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Comcast's bid to buy Disney raises a specter even scarier than the witch in Snow White: A Mickey Mouse Internet.
Mar 17, 2004 | If you're looking for a perfect example of the limitless possibility of the Internet, the true, world-shrinking power of a fast, always-on network, you might find it at George's house. George is a British expat who lives in Philadelphia with his wife and kids and father. (We'll call him George, because, for reasons that will be explained, he doesn't want his real name published.) George loves America, but he also can't shake the feeling that he's not fully at home here; something about the place just doesn't click with him.
"Very few Brits ever get totally assimilated into the American culture," he says. So at George's house, the Internet functions as a portal to a world left behind. George and his family watch the BBC News on the Web three times a day. George, who spent two decades in the British film industry, makes digital movies of his family, and he sends the movies over the Internet to the extended family back home; they, in turn, send films of the mother country. "We use the Net as a lifeline," George says. "For anybody for whom this isn't their native country, you'd understand."
But Comcast, the company that provides George's high-speed Internet service, didn't understand. Last August, the company sent him a letter telling him to quit it -- he was using the Internet too much. The firm said he was violating Comcast's "acceptable use" policy, that he was somehow abusing his service. This surprised George, because as far as he knew he wasn't doing anything illegal or unseemly online -- "We're not using porn sites," he says -- and his contract with the firm didn't spell out any limits on his Internet use. When he called the company, it gave him the "runaround" -- nobody would tell George specifically what he should do to bring his use back in line with Comcast's policies, other than that, as a general matter, he ought to consider using the Internet much, much less.
George is not alone. Since the summer, Comcast has warned hundreds, possibly thousands, of customers of potential service termination due to high Internet use. The customers who receive these letters, people who'd always been told that their Internet service was "unlimited," find themselves in a Kafkaesque comedy of errors: The customers say that Comcast tells them they're using the service too much, but it won't give them any meaningful measure of how much is too much.
Philadelphia is Comcast's hometown, and the company is a powerful local force, so George had no choice but to accede to the company's demands. DSL isn't available in his neighborhood, and he can't do without a high-speed connection. (That's why George wants anonymity; he fears Comcast might cut him off for speaking to the press.) To keep a lifeline to the home country, his family has dramatically cut down its time online -- they now send their home movies by mail. His "quality of life" has consequently diminished, George says.
Comcast is the largest cable television operator in the United States, a firm whose lines reach more than 21 million homes, almost twice as many as its closest rival. With more than 5 million high-speed Internet customers, it is also the nation's largest broadband service. If it succeeds in its attempt to buy Disney, it would be the largest media company in the world. Comcast also spends millions of dollars a year on a sophisticated lobbying operation in Washington. According to news reports, Comcast recently hired, among others, Victoria Clarke, Donald Rumsfeld's former spokeswoman, and Lorine D. Card, the sister-in-law of Andrew Card, George W. Bush's chief of staff. Comcast is already one of the most powerful telecommunications companies in the United States, and its ambitions appear limitless.
To George and several other customers who have been caught up in the company's Byzantine policies, this power makes the company something to be feared. And the customers worry that if Comcast is successful in its hostile bid for Disney, a deal that would make it the largest media firm in the world, Comcast will become even less responsive to customers. Consumer groups are bracing for the possibility; they suggest that if Comcast gets Disney, the media -- especially the Internet -- will never be the same again.
The traditional reasons to worry about a Comcast-Disney merger -- it may raise your cable bill, and it could give Disney's content an advantage in your lineup of channels -- are compelling enough. But tech-savvy media critics these days are talking about a more theoretical, even scarier, proposition: If Comcast buys Disney, they wonder, will we get a Mickey Mouse Internet? Comcast has already demonstrated a willingness to circumscribe what customers do online. It has not only attacked high-use customers but, in the past, has also curbed virtual private networks (a popular way for corporations to integrate telecommuters into the company intranet) and, according to some customers, has limited traffic on Usenet, the oldest (and most unregulated) of all the Net's discussion forums. The company's terms of service also prohibit users from running file-sharing applications (among other things), and it has a less-than-clear policy on whether running a Wi-Fi network in your house is OK.
Such restrictions have prompted people to wonder what the company might do when it owns a vast stash of content. Will Disney's content -- its Web sites, its streaming movies and music and TV shows -- get pushed through at quicker rates to Comcast's broadband customers? Will other content, whether from a rival media giant or from your friends and family, get pushed through at all? And will the underlying architecture of the Internet subtly shift, over time, to accommodate the kinds of applications that media giants like Comcast want us to use, rather than the ones that come from the bubbling innovation of the Internet itself -- like the Web, or e-mail, or peer-to-peer file trading?
At the moment, these concerns are somewhat fuzzy because the merger is not a certainty and because Comcast vehemently denies any intention of messing with the Net. Comcast claims that its critics are simply making much ado about very little. But the critics say they're only looking at the logical outcome of a marriage between Comcast and Disney. "If Comcast thinks the merger is going to pay off because there's a natural synergy between content and distribution, the only way for them to make it pay is by using their distribution platform to give an unfair advantage to the content," says Dave Burstein, the editor of DSL Prime, an influential broadband industry newsletter. "Comcast will have incredible incentive to keep content that's not from Disney away from the consumer."
Currently, there are no federal regulations prohibiting Comcast from doing something like that, which is why Comcast's critics are demanding such restrictions. Unless the Federal Communications Commission imposes rules to prevent distribution companies like Comcast from favoring the content of one media firm over others', says Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, "if Comcast and Disney are together, the incentive to play the game will be irresistible."
Will the FCC crack down? Considering Comcast's history with regulators, that appears unlikely.
