11

The FCC Approves

THE COMMUNICATIONS MERGER PROCESS at the Federal Communications Commission, one content-industry employee told me, is “just awful.”1 It's a game: the companies that plan to merge know that if they can get the regulators to spend enough time considering the deal, it will probably go through. There may be a brief struggle with underfunded public-interest groups, but if no other large companies oppose the deal, the feds’ investment of time in working with the merging parties, coupled with their interest in moving on to other items on their agenda, generally overcomes any private concerns about consolidation of market power. Just two major media–telecommunications mergers have been rejected by the FCC in the twenty-first century: the proposed combination of the country's two major satellite video providers, EchoStar and DirecTV in 2002, and the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile in 2011.² Both rejections were unusual. In 2008, by contrast, the FCC approved the merger of the two providers of satellite radio, Sirius and XM, even after it became clear that the combined entity (Sirius XM) would, in fact, monopolize the satellite radio market.³

The merger-approval dance requires a series of steps. What is called a “record” of filings with the FCC is created over a period of months, amounting to hundreds of thousands of pages. Deals are struck before and during the process to make stakeholders (such as interest groups and trade associations) who might object feel that they have gotten something out of the process. In the Sirius-XM merger, for example, the Commission pointed to the new combined satellite radio company's voluntary commitment to offer lower prices for a three-year period as a public-interest benefit that would outweigh the long-term monopolistic harm generated by the transaction.4 Yet after all the filings and the hundreds of meetings, the last phase is often an unseemly scramble for concessions. “At the end,” the content-industry employee told me, “people will all be in the room trying to get something. It will matter who is in the room.”⁵ Mergers are fact-dependent—particular companies are involved, particular market power issues are at stake—but the final decision sets the stage for broad future policy even though only a few key actors are “in the room” at the end of the process.

For instance, after their last-minute struggles to merge at the end of 2005 with SBC and MCI, respectively, AT&T and Verizon voluntarily agreed to subject their DSL Internet access businesses to the FCC Broadband Internet Access Policy Statement, which entitles consumers to run applications and use services of their choice.⁶ The companies’ agreement made a nonbinding policy statement by the Commission appear suddenly binding—but for only part of the high-speed Internet access industry and not for the cable companies. The same 2005 merger approvals were used to pressure the phone companies to sell ten-dollar-a-month DSL services separately, divested from bundles of services, for two years. Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy felt that the Commission was overstepping the appropriate scope of its merger review by exacting these agreements, noting that “[i]t should not be standard operating procedure to craft company-specific merger conditions to address unknown and hypothetical competitive threats,” and urging the FCC to use its “customary administrative weaponry” of rulemaking and enforcement actions, rather than merger reviews, to shape policy.⁷ As Thomas Koutsky and Lawrence Spiwak of the Phoenix Center asked in a 2007 article, “Are consumers really well-served by backroom, closed-door negotiations between the regulator and prospective merging parties over important public issues?”⁸

Part of the reason for the somewhat chaotic process at the FCC is the interplay between its statutory public-interest mandate and the belief of some commissioners in the power of “intermodal competition.” Former chairman Michael Powell largely deregulated the information-transport industry beginning in 2002 because he was convinced that different pipes and wires and airwaves would compete with one another, and this competition would protect consumers better than any regulations. Phone companies would battle cable, cable would battle satellite, and wireless and “broadband over powerline” would take on all comers. Given this policy focus, a wave of mergers had inevitably followed among the competitors in each industry.9 The result was extraordinary consolidation in the telephone world (both wireless and wired) and the cable arena but, ultimately, none of the anticipated competition.

At the same time, the FCC has broader authority over mergers than the antitrust division of the Department of Justice (DOJ). The Commission is charged with determining how the public's long-term interest will be served by any merger transaction, and so it takes into account traditional public-interest values like diversity of broadcasts and localism—considerations that are not relevant to DOJ review, in which the agency looks at the effects on competition.¹⁰

The Commission thus has the difficult task of addressing the concerns of innumerable groups about the effect of a given transaction on a wide range of public values while tacitly encouraging telecommunications companies that have sufficient scale and scope to survive—so as to avoid the need to regulate. What is fascinating is that this “awful,” detailed, backroom drafting of broad voluntary conditions routinely leads to deal points that are trumpeted by the commissioners approving the merger as wins for consumers but that in the end are either unenforced or unenforceable.

