The Summer That Will Change the Internet Forever [View all]

http://www.vox.com/2014/5/8/5694826/this-summer-will-change-the-internet-and-media-forever

"It's impossible to overstate how massive Comcast will become if it's allowed to buy Time Warner Cable. The combined company will have 31 million TV customers and 32 million broadband subscribers, dwarfing every other company in the United States. It will be the only major service provider in 19 of 20 major American cities. And it will also own NBC Universal, which means it will control a massive number of cable channels, film studios, production companies, MSNBC, and NBC itself...."

"At this point it's fair to call the furor over the FCC's Open Internet rulemaking process a full-on crisis. The short version is that the FCC's old net neutrality rules preventing ISPs like Comcast from throttling services like Netflix were thrown out by a federal court in February, and new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler responded with a new set of rules that basically everyone hates... except ISPs like Comcast. (This is where a cynical person points out that Wheeler used to be a prominent cable industry lobbyist

Wheeler's new rules would allow ISPs to create "fast lanes" on their services that a company like Apple could pay to use, so (for example) iTunes movies would stream better than Google Play movies. That would fundamentally change the entire way American businesses and consumers have experienced so far, and as more and more media moves to the internet (see the Aereo decision below) it could change the fundamental costs of publishing..."