From InfoWorld: Comcast is officially walking away from plans to acquire Time Warner Cable, after regulators signaled their displeasure with the deal.
"Today, we move on," Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement. "Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn't agree, we could walk away."
The deal almost seemed like a foregone conclusion when Comcast announced its $45.2 billion Time Warner Cable acquisition plan last year. As Bloomberg notes, the cable giant spends more money on lobbying in Washington than any other company, and dumped $17 million into its lobbying efforts in 2014 alone.
But ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission had too many concerns about the acquisition, which would have given the combined companies as much as 57 percent of the broadband market and nearly 30 percent of the pay TV market, the New York Times reports. For Comcast, pushing onward may have involved a lengthy FCC hearing that could have pushed the deal beyond its completion timeframe.
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