Comcast buys NBC in a desperate attempt to be cool

I went to high school with a kid just like Com­cast. He was a big kid, with big, giant, black hair. He’d spouted some story about how his long ago dis­tant cousin was related to Russ­ian roy­alty, a tzar or Rum­plestilt­skin or some such.

One day, this great oak of a boy shows up in a shiny new car. He says his divorcee mom has agreed to buy liquor for his high school par­ties because, he says, “she says that if she buys the booze and my friends come to my house, that will keep us all out of trou­ble.“

Of course, so will prison, largely.

So the par­ties move to the Russian’s house, much booze is bought, and this Com­cas­tic train-wreck of a boy never real­izes that cos­mi­cally, in spite of the dark glasses that he wears and the cool car that he dri­ves, and even in spite of the gal­lons of alco­hol his mom brings to the house … he is still, fun­da­men­tally, a jerk.

And here we go again, his­tory repeat­ing itself glo­ri­ously. Now, Com­cast gets to be the Russ­ian kid, and GE gets to be the guy who only drank soda and goes home with the head cheer­leader.

To be sure, this is an absolute dream come true for Com­cast. This is the brass ring, it’s the big show. The really, really big show. Now, the cable provider, the dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work, owns the pipes and a con­trol­ling inter­est in the gas, too. Time­Warner got close, but never quite exe­cuted. Com­cast thinks it’s going to make good on that.

GE is walk­ing away with a bit of cash — $13 bil­lion — so enough to roll out another microwave oven. More impor­tantly, GE gets free­dom. NBC is like that skin tag on your hip that keeps grow­ing and grow­ing, but not doing any­thing use­ful. NBC was the goofy step­brother that came to din­ner and never left, back when GE acquired RCA in 1986. If you’re GE in this sit­u­a­tion, this is good rid­dance to bad rub­bish.

The prob­lem with all this rot is in the series of flags it raises. Some are big flags. Some are lit­tle ones… but they’re all sort of red.

One big one is net­work neu­tral­ity. I’m actu­ally against net­work neu­tral­ity. It’s a market-driven con­cept and in it’s purest form — pay­ing a pre­mium for higher speed access to con­tent — it serves the peo­ple who get con­tent deliv­ered. That’s a good thing. Let the mar­ket rule.

Com­cast has a dif­fer­ent idea of net­work neu­tral­ity, though, and it looks some­thing like inter­net divesti­ture. Imag­ine a day in which you wake up and want to watch the lat­est “30 Rock” only to find out that you aren’t a pay­ing sub­scriber to that inter­net.

As tele­vi­sion con­tent moves more and more online, the thought of pil­lar NBC shows mov­ing behind the Com­cast gate could get damned near anti-competitive. And that’s not me talk­ing, that’s  my man Ed Markey (D-Mass.), voice of the lit­tle peo­ple.

“This pro­posed deal raises sig­nif­i­cant ques­tions about con­sumer choice and com­pe­ti­tion, inno­va­tion and invest­ment in the media mar­ket­place that merit close scrutiny by Con­gress, the FCC and the Jus­tice Depart­ment.“

Best thing that could come out of this rot is the dia­log. In the end, Com­cast will get their NBC. If his­tory is any indi­ca­tor, they’ll likely do some­thing stu­pid with it (I’m sorry, but I’m look­ing at you, Hulu). But more peo­ple who should be talk­ing about these issues in the media mar­ket­place will be talk­ing about them. Out of the ash of big media res­ig­na­tion, though, comes the real­iza­tion that the media mar­ket­place has already shifted right out from under the merg­ers and acqui­si­tions. The future isn’t Comcast’s, or NBC’s. The future belongs to the rest of us — latent sto­ry­tellers wait­ing for the next writer’s strike, the next stu­dio gaff, the next “GI Joe” for an oppor­tu­nity to give their sto­ries, real and rich sto­ries, life and freedom.