Is it just a testament to how much Americans love TV that we let Comcast get to the seemingly "too big to fail" state that it's in?
Practices that Benn describes, like unreturned equipment fees and dubious installation fees, seem like a borderline legal way to eek out better margins--but it also seems like it shouldn't have taken all that much for consumers to say "no."
Well, yeah. I worked in cable TV distribution systems years ago. Family business, we owned or maintained a handful of CATV/MATV systems around the south bay.
Anyway, TV was a big deal for a lot of people. People in mobile home parks who were barely scraping by would want expensive packages with ESPN and the like. Minor disruptions occasionally made people furious (as a smaller system, equipment replacement usually meant that a channel had to be off for a few minutes, and the downtime got worse as satellite equipment got "better").
Even now, go to an apartment complex and see how many small dishes you see.
It's been like this for a long, long time and Comcast and Time Warner and a few others have converted their considerable wealth into political influence to make sure that they have a locked in and minimally competitive market for a long time to come.
For those that aren't so interested in TV (like me), "high speed" internet access has become a staple.
Google is the only real newsworthy disruption of the big ISPs in recent history. If Musk does get a low-orbit satellite network going, that might change the game a bit. Otherwise, we're all just stuck with this situation for the foreseeable future.
It might help to consider TV as the Internet before the real Internet made its way into people's homes. You got a newspaper once a day, but cable TV news was up-to-the-minute, and local TV news filled you in on local events from the day. You couldn't forward cute cat videos to your co-workers with one click, so you'd bond at the coffee machine every morning talking about last night's basketball game, or who shot JR, or that clumsy guy that fell off the roof on America's Funniest Home Videos.
In 1970, 1% of the U.S. population (20 million citizens) was illiterate. Do you know 100 people; friends, family, neighbors? One of them might not have been able to read. As an audio-visual medium, TV is an equalizer. America loves to think of itself as a classless society. With apologies to Andy Warhol: "You can be watching TV and see Alf, and you know that the President watches Alf, Liz Taylor watches Alf, and just think, you can watch Alf, too."
So much of cable TV's influence reflected its ability to educate, inform, AND entertain. Communities were given public access studios without the need for powerful, expensive transmitters. They could have a whole channel with computer-generated text over soothing elevator music showing the latest happenings at the public library. CSPAN put the legislative process in your living room. TLC was originally The Learning Channel and it had actual educational shows, but so did all the local community colleges on their own low-budget cable stations. On the morning of the Challenger disaster, I watched the shuttle crew drive to the launch pad on NASATV while I ate breakfast. Is this what everybody watched, all the time? No. But when it came time to vote on "Community Antenna TV" and eventually cable, this is what was trotted out and you can't deny the power of bringing that into people's homes.
TV was a huge deal until we replaced it with the Internet, and in many ways we're using it in the same ways. It's shared culture. It's audio-visual entertainment. It's news & information.
> The median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer during the 2013-2014 TV season was 44.4 years old, a 6 percent increase in age from four years earlier. Audiences for the major broadcast network shows are much older and aging even faster, with a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7 percent from four years ago.
> These television viewers are aging faster than the U.S. population, Nathanson points out. The median age in the U.S. was 37.2, according to the U.S. Census, a figure that increased 1.9 percent over a decade. So to put that in context of television viewing, he said TV audiences aged 5 percent faster than the average American.
(September, 2014)
So if it is just, or mainly, TV, Comcast is in serious shit.
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Comcast will be dependent on exclusively TV in the future, and instead appear (to me) to be actively adapting: They own Hulu and are the only broadband ISP available to many Americans.
Regulation as a utility, prosecution under anti-trust laws or disruption (like thaumaturgy suggests above) seem like the only hope.
The age stats are interesting though. Times have changed since the world that csixty4 describes.
Practices that Benn describes, like unreturned equipment fees and dubious installation fees, seem like a borderline legal way to eek out better margins--but it also seems like it shouldn't have taken all that much for consumers to say "no."