Former Obama advisor argues Comcast is a threat to the open Internet

 

Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard and a former advisor to President Obama, was not a fan of Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal. In fact, Crawford was so appalled by the transaction that she made the fight over the merger the focus of her book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

But Crawford's beef isn't only with Comcast. She sees the cable giant's growing size as a symptom of much larger problems with the telecommunications, media, and technology sectors. In her view, these communications industries fester with monopolies, collusion, and consumer-hostile business practices. A few big companies—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, Apple, Google, and Microsoft—"tacitly cooperate by carving out their separate areas of expertise," leaving customers with low quality and high prices.

For the rest of the story: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/former-obama-advisor-argues-comcast-is-a-threat-to-the-open-internet/