to stay with the cable company as its merger deal with Comcast is scrutinized by regulators.

The bulk of the bonuses will be paid to the company’s top executives in New York, but an additional 1,800 middle management employees would also receive twice their regularly scheduled annual equity award to compensate for canceled awards in 2015 and 2016. About 15,000 rank and file employees eligible to participate in Time Warner’s supplemental bonus program will receive a much smaller bonus — averaging less than $70 per employee.

While upper level management will gorge on cash and stock, middle management will receive stock only. Rank and file employees will receive a token payout amounting to 50 percent of their target bonus for 2014. Recipients may want to save the money. As part of Comcast’s plans to realize cost savings from the merger, many employees of Time Warner Cable’s call centers and technical staff may not have a future paycheck at all if the merger is approved. Comcast relies heavily on existing offshore call centers for customer service and subcontracts a significant percentage of engineering and service call work to third-party subcontractors.

Among the top recipients of the largesse:

• Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus, who will receive a golden parachute package worth $81.8 million in cash, restricted stock and stock options. Because his compensation package is so large, Time Warner Cable has also agreed to pay an extra $300,000 to allow Marcus to hire his own financial planning firm to manage the enormous sums involved;
• The other top five executives of Time Warner Cable in New York will share more than $136 million in golden parachute compensation. They will have to figure out how to spend the money on their own.