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On January 18, 2011, Comcast received government approval to acquire NBC Universal. This followed a lengthy review, which mandated a list of conditions. The most important of them is aimed at preventing the new media conglomerate from thwarting competition in online video. However,even though regulators described their review as the most intense scrutiny ever for a planned media merger, Comcast managers said they believed their company faced few onerous restrictions from the review. “I don’t think any of the conditions are particularly restrictive,” said David L. Cohen, executive vice president of Comcast. This statement ought to give readers some pause.

According to The New York Times, "The combination of Comcast’s cable and Internet systems and NBC Universal’s channels will create a media powerhouse, and it will be the first time a cable company will control a major broadcast network." In abstract terms, process or transport will control content. It is perhaps as though the flying to grandma's for Thanksgiving were itself the point. Less abstractly, it is worth looking at how the privileging of throughput might have an impact on content. It seems at the very least like a case of mistaken priorities.  Even so, what sticks out to me is the conflict of interest that is inherent in the combination. I believe we put too much stock on the ability of regulations to mitigate such conflicts.
The concentration of market power in a combined media company that includes program content with a strong cable-system influence is inherently at odds financially with other routes being able to use the content. In other words, there is an inherent conflict of interest at the root of the combination. Interestingly, it could be argued that NBC content, being private property, could rightly be limited to one pipeline. For example, NBC could have purchased Comcast in order to have its own route. It would be understandable if NBC wanted to limit its content to its own pipeline. Our resistance to this idea is perhaps because we view the major networks as public goods because they are readily available over the airwaves. The latter give the content the veneer of being public goods. Similarly with the free content available on the internet, it is easy to view it as a public good because it is free and available, even though the content has ownership. This post, for example, is mine because I am writing it; it contains my ideas. So it could be argued that the "over the air" system of television broadcasting had led us to "forget" that the content is private property, which could rightly be limited as to throughput.  Yet it could also be argued that broadcasters must have broadcasting licenses because they are being allowed to use the public airwaves, which are a public good, and there can be obligations associated with this privilege that include open access and safeguarding competition. Essentially, there is is a public good vs. private property tradeoff that should be addressed in analyzing the merger.
The matter of who in the merger is in the driver's seat is also relevant, for it might be in NBC's interest to be broadcast beyond its own cable system, whereas Comcast would benefit most by restricting the availability. Part of the angst over the merger may be due to the restrictiveness inherent in Comcast being in the driver's seat. A policy implication might be that in such mergers the content could be mandated to be in charge. That the people at Comcast view the restrictions as far from onerous may suggest that the company will be able to do what is in its financial interest in spite of the conditions. One might recall the case of subprime mortgage derivatives, which had outstripped the ability of regulators to regulate, much less to understand. To rely on regulations to protect the public interest in the case of very complex securities minimizes the ability of traders to circumvent what must seem to them as quite superficial barriers. The conflict of interest in the present case, which involves throughput restricting access beyond what is in the interest of the public or even the content, can be expected to have a subtle and on-going force that would inevitably out-wiggle the ability of regulators to look out for the public interest. 

Lastly, the case of a media company that includes political and news content means that market concentration also has implications for free speech, and ultimately for the republic itself. Specifially, the views gaining access in the public air waves could narrow, and those that make it through migh be more likely to support the media company's general political interests. It is, for example, in the interest of corporations that we debate secondary issues, rather than the basics that enable large businesses to exist.  For example, it is notable that after the <i>Citizens United </i>case that allows for unlimited campaign donations, the question of whether a corporation should be considered a legal person was not salient in the media.  Also nearly missing was a discussion of whether wealth constitutes speech.  As another example, in the debate on financial reform in 2010, whether banks too big to fair should be allowed even to exist was not much debated. Consequently, the resulting law applies "too big to fail" only to firms that have already failed on their own (e.g., structuring their liquidation). According to Jesse Eisinger of Propublica, "Goldman, like all the other major investment and commercial banks, had become too big and intertwined, making the financial system too fragile. . . . Unfortunately, despite a hulking financial reform law, the American financial system still has largely the same structural issues that it had before the crisis." Eisinger laments that neither the U.S. Government nor Wall Street has been particularly interested in going after the underlying structural flaw: over-leveraged banks whose size alone renders them too big to fail. Coincidentally, discussion of this structural flaw and the related very existence of the big banks as big banks was kept largely off the public radar. I wonder if we realize how narrow our public political discourse really is,  why that is so, and what the impact has been on legislation.  In other words, what the public debates may not be an accident. The consolidation of the media sector could facilitate the subterranean influence of corporate America on the American polity and society.

 In short, conflicts of interest are of such force that they cannot be undone by regulators. Therefore, it is better that such conflicts not be permitted to exist in the first place. Pipeline should not be allowed to control content. It isn't even good business because it isn't in the interest of the content.  Hence even from the standpoint of private property, there is reason to be critical of the merger. Secondly, it ought to be recognized that the concentration of media power in a republic is dangerous to that form of government because a narrowing of public discourse does not serve the electorate in making informed decisions in voting.  Compounding the problem, both the conflict of interest and the negative effects on the republic itself are long-term, whereas the regulators and the public have their attention fixed primarily on the short term.

Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/business/media/19comcast.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=comcast&st=Search; Jesse Eisinger, "Goldman Sachs's Navel-Gazing Comes Up Short," The New York Times, January 19, 2011: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/goldman-sachss-navel-gazing-comes-up-short/?ref=business