Comcast, the largest cable company in the United States, has recently announced that it will acquire a 51% stake in NBC Universal, one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world. This will give Comcast control over the creation and dissemination of content to a huge portion of the US, an example of potentially anticompetitive vertical integration.

This act of consolidation has many open media activists on edge, citing antitrust issues and threats to democracy. When a single company owns news channels, cable suppliers, and internet providers, the threat of censorship or unfair practices increases.

“If Comcast controls content, they could in theory, depending on the legal framework, raise their prices for their competitors,” said Marvin Ammori, advisor to the group Free Press, who recently wrote a piece about the merger in the Huffington Post. Now that a service provider will be able to charge higher rates to competitors, including other cable networks and satellite TV providers, prices could rise for consumers and competition could be stifled. Free Press recently released their own white paper (PDF) and website dedicated to blocking the merger.

The potential for bundling content and distribution while raising prices for the competition has prompted the government to step in. The Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department are examining the effects of the merger. Even congressmen, including Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, are worried about the anticompetitive implications of the merger. Comcast, however, assures that the deal is “pro-competitive, pro-consumer, and strongly in the public interest.”

With the merger comes potential threats to online video. Being the biggest cable internet provider, Comcast has a financial incentive to favor its own content (like NBC’s programming) over others’, raising network neutrality issues. This gives proponents of peer-to-peer and open video reason for unease, too. In the past, Comcast was reprimanded by the FCC for blocking peer-to-peer applications, like BitTorrent and Miro. Now that video is becoming more ubiquitous, the cable company may aim to stifle participation and user-generated video in favor of the streaming of its own content. This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Comcast will also get NBC’s 27% stake in Hulu, one of the largest online television distributors. Hulu, which offers many television shows for free, is often seen as a check to cable companies. As a recent editorial in The New York Times notes, “Comcast could well see such services as a threat and bundle them with cable services or abandon them entirely.”

The merger also comes relatively soon after Comcast announced its internet television service, TV Everywhere, which gives on demand television access solely to Comcast cable subscribers. TV Everywhere, which will be released this month, is a prime example of the “incumbent media,” as Ammori puts it, “trying to control the distribution of the emerging media.”

Photo by by Avatar/ΣΙΓΜΑ