Ongoing saga of broadband access and affordability in the US took another twist in the tale with Comcast and Netflix agreement to “give good speed” to Netflix connections with customers over Comcast infrastructure. Details being few as to what actually is in the agreement.

If one had any “innocence” about how these decisions are made for the citizens of the US, one might take note of this example below for Comcast, which recently swallowed Universal and NBC, and is trying to swallow Time Warner.

Perhaps they’d like to swallow Netflix too…or if Netflix got big enough, vice versa. Google’s build out of FTTH in various cities is part of this equation, but we shouldn’t be naive to the point that we believe Google can be trusted to serve the interests of the country as a whole either.

Corporations appear to do what they can in the regulatory environment they find themselves in, so it’s not as if Comcast is particularly different in this regard. But in situations where critical infrastructure is involved, the need for wise and competent regulatory oversight comes to the fore to balance the powers of corporations that control large parts of our lives by their decisions.

David L. Cohen, a Comcast executive, oversees the company’s government affairs operations and also helps run the Comcast Foundation, a charitable organization.

 

 

(…..) It is a hint, critics say, of just how sophisticated Comcast’s lobbying machine is, an enterprise that, like the company itself, reaches across the United States and has more than 100 registered lobbyists in Washington alone.

 

That team, as of the end of last year, featured five former members of Congress. But it also included Meredith Attwell Baker, who left the Federal Communications Commission in 2011 to help lead Comcast’s internal lobbying office in Washington — just five months after she voted to approve a big deal for Comcast, its takeover of NBCUniversal.

 

While PSA is non partisan, and non political, we are chartered to support thriving online affordable access to life changing tools in the cloud. Therefore we cannot avoid awareness of decisions being made that will greatly impact the feasibility of delivering those services across the “digital divide”.

OTOH, PSA is not going to “out of principal” adopt a confrontational or adverse relationship with whomever we need to work with. Comcast’s John Christopher is the local agent for programs and local support that aids the SNM region, so it’s complicated. We would be pleased to work with him on these sorts of projects, while still being concerned over national telecom and broadband infrastructure policies.