The petition cites research showing that in the US airline industry, some “mergers have increased fares not only on overlap routes but also on non-overlap routes.”
Charter/Cox competition is not completely non-existent
The petition also cited comments from the California Public Utilities Commission’s Office of the Public Advocate, which said Charter and Cox compete directly against each other in parts of their territories. The California Public Advocates Office submitted a protest in state regulatory proceedings in September 2025, writing:
The joint applicants claim that Charter and Cox do not have, or have very few, overlapping locations, so the proposed transaction would not harm competition. However, FCC broadband data shows that Charter and Cox have 25,503 overlapping locations in California. At 16,485 of these locations (65%), Charter and Cox California are the only two providers that offer download speeds of at least 1,000 Mbps.
If the proposed transaction is approved, customers in those areas will have access to only one provider for high-speed service and no meaningful choice between providers. Finally, Charter is already the sole provider of gigabit service in 48% of its service area, while Cox is the sole provider in 65% of its service area. Consolidating these footprints will significantly expand Charter’s monopoly power in the high-speed fixed broadband market.
John Bergmeyer, legal director of Public Knowledge, said that Carr did not require the FCC to “do anything to Charter that it was not already planning to do.” He said this stands in stark contrast to the FCC’s 2016 approval of Charter’s merger with Time Warner Cable, which allowed Charter to become the second-largest cable company in the US.
“In 2016, the Commission approved Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable only after imposing conditions on data caps, usage-based pricing and payment interconnection,” Bergmeier said Friday. “Today’s order shows that those concerns no longer apply, primarily because the Agency attributes fixed wireless and satellite as competitive barriers to cable. Additionally, the Commission did not impose any affordability conditions despite doing so in the 2016 Charter, Comcast-NBCU, and Verizon-TracFone transactions. The record does not support this result.”
Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 12 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast.
<a href