Criticism of the Time Warner-Comcast merger seems weirdly oblivious to the revolution happening in the video marketplace

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Criticism of the Time Warner-Comcast merger seems weirdly oblivious to the revolution happening in the video marketplace.

HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

March 11, 2014 6:56 p.m. ET

The medal for obtuseness goes to the outpouring of commentary since the Time Warner-Comcast merger. Every big deal gets its share, but good grief.

The pièce de résistance was a Paul Krugman column in the New York Times that seemed studiously ignorant of any developments in the TV business since the arrival of satellite in the mid-1990s. Ditto a piece by conservative economist Irwin Stelzer in the Weekly Standard, which boldly concluded that the merger is “anticompetitive” and “anticonsumer” based on an anecdote from 1996, when Rupert Murdoch fought to get Fox News picked up by then-CNN owner Time Warner’s Manhattan cable system.

Uh huh. To be aware of news of recent vintage (and by recent we mean in the last 15 years) is to know how severely the balance of power has shifted in the opposite direction—away from cable-system operators and toward content owners like Disney, CBS and, yes, Fox. Time Warner (owner of CNN) and Time Warner Cable aren’t even the same company anymore, the cable operations having been spun off so the owner of CNN and HBO could more gleefully participate in the pillage of the cable industry and its customers.

In turn, Time Warner Cable was vulnerable to Comcast’s takeover offer precisely because of the beating it took in programming negotiations last summer with another content owner, CBS.

So dramatic is the swing, cable, once allergic to regulation, has been in Washington pleading for a finger on the scale in its dealings with the broadcast industry. Let’s not even mention emerging competitors like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Sony, DISH and Verizon who are fixing to blow up the traditional cable TV bundle altogether.

Oh well, if a merger can qualify as “big,” a market will exist for alleged experts to shriek monopoly. Mr. Krugman brings his inimitable method: glance at a press release by some liberal group, make a few assumptions and then wing it in a way meant vaguely to validate his strangely Manichaean sense of partisan allegiances. Mr. Stelzer, for his part, appears to be merely asleep. And joining them in their corner are the usual anti-business “public interest” groups who oppose mergers because that’s what they do.

Here’s the truth, folks. Comcast-Time Warner may be of interest to specialists in the way a new butterfly pattern is of interest to lepidopterists, but the proposed merger would change nothing you care about in a way noticeable to you, whether it receives government approval or not.

That was true of the Comcast-NBC merger of 2009, in which the end of the world was also mooted.

It was true of Time Warner’s 2000 merger with AOL, whose threat to humanity was painted in lurid colors though the threat turned out to be to Time Warner stockholders.

It was true of the cavalcade of eye-popping transactions in the late 1990s that gave birth to AT&T Broadband (don’t ask) and then saw the caboodle dumped on Comcast at a colossal loss.

You would suffer from an unhealthy interest in broadband history to know that the “open access” issue was born with the earliest of these deals, prompted by AOL desperately trying to use regulation and politics to extend its dial-up dominance into the broadband era.

After passing through many hands, the open-access bloody shirt became the net neutrality bloody shirt, and was adopted by Netflix to gain political leverage over downstream broadband operators like Comcast—though Netflix has lately found it useful to acknowledge the obvious: that content has steadily gained dominance over distribution.

On the one issue that might legitimately worry voters, broadband competition (subject of a future column), the merger appears either moot or benign. As cable franchisees, Time Warner and Comcast don’t compete, so a fair hope is that their combo would actually bring scale and efficiency to the continuing rollout of faster broadband and more Wi-Fi hot spots for cable subscribers.

Lo, no sooner was their merger revealed than Google announced 34 more cities that would be considered for superfast Google Fiber, including several where Comcast or Time Warner is predominant supplier today.

Google is not oblivious to the political repercussions of its moves. For whatever reason, Google apparently wants the Time Warner-Comcast merger to go forward—likely because it believes the merger would speed delivery of faster broadband, which is always and everywhere in Google’s interest.

One more thing: With each passing day, it becomes clearer that the wireless industry, now with Japan’s SoftBank mixing it up as owner of Sprint, will also be helping to melt the franchise barriers to broadband competition. All of this is much more important to consumers than anything coming out of Washington’s merger-shakedown rituals.

Yes, there will be a political circus, deeply gratifying to people whose income and prestige derive from the circus. By all means, turn in their direction if you’ve eaten some bad clams that you want to get out of your system.