Once Comcast’s Deal Shifted to a Focus on Broadband, Its Ambitions Were Sunk; New York Times, 4/23/15

Jonathan Mahler, New York Times; Once Comcast’s Deal Shifted to a Focus on Broadband, Its Ambitions Were Sunk:

"If there was a single moment when the winds seemed to shift against Comcast, it came in November, when President Obama released a video on the White House website in which he spoke about the future of the Internet. For the first time, Mr. Obama, who had long offered support for the idea of net neutrality but had always stopped short of suggesting how it might be achieved, was unambiguously clear about what he wanted. He called on the Federal Communications Commission to adopt “the strongest possible rules” to regulate the Internet.

“For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access into and out of your home or business,” he said. “It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information — whether a phone call or a packet of data.”...

It meant that a lot of Americans living in rural areas no longer had what qualified as high-speed Internet access — making Comcast’s already large share of the broadband market considerably larger."