In 1999, the FCC conditioned a merger between SBC and Ameritech on SBC's commitment to enter into thirty markets outside its region. But no one defined “entry” SBC sold service to some of its Boston employees and then shut down the Boston operation.¹¹ The “separate $10/month DSL” offering required by the Commission of AT&T and Verizon in 2005 was buried in the phone companies’ Web sites. The FCC had not said anything about publicizing the offering. Adherence to the FCC Broadband Internet Access Policy Statement (giving consumers free choice of applications and services) was meanwhile limited to slow DSL services and did not apply to the companies’ fiber communications—or to Comcast, Time Warner, and Cablevision.

Here is how the process at the FCC works: The merging companies figure out whom they have to please in order to avoid controversy and set to work persuading those groups or companies to support their transaction; the FCC, after much negotiating, creates conditions that it feels will serve the public interest and outweigh the anticompetitive harms created by the deal; the merging parties complain bitterly that the conditions are not specific to the merger but are broad attempts to make policy; a long series of meetings and filings is followed by a last-minute scramble for concessions; and on the day the deal is approved, the parties and regulators both issue press releases claiming victory.

This was the course taken by the Comcast-NBCU merger. The deal faced high hurdles because of its sheer size and the opportunity for abuse the arrangement provided. But thanks to years of positioning, lots of deftly distributed cash, and the organizational brilliance of Comcast's David Cohen, it went through with relative ease. There were a few hearings, but any concerns about the deal were overwhelmed by the orchestrated political support coming from all over America, as well as by the fact that the cable industry was already so concentrated that this single transaction would not by itself change the picture appreciably.

The theater of the deal, the march of posturing, lobbying, arguing, and persuading, followed the usual pattern. It was grand in scale and scope, perhaps, but it was not surprising or even particularly Machiavellian. And following a last-minute flurry of activity, it set the stage for future policy. There were conditions carefully worked out by the FCC (together with the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division) aimed at reducing the distributor's power to raise prices for its rivals and, particularly, its nascent online rivals.

The day the merger was approved, Cohen said that the conditions imposed by the reviewing agencies would not impair Comcast's ability to operate its business or disadvantage its competitiveness.12 The conditions Comcast had accepted did not seem likely to make any difference to media market structures in the United States—and particularly to the overwhelming dominance of local cable incumbents in the market for high-speed Internet access. Four months later, one of the FCC commissioners who had voted to approve the merger left to work for Comcast.¹³

As communications behemoths routinely consolidate, the public could be left with the impression—if it were paying attention—that nothing much happens between the announcement of a proposed deal and then, a year or so later, its approval by the relevant agencies. But this is not the case. For the gargantuan Comcast-NBCU merger, the staffs of the Federal Communications Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice pulled large teams together to review documents, hold meetings, and agree on conditions. So did the company and industry lobbyists.

Comcast hired almost eighty former government employees to help lobby for approval of the merger, including several former chiefs of staff for key legislators on congressional antitrust committees, former FCC staffers and Antitrust Division lawyers, and at least four former members of Congress: Reps. Robert Walker (R-Pa.), William Gray (D-Pa.), and Chip Pickering (R-Miss.), and Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.). Many Comcast vendors were hired who did not need to register as lobbyists because they were strategizing in the background rather than meeting directly with agencies or legislators.14 Such profligate hiring had two advantages: in addition to attracting talented lobbyists who could speak meaningfully to former colleagues inside government, every lobbying or economic consulting firm whose employee was retained was effectively barred from offering objections to the deal because the firm would have a conflict of interest. To get the merger approved, Comcast spent many times what it had lavished on its last major deal, the colossal 2002 purchase of AT&T's cable systems, which had made Comcast the largest cable provider in the nation. David Cohen was rumored to have joked, “Let me know if there's anyone I haven't hired.”¹⁵

To avoid internal turf battles and ensure that its wide-ranging review process had a single manager, the FCC hired John Flynn, a former Supreme Court clerk, general counsel at a satellite company, and partner at a large Washington law firm.¹⁶ By all accounts the poker-faced Flynn kept a steady if not charismatic hand on the tiller at the FCC and was an extraordinarily quick study, something a deal with this many angles needed. He approached his task with humility and a low-key intensity. He had come to do this single job and would be gone when it was over.

