Mayor Nutter, Please cut our Comcast Tax
Dear Mayor Nutter, I hear you've been pretty busy with this St. Peter's on the Parkway business, so I hate to distract you. But someday soon, His Holiness will be heading home to Rome, the leaves in Fairmount Park will start to turn, and Pennsylvania might even have a budget. You'll be ready to plow into your final months.
Dear Mayor Nutter,
I hear you've been pretty busy with this St. Peter's on the Parkway business, so I hate to distract you. But someday soon, His Holiness will be heading home to Rome, the leaves in Fairmount Park will start to turn, and Pennsylvania might even have a budget. You'll be ready to plow into your final months.
So today I'd like to add one item to your punch list - or circle one already there: scoring the best possible deal for me and my fellow Philadelphians as you renew the city's 15-year franchise agreements with Comcast, our hometown cable and broadband giant.
As I concede every time I bend your ear on this, I understand you've got bigger challenges as the mayor of a vibrant, beautiful city that also has deep veins of poverty and a struggling middle class.
On the other hand, you seem to understand that pocketbook issues matter. About half of the city's households pay what I call the "Comcast Tax," often coughing up $150 or more each month while watching rates rise far faster than our pay or other prices. That's one reason it galls us to see this $69 billion-a-year corporation - whose growth we've fueled - get tax breaks from a city that can't afford to fund its schools.
And you also seem to get that this is no longer "just cable TV" - not when cable is the dominant provider almost everywhere of broadband Internet, which has already become this century's essential tool of communications. I'd love to hear your voice raised alongside others - such as the United Nations' Human Rights Council and Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee - that have urged recognition of Internet access as a fundamental human right.
Frankly, I don't know if this gets personal for you - whether it gives you whiplash to go from chatting up a billionaire like Brian Roberts to talking with aides and city residents about impoverished schools, homelessness, and the like. But I suspect that, over time, you've realized the same thing I have: that as much as we like Comcast or people we know there, we also recognize that much of its haul of cash - it had $3.5 billion on hand at the close of the last quarter - comes from squeezing monopoly-like profits out of its core products, like a feudal lord collecting rents.
But here's where we part ways: I can't do anything about this - paying my cable and Internet bill isn't like haggling over the price of a car.
But you can. You have something Comcast wants: your assent to extensions of its 15-year franchises, so the company lampooned as Kabletown can happily continue to collect its tax here without drawing more of the bad publicity it seems to attract lately like a magnet.
So here's the main reason I'm writing you today: to urge you to take a hard stand in these talks for three principles.
The first is the importance of the Internet to all Philly residents - not just the better-off who can afford it and poor families with school kids who qualify for Comcast's low-cost Internet Essentials program, but everybody. Tell Roberts or whomever he dispatches to bargain that you're offended by Comcast's decision to do a pilot project for outreach to the elderly in Florida and San Francisco, not here.
Is it possible that Comcast is withholding plans to expand the program in Philly as a bargaining chip? You bet, so you should tell Comcast that when you demanded "most-favored nation" treatment for its hometown, you meant it.
The second principle to stand up for is the importance of choice - an element crucial to making any market work. If disgruntled consumers can't readily tell Comcast or any company to take a hike, they can't play their part in enforcing "market discipline."
Of course, nothing is going to quickly make the broadband market competitive, including new technologies such as fixed-wireless Internet that always seem to be on the horizon. Some in Philly are still waiting for Verizon to finish its FiOS build-out, which will give them a single alternative to Comcast (and make them luckier than some around the region likely to never get Verizon's fiber). And let's face it: Duopoly beats monopoly, but not by much.
Which brings me to the third principle to push: that to maximize city residents' choice, our beloved sports teams must finally be treated like the public assets they are, backed by city services and tax dollars, and not as wholly owned Comcast subsidiaries.
Federal regulators finally closed the "terrestrial loophole" that allowed Comcast to refuse its Philly SportsNet channel to DirecTV or Dish Network. But Comcast continues to play games. It's reportedly demanding about $4 per subscriber - too much in a region where it knows most fans have had to stick with cable.
There are many ways to fix this, such as by insisting that Comcast offer sports to the satellites - and to their own Basic Cable subscribers - on an a la carte basis.
You're the one at the table, Mr. Mayor. But you can count on this: Drive the hardest bargain you can to cut the city's Comcast tax, and we'll all have your back.
215-854-2776@jeffgelles