If the federal communications commission allows Comcast to buy Time Warner Cable, you can kiss any dreams of truly high-speed access to an open Internet goodbye. The Internet will be a far poorer place. And Comcast will be a far richer company. There's already little broadband competition in the U.S., and this deal will all but kill it. Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who has studied broadband competition, is a harsh critic of the proposed buyout. In an article for Bloomberg, she writes, "The reason this deal is scary is that for the vast majority of businesses in 19 of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the country, their only choice for a high-capacity wired connection will be Comcast." With little or no competition, Comcast will have little reason to increase the speed or lower the cost of broadband. And we need faster, cheaper broadband; the U.S. lags behind many countries in both areas. Akamai says that the average broadband speed in the U.S. is 7.4Mbps, only eighth in the world. And at an average price of $6.14 per Mbps, our broadband access is one of the most expensive in the developed world.
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机译：如果联邦通信委员会允许康卡斯特（Comcast）购买时代华纳有线（Time Warner Cable），您就可以实现真正的高速访问开放式互联网再见的梦想。互联网将是一个更加贫穷的地方。康卡斯特将成为一个更富裕的公司。在美国，宽带竞争已经很少，而这笔交易几乎将其扼杀。本杰明·卡多佐法学院的教授，哈佛法学院的客座教授苏珊·克劳福德（Susan Crawford）对拟议的买断提出了严厉的批评。她在给彭博社的一篇文章中写道：“这笔交易之所以令人恐惧，是因为对于该国20个最大都市区中的19个城市中的绝大多数企业而言，康卡斯特是他们进行高容量有线连接的唯一选择。 ”在竞争很少或没有竞争的情况下，康卡斯特几乎没有理由提高速度或降低宽带成本。我们需要更快，更便宜的宽带；美国在这两个方面都落后于许多国家。 Akamai表示，美国的平均宽带速度为7.4Mbps，仅世界第八。而且，宽带接入的平均价格为每Mbps 6.14美元，是发达国家中最昂贵的宽带接入之一。
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