On his arrival in the spring of 2010, Flynn was almost immediately presented with a demand from FCC management that the review go faster than the staff had initially thought possible. The broad scope of the FCC's public-interest standard for reviewing mergers meant that the agency had to consider a host of issues beyond antitrust matters, including broadcasting, children's programming, diversity, and localism. Flynn's charge was to harness the staff's expertise in all these areas while ensuring that every secondary issue had economists and lawyers assigned to help, and to get the work done as quickly as possible. At the same time, he would be acting in public: summaries of meetings at the FCC and comments submitted on a merger are posted online; although these summaries are often unhelpfully superficial, the fact that X has met with Y will probably be known. Flynn and his team set to work, creating clear lines of responsibility and dividing up tasks. The Comcast-NBCU process would be the most intense review the FCC had ever run for a single transaction.17

Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice, the Antitrust Division assigned more than thirty lawyers, plus a group of economists, to its review process. The DOJ review would be more narrowly focused on whether the transaction had the potential to strangle nascent markets and raise competitors’ costs of doing business. The department is a law enforcement agency with a broad mandate rather than an administrative agency focused on a single industry, so it is less of a hotbed of gossip and public-private intrigue than the FCC; its lawyers tend to be discreet, and its documents and meetings are not made public. Lawyers within the Antitrust Division hoped to use their relative confidentiality to reassure companies and individuals who were worried about retribution from Comcast if they spoke up or handed over documents. Christine Varney, the division chief, quickly zeroed in on the merger's potential effect on online video, and the team met with scores of people (more than 125 companies in all) and sent out extensive and detailed demands for information to small and large cable operators, broadcasters, online video providers, and many other companies. The division ultimately reviewed more than a million business documents from the merging companies.

The Antitrust Division and the FCC closely coordinated their analysis. They held several key meetings jointly, pooled their economic and telecommunications expertise, and simultaneously announced harmonized conditions for the deal when the merger was approved. Such close coordination differed from past procedures, and agency personnel told me that they thought their joint work had made it harder for the companies to play the agencies off against each other.18

At the same time, the coordination made some companies nervous: they were leery of talking to the DOJ for fear their discussions would leak out through the FCC and irritate Comcast. As one content-industry person told me, “You can't overstate the amount of fear people have in dealing with Comcast. The programmers are terrified, and they don't want to give things to DOJ that will then go to FCC. Even if a programmer has a multi-year contract with Comcast, things come up all the time—ambiguities—and they have to re-negotiate. So having a long-term contract doesn't give a programmer any comfort. They're still completely stuck with Comcast.”¹⁹

Months of meetings and filings followed. Varney regularly met with Genachowski; she was said to be urging Genachowski to be firm. It was a rough time for the FCC chairman. While the Comcast-NBCU review was going on, the net neutrality issue was raging and staff were holding ten meetings a day internally trying to resolve policy and technical questions. By mid-2010 Genachowski's careful effort to consider all points of view, take a thoughtful centrist position, and not risk having President Obama attacked as hostile to business appeared to be backfiring. The carriers knew that Genachowski was considered thin-skinned, someone who could not abide the politics of personal destruction that prevail in the telecommunications and media sector; they figured that all they had to do was rattle his cage, and they would probably get what they wanted. The same dynamics seemed to apply to the Comcast-NBCU review, and Varney and her staff may have worried that when push came to shove, the FCC would be unable to stand up to Comcast.²⁰

The public narrative of the Comcast-NBCU transaction remained largely the Comcast-shaped story. Major media would have jumped on the news if any major companies had spoken up about the deal, but the telephone companies (Verizon, AT&T, Qwest), large cable companies (Time Warner, Cablevision), media conglomerates (News Corp., Disney, Viacom, CBS, Turner), and large online companies (Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook) were mostly not saying a thing. The media and telecommunications world had become sufficiently consolidated that no large company saw much upside to opposing another large company's deal—their positions might be reversed soon enough, and all of them needed to deal with Comcast. They talked to the Department of Justice and provided information about their practices, but they did not make noise; when it came to Comcast-NBCU, the media community maintained an appearance of equipoise.

