Comcast ≠ Blockbuster

I’m not sure why, but I’ve always felt like Dan Lyons was desperate for attention. Now I know he is:

Daniel Lyons, visiting fellow at AEI’s Center for Internet, Communications and Technology, thinks antitrust regulators may be too stuck in the present when it comes to the Comcast-Time Warner Cable. He cites a blast from the past to make his point:
“Ten years ago, the FTC successfully blocked the merger between Blockbuster and Hollywood Video because the combined company would have dominated the market for video store rentals — failing to appreciate that technology was shifting so quickly that ‘video store rentals’ was no longer a relevant market,” he writes. “Without the scale to compete against new technologies, both companies eventually collapsed. It remains to be seen whether regulators have made the same mistake here.“

Comparing Blockbuster (a company whose revenue was already on the decline in 2005 and didn’t provide access to anything critical to our society) to Comcast (a company whose revenue continues to grow and has roughly 20% of the country’s broadband subscribers) is absurd. But, as John Gruber has pointed out, Dan Lyons specializes in the absurd.

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The billionaire’s typewriter

Still, I wouldn’t say that Medium’s ho­mo­ge­neous de­sign is bad ex ante. Among web-pub­lish­ing tools, I see Medium as the equiv­a­lent of a frozen pizza: not as whole­some as a meal you could make your­self, but for those with­out the time or mo­ti­va­tion to cook, a po­ten­tially bet­ter op­tion than just eat­ing peanut but­ter straight from the jar.

I’ve never understood Medium. This quote just about sums it up for me.