Charter Communications, operator of the Spectrum cable brand, has obtained Federal Communications Commission permission to buy Cox and surpass Comcast as the country’s largest home Internet service provider.
Charter has 29.7 million residential and business Internet customers compared to Comcast’s 31.26 million. Buying Cox will give Charter another 5.9 million Internet customers. The FCC approved the deal on Friday, but the companies still need Justice Department approval and sign-offs from states including California and New York.
Opponents of Charter’s $34.5 billion acquisition told the FCC that eliminating Cox as an independent entity will make it easier for Charter and Comcast to raise prices. But the FCC dismissed those concerns on the grounds that Charter and Cox don’t compete directly against each other in the vast majority of their territories.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s primary demand from companies seeking to merge has been to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies. In a press release, the Carr-led FCC said that “Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination,” and that Charter’s network-expansion plans will bring “faster broadband and lower prices” to rural areas.
The merger was approved one day after Charter sent a letter to Carr outlining its actions to end DEI. Charter offers broadband and cable service in 41 states, while Cox does so in 18 states.
FCC: No reason to worry about higher prices
The FCC’s Charter/Cox decision dismissed competition concerns raised in a November 2025 petition to deny filed by Public Knowledge, the Communications Workers of America, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, and the Center for Accessible Technology. The FCC said:
Petitioners argue that the Transaction would reduce the number of cable operators, making it easier for competitors, such as Comcast, to “benchmark” their pricing, promotions, bundling, and rate schedules to New Charter. Specifically, they argue that “[r]educing the number of major cable operators makes it easier for each to benchmark pricing decisions against others, reducing competitive pressure across the industry.”
Citing the literature on multimarket contact, they further argue that “the merger could transform the competitive landscape such that New Charter becomes the benchmark for Comcast,… thereby enabling parallel behavior.” We find this argument unpersuasive. First, there is very little multimarket contact in this case. Because cable companies have generally offered residential broadband service within their non-overlapping franchise territories, they compete directly against each other only at a very small number of locations.
The FCC added that Charter and other cable firms will continue to face competition from fiber, fixed wireless, and satellite broadband providers. Competition from those sectors “will have a significantly greater impact on their pricing decisions than the possible increased ability to benchmark due to the loss of a single cable provider (Cox) in a different territory,” the FCC said.
The petition to deny the merger said it “would reduce the number of sizable independent cable operators” that compete against Comcast and other cable firms. “With fewer independent peers, Comcast could rely more on parallel conduct rather than competitive differentiation, especially in non-overlapping territories,” the petition said. “The consolidation of pricing benchmarks makes parallel moves (rate increases, reduced promotional discounts) more feasible, simplifying rivals’ strategic comparisons and promoting conscious parallelism.”
The petition cited research suggesting that in the US airline industry, some “mergers increased fares not only on overlap routes but also on non-overlap routes.”
Charter/Cox competition not entirely nonexistent
The petition also quoted comments from the California Public Utilities Commission’s Public Advocates Office, which said that Charter and Cox do compete against each other directly in parts of their territories. The California Public Advocates Office submitted a protest in the state regulatory proceeding in September 2025, writing:
The Joint Applicants claim that Charter and Cox have no, or very few, overlapping locations, so the Proposed Transaction will not harm competition. However, FCC broadband data show that Charter and Cox California have 25,503 overlapping locations. At 16,485 of these locations (65%), Charter and Cox California are the only two providers offering speeds of at least 1,000 Mbps download.
If the Proposed Transaction is approved, customers in those areas will have access to only a single provider for high-speed service and will have 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 would significantly expand Charter’s monopoly power in the high-speed fixed broadband market.
Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer said that the Carr FCC “did not require Charter to do anything it wasn’t already planning to do.” He said this is in stark contrast to the FCC’s 2016 approval of Charter’s merger with Time Warner Cable, which allowed Charter to become the second biggest 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 paid interconnection,” Bergmayer said on Friday. “Today’s order finds those concerns no longer apply, largely because the agency credits fixed wireless and satellite as competitive constraints on cable. Further, the Commission imposed no affordability conditions, despite doing so in the 2016 Charter, Comcast-NBCU, and Verizon-TracFone transactions. The record does not support this outcome.”
Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 12 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast.