Public-interest groups did their best to kick sand in the gears. Free Press in particular agitated for blocking the deal entirely; Executive Director Josh Silver issued statements and wrote blog posts throughout the year of the FCC review, and wrote after the deal was approved that “the Comcast-NBC merger is truly a disaster for anyone who hopes the American public might someday emerge from the propaganda morass that is embodied by cable television, and now threatens to consume the internet.”21 Andy Schwartzman of the Media Access Project testified vehemently against the deal.²² Public Knowledge's Harold Feld wrote comments and blog posts.²³ All these groups joined the Communications Workers of America and Common Cause in opposing the merger as filed and asking for detailed conditions that would, in their view, curb Comcast's market power.²⁴

But in the absence of opposition from another large corporation, the tens of thousands of comments filed in support of the public advocates’ views were outweighed by the hundreds of supportive comments from Comcast allies—state and local officials, business groups, and nonprofits.²⁵ Sensing a draw complicated by a lot of tricky details, reporters saw little to write about. National coverage of the deal was surprisingly thin considering the size of the participants.

Meanwhile, Kathy Zachem, an engaging, forceful, and well-liked Comcast employee charged by David Cohen with managing the company's relationship with the FCC, virtually camped out at the Commission's offices, holding court on the eighth floor, where all the commissioners have offices. The entire Comcast team was viewed by staff as good to work with and professional; the Comcast people worked hard and did not leak information.

The FCC and DOJ had a lot of ground to cover, even if the public was not hearing about it. This was the Obama administration's first mega-merger, and the reviewing agencies had mountains of information to absorb and analyze. The basic concerns were obvious: would the addition of NBC Universal content to the assets already under Comcast's control give the company the power to demand better terms for programming and for carriage of other peoples’ programming? Would Comcast be able to use this power to move the subscription cable model online while suppressing competition from new forms of online video? What effect would the merger have on the future of Internet businesses and Internet access? The merger review took more than a year, in the end, because each of these issues had to be understood and then explained in writing to the public in the final order, which was filed online.

From the start, blocking the merger was unlikely. The agency economists took the view that there were positive gains from vertical integration between content and distribution; “double marginalization” (overhead overlaps triggered by the involvement of multiple companies) could be reduced, innovation could be enhanced by coordinating work on content with work on new forms of distribution, and overall costs could be cut through economies of scale and scope. Case law supported the idea that vertical integration was less worrisome than horizontal mergers; the antitrust agencies had not successfully litigated a vertical merger challenge for decades.26

Besides, Comcast was already in the content business: its regional sports networks were powerful engines driving the company. The Antitrust Division staff, given the scope of their review, felt they did not have a good enough analytical reason to challenge the merger as a whole; the FCC wanted to limit itself to merger-specific harms, and staff members believed that it would be difficult to make a strong case that the merger would make the existing situation worse. And the political dynamics clearly favored the merger; with most legislators, minority groups, and state officials from across the country in favor and no large businesses opposed, there was little reason to contest a vertical merger. Six months before the final decisions were released, John Malone said of the deal, “Absolutely it'll happen. I don't think there's any question. And I don't think they'll [Comcast and NBC Universal] have to make a lot of commitments to get it through. They'll make some.” Malone predicted that other distributors would see clues in the deal's approval that would prompt them to vertically integrate as well, in order to protect themselves.²⁷

The skirmishing was over the conditions for the deal. Competing providers of pay TV wanted to ensure that they would have fair access to programming that would be owned by Comcast. Although AT&T did not seem overly concerned—CEO Randall Stephenson told the press that he expected his company would have the same access to programming following the deal—small cable companies complained that the existing program-access rules allowed Comcast innumerable ways to make life hell for them. Enforcing the rules was costly and time-consuming, and Comcast could always claim that it was merely using standard volume discounts and (secret) “most favored nation” provisions in its contracts to favor larger distributors.28

Other programmers wanted the chance to be distributed through Comcast's enormous pipes. Without this distribution, they would not be able to sell advertising effectively so that they could become bigger, and without distribution on Comcast they would not be viewed as important enough to get distribution from Cablevision, Cox, or Charter. The big cable companies routinely act in parallel. Comcast had been denying independent programmers access for years; the FCC had just one judge dealing with carriage complaints, and Comcast had been able to avoid or wear down most complainers. Al Jazeera may have been able to trigger the fall of governments, but it could not get carriage on Comcast; no programmer independent of the media conglomerates has managed that reliably.²⁹ With the addition of NBCU content, programmers argued, Comcast would have even more reason to shield its marquee brands (USA, CNBC, NBC Sports) from competition by keeping independents out of its pipes. Bloomberg, in particular, wanted special treatment from Comcast: “neighborhooding” of all business channels so that it could be found next to CNBC.³⁰

