Comcast is likely happy Sen. Al Franken is just one of 100 lawmakers in the upper house and not one of five votes on the Federal Communications Commission.
Its $45 billion planned takeover of Time Warner Cable — the biggest deal so far in 2014 — would likely be toast if Franken were at the FCC.
Franken (D-MN), stating clearly at Wednesday's Senate hearing on the proposed deal that he was squarely against it, roughed up Comcast's chief Washington fixer who came to the Hill to defend the purchase.
The lawmaker, standing firmly on populist ground — who doesn't have bad thoughts about their cable company? — took issue with Comcast executive David Cohen's claim the cable giant kept its promises to the FCC when it acquired NBCUniversal in its 2010.
Cohen, Comcast's DC Mr. Fix-it, admitted the FCC did look into one issue — its promotion of low-cost Internet service.
But Cohen was forced to apologize after Franken pointed out that regulators also battled Comcast over Bloomberg TV's position in the channel line-up.
Bloomberg wanted to be positioned with other business networks but Comcast — which owns Bloomberg rival CNBC — refused to move it to more favorable space.
"The point I was trying to get at was whether there were compliance issues," Cohen told Franken. "We should have had a better choice of words, and I apologize."
"Apology accepted," said Franken, who called Cohen a good "salesman."
The Comcast-Bloomberg tiff has been settled.
Franken later appeared on Bloomberg TV to explain that while Comcast had created a low-cost Internet-only product as a condition of its $13.8 billion NBCU acquisition, it had largely failed to market it — instead putting marketing moolah behind its bundled TV-phone-Internet play.
Comcast paid an $800,000 fine over its lack of sufficient promotion.
Cohen also got heat on The Hill about Comcast, with TWC's assets, controlling some 33 million video customers and 40 percent of US broadband access.
"They will have enormous power over how the Internet develops," Gene Kimmelman, a former top anti-trust cop at the Department of Justice, now CEO of Public Knowledge, a free Internet group, said.
" If they have almost half of the customers, manufacturers will make to their specifications," he added. "If they want it to be through a bundled high-price set of services, I'm sure it will be."
While the hearing made for good TV, Guggenheim analyst Paul Gallant figured that no one landed any major blows on Comcast.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) used the occasion to figure out his own pay-TV problems — offering that since his DirecTV kept cutting out during poor weather and in the middle of sports events he was in the market for some alternatives.
"Why should I come back to cable?" Graham asked.
Cohen gladly answered and spoke about Comcast's video on demand service and high-speed internet.
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