In most cities in the US the cable company is now a broadband monopoly. They have won the competition battle and have largely taken customers formerly served by telco DSL. The cable companies have grown into monopolies due to being better competitors and by offering superior broadband products. There are still some markets where the cable companies are not monopolies – they may be competing with a fiber overbuilder or an aggressive CLEC using DSL, or the cable company has not made the upgrades in a given market to the fastest broadband products. But for most towns in the US the cable companies now fit the definition of a classic monopoly.

What I find alarming as a consumer is that there is no talk at the national or even the state level of reacting to the monopoly status of the big cable companies. I know that this conversation will eventually arise as has happened in the past with other monopolies. Monopolies naturally abuse their monopoly power more and more over time until the government is forced to react to regulate them.

The nature of monopolies is well understood and there are well-stablished reasons why governments eventually step in to regulate monopolies:

• Price Gouging. Monopolies always raise prices over time when there are no competitors to keep them in check. We know that Wall Street is currently urging the big cable companies to aggressively raise broadband prices.
• Poor Service. Monopolies tend toward providing poor customer service because they have no incentive to do better. The big ISPs are already today are rated by consumers as their least favorite corporations.
• Monopsony Power. This economics term refers to the tendency for monopolies to exploit their purchasing power by forcing low prices on their supply chain. Perhaps the best example of this is Comcast swallowing up the programmers that supply the content for their cable product.

We know from a few centuries of experience how to deal with monopolies. Governments have numerous options:

Promote Competition. Governments sometimes try to curb monopolies by promoting competition. In the broadband world this could involve the government providing funding to build urban fiber or supporting alternate technologies like 5G to directly compete with the cable monopolies.

Price Regulation. Many natural monopolies are regulated through price caps where regulators must approve rate increases. This remedy is most effective with natural monopolies like electricity or water systems which serve everybody in a community.

Quality of Service Regulation. Regulators have often intervened and forced customer service standards on monopolies. The best example is the old Ma Bell and regulators over the years defined much of the interface between AT&T and customers. They regulated many aspects of that interface such as the rules governing disconnecting customers for non-payment or be defining acceptable time period to make repairs.

Divestiture. An extreme remedy is divestiture, or breaking up a monopoly into different components. We’ve seen this in our industry when the government forced the divestiture of AT&T into local telephone companies and a nationwide long-distance network. It’s harder to see such a clean split for cable companies, but the government could make them divest of programming assets or other ventures that enable them to inflict monopoly abuses.

Rate of Return Regulation. Another effective form of regulation is rate of return regulation. This is still done today for large power companies who must defend their expenditures and rates to regulators. Earnings for the core business are strictly regulated and excess profits returned to customers.

Penalties for Monopoly Abuse. Finally, the government can impose penalties for monopoly abuses. The FCC has always had this authority and issues fines against bad actors in the industry. The Federal Trade Commission also can fine cable companies for operating practices that harm customers.

We are in an environment today where big ISPs and many other large corporations have gained the upper hand in the market through the lobbying of legislators and regulators. However, historically the treatment of monopolies has always been cyclical, and eventually the monopoly abuses become unbearable and the public demands regulation. I would think that if the cable companies follow Wall Street’s advice and raise base broadband rates to $90 per month that we’ll see the government be forced to react.

It’s also possible that some alternate technology like 5G might eventually create competitive pressure for the cable companies. But it’s just as likely that in most places that wireless carriers will be other large companies and we’ll see duopoly competition like we’ve seen for years between Verizon FiOS and the cable companies in the Northeast, where both charge similar prices and don’t really compete.