Online video-distribution companies worried that Comcast could make things especially difficult for them; with control over more programming and no obligation to allow competing broadband companies to use its pipes, Comcast could deny new online companies a platform. Comcast's ability to offer its own online video with TV Everywhere would make the situation even worse; the cable bundled subscription model would be successfully moved online.³¹

Toward the end of the process, the FCC paid glancing attention to the issue of high-speed Internet access and the power of Comcast (and other cable incumbents) to dominate wired access in its market areas. Earthlink, the Internet service provider that had been allowed onto Time Warner's cable system as a result of the AOL–Time Warner merger a decade earlier, strongly argued for wholesale stand-alone broadband access so that it could compete.32

Public-interest groups trooped to the FCC offices about once a week. Like some of the companies, they wanted rules to ensure Comcast's rivals access to programming, better rules covering Comcast's obligation to carry programming from independent programmers, and a requirement that Comcast make its high-speed Internet access services available on a wholesale basis.³³ To the end, the public-interest groups thought that wholesale access to high-speed Internet services was a strong possibility.

Comcast, for its part, kept asserting that the review was certain to be settled in 2010—the company was expert at creating an air of inevitability, and it had financial reasons for wanting to get the deal done that year. It had seen an opportunity in a business-friendly administration and had gone forward. But approval of the merger on Comcast's schedule would not be possible, given the work that had to be done on net neutrality and the compromises the staff had to get through in order to complete that order. Approval would have to wait until January 2011.

Some outsiders to the process found it hard to believe that public policy would permit the deal to go through. “If the framers could see what has happened to their First Amendment, they'd be shocked,” one commenter told me. “It now protects corporations. … Comcast owns the Internet now.”³⁴

But the unthinkable had become commonplace. At the end of 2010, after months of work, the FCC staff was nearly ready to circulate its proposed conditions for a vote. There was, predictably, a last-minute scramble to add on conditions that had personal appeal for one actor or another. The commissioners all had their own requests. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn had already made hers known; she wanted to ensure that the deal was used as an opportunity to provide low-income Americans, as well as schools and libraries, with better access to low-cost broadband.³⁵ Commissioner Michael Copps, after a period of disengagement, submitted a host of requests at the end, including requiring Comcast to sell Internet access on a wholesale basis as well as putting in place much stiffer rules about programming—both access to Comcast's programming and carriage by Comcast of independents’ programming.

The Republican commissioners, McDowell and Baker, had had little involvement in the process beyond preliminary briefings; now, however, they insisted that the conditions on the merger expire as quickly as possible. And they wanted to be sure that the Commission did not say anything about either net neutrality or the terms under which Comcast would make programming available online; the FCC had never extended its program-access rules to the Internet.36

Brian Roberts and David Cohen came in to see Chairman Genachowski on Thursday, January 13, 2011. The results would be announced the following Tuesday. Genachowski told them that the merger would be approved, and Comcast was comfortable with the conditions that had been proposed. The Republicans had gotten some minor language tweaks but had not otherwise prevailed; Commissioner Clyburn's concerns had largely been addressed and she would support the merger; Commissioner Copps's end-of-process list of requests had not made it into the deal, but his nay vote would not affect the final outcome.³⁷

Investment analysts looking at the announced conditions saw a positive outcome for Comcast. Although competing distributors got the ability to trigger “baseball arbitration” for programming (in which both sides are obliged to make a last best offer, one of which will be chosen by the arbitrator), Comcast could still bundle at will—which would make any arbitration extremely difficult to win.³⁸ And online video distributors would get access to Comcast-NBCU content, but there were enough exceptions and details and expenses involved to keep lawyers busy for a long time; the most potentially disruptive condition required Comcast-NBCU to license to an online video distributor (OVD) broadcast, cable, or film content comparable in scope and quality to the content the OVD received from one of the joint venture's programming peers. There would be fights over the meaning of “comparable,” and in order to trigger the obligation at all one of the four peer conglomerates would have to break ranks with the others in making programming available online outside the TV Everywhere umbrella, a situation that left ample room for maneuvering and litigation. Little had changed with regard to Comcast's ability to protect its own programming from independent competitors (the “program carriage” issue), and the net neutrality obligation did not apply to IP-based services Comcast carried over its own “private network.” This exception effectively negated the rule because Comcast would be the source of the definition of its “private network.”39

