Comcast is a perennial winner of national polls for the most hated company in America, and the bigger it gets, the worse it gets: back in 2011, the Obama administration let the company swallow NBC Universal, teeing it up to powerfully benefit from the destruction of Net Neutrality under Trump; now Trump is poised to let the company buy Fox and Sky, making the company bigger and more powerful.
At the same time, the end of Net Neutrality, combined with telcos’ abandonment of DSL upgrades, has made Comcast the de facto monopoly broadband provider for tens of millions of Americans, leading to a decline in the company’s already poor service and prices.
Created in 1969, Comcast has spent decades prioritizing growth and expansion over innovation. As Comcast focused on gobbling up smaller cable operators, it refused to invest equally in scaling up customer service and support, a major reason why Comcast has some of the worst customer service and satisfaction ratings of any company, in any industry in America.With regulators handcuffed, broadband competition waning, net neutrality on the ropes and Comcast and AT&T hoovering up broadcasters to cement their domination of the emerging streaming video market, the writing is on the wall for all of Comcast’s worst tendencies to be amplified many times over.
Comcast Is Already Hated—and it’s About to Become a Lot More Powerful [Karl Bode/Motherboard]