If you’ve got something to say about the pending Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger but never found time to formulate your thoughts, we have good news for you, The Federal Communications Commission extended the Oct. 8 public deadline by 21 days, largely due to a “voluminous” (and tardy) document Comcast filed in response to the commission’s request for more information on broadband management.
“As such, the analysis presented is critical to the review of the proposed transactions and additional time is needed to evaluate it,” the FCC said on its website.
See also: The FCC’s Net Neutrality Crash Gives You Time To Learn What John Oliver Got Wrong
Comcast’s nearly 850-page document responds both to the FCC’s information request and to Dish Network’s complaint that neither Comcast or Time Warner fully answered the FCC’s original information request. What’s more, Comcast missed its due date—it filed the document on Sept. 23, almost two weeks after the FCC’s September 11 deadline.
There’s a lot of “new information” in Comcast’s epic filing, the FCC points out, including “an empirical analysis investigating the question of Comcast’s discrimination against non-affiliated programing.” The Dish Network, as well as consumer rights groups, argue that a Comcast-TWC behemoth would rule the cable and broadband access of 30 million subscribers, and thus would be able to dictate what those Americans watch on TV and how they access the Internet.
Notably, all this extra work does not make up for Comcast’s tardiness so far as the government is concerned. Instead, the FCC points out, the Comcast filing “represents a relatively substantial body of new material that perhaps could have been presented in the initial application.”
Shoulda. Coulda. Woulda.
It does, however, give you, the American consumer extra time to read up on the merger, at least if you’re able to access it on the FCC’s quaint old-timey website.
Lead image by anthony kell