On the plus side for the public, Comcast was obliged to offer a retail stand-alone high-speed Internet access service at $49.95 a month for 6 Mbps speed—a service it was already selling. It would have to bring data services to an additional four hundred thousand homes (but could impose whatever terms it wanted) and would be obliged to promote greater broadband adoption by 2.5 million low-income households through a $9.95 per month service—information the FCC tried to ensure would be more public than AT&T and Verizon's ten-dollar-a-month DSL offer had been a few years earlier. The FCC adopted Comcast's low-cost broadband suggestion nearly verbatim, but although the program looked like a public benefit, it would not be easy for customers to apply for it.⁴⁰ Means-tested plans were not going to affect Comcast's existing services, and, as the company had found back in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1963, when it is difficult to apply for something, customers won't. The company would not be offering the program to anyone who had recently been a customer of Comcast. In effect, the merger condition opened new business opportunities to Comcast without creating any pressure on the company to offer the same deal to its existing customers. And when the program ended, families would be forced to choose between canceling their access or paying Comcast's higher rate for the same services. Most important, the voluntary nature of the program substantially lowered the risk that Comcast would be regulated by the FCC: if the Commission tried to wield power, the company could threaten to withdraw its voluntary assistance. In the meantime, the program would give Comcast essentially free advertising facilitated by government and nonprofit organizations.

As one experienced Comcast watcher told me, the merger conditions would be completely ineffective in limiting Comcast's ability to use its market power; there are a number of ways for Comcast to legally wriggle out of every condition imposed by the DOJ and FCC. “I would take structural competition any day,” he said, “over trying to regulate behavior. The Comcast [merger] conditions are regulating behavior.”41

His prediction came true just months later. Bloomberg had succeeded in getting a condition included in the merger approval that appeared to require Comcast to carry Bloomberg—and other independent news and business channels—in the same neighborhood of business channels as MSNBC, CNBC, and Fox News. The interpretive lawyering had begun. Comcast chose not to comply and claimed that it did not have to. As David Cohen's subordinate Sena Fitzmaurice argued: “Bloomberg simply misinterprets the ‘neighborhooding’ condition in the FCC's Comcast NBCUniversal transaction order. It does not ‘neighborhood’ news channels in the way Bloomberg seeks to be repositioned.” Bloomberg responded, “This is something of a test case of how serious Comcast is about implementing the conditions set by the FCC order,” and filed an enormous record of documents aimed at convincing the FCC that Comcast was deliberately misinterpreting the condition in order to harm Bloomberg‘s ability to compete with CNBC. Comcast responded with enormous filings of its own.⁴²

The day after the merger was approved, with the disappointed FCC commissioner Copps offering the lone voice of dissent, Cohen talked about the government conditions for the deal. His argument now pivoted: his audience was no longer the regulators, whom he had been praising for more than a year, but the investment community. “None of these commitments or conditions will prevent us from operating these businesses the way our business plans call for us to do so,” he said, “and none of them will prevent the businesses from being competitive in all of the markets in which we do business.”⁴³ Cohen knew better than to sound triumphant, but he clearly was. Comcast had not been pinned down by the regulators, and it was now ready to move ahead as one of America's four media powerhouses.

Meanwhile, the company continued to bulk up its Washington lobbying force. FCC commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, a Republican and the daughter-in-law of former secretary of state James Baker, announced that she would leave at the end of her two-year term to join Comcast. A well-respected former Department of Commerce official with a substantial telecom legal background, Baker had been seen as a shoo-in for reappointment by the Obama administration, so her departure seemed sudden. More important, her quick transformation from regulator to voice of the regulated struck many observers as inappropriate.44

One of Comcast's nonprofit grantees, a small media nonprofit organization in Seattle called Reel Grrls, sent out a tweet expressing shock. A Comcast manager wrote to Reel Grrls: “Given the fact that Comcast has been a major supporter of Reel Grrls for several years now, I am frankly shocked that your organization is slamming us on Twitter. I cannot in good conscience continue to provide you with funding.” Following an outcry, Comcast quickly apologized and said the whole thing was a mistake; it “reach[ed] out” to Reel Grrls to let the organization know that its funding was not in jeopardy.⁴⁵

After a couple of weeks of bluster, the issue died down; Baker hadn't broken any laws. Comcast hired a slew of other Washington notables. Politico characterized the spate of hires as “a veritable tour de force of Beltway know-how—and a possible sign that the company anticipates some big battles on the policy horizon.”⁴⁶