Comcast-NBCU spotlight moving away from Washington, D.C.

Because Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal would affect the entire country, government officials are taking their hearings on the road. On July 7 the House Judiciary Committee, at the urging of Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, will hold a hearing about the proposed $30 billion deal at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. Waters has also been pushing the FCC to leave its comfort pocket in the nation's capital and it appears she's made an impression since the agency has said it will hold hearings in locales where Comcast has a strong presence and where NBC owns and operates TV stations.

And, in other merger news, the New York Post is quoting sources that NBC chief Jeff Zucker has arranged a $30-$40 million exit strategy "a couple months" after Comcast finalizes its deal. Of course the report should be taken with a boatload of sand since "sources close to the company steadfastly denied ... that any exit package for Zucker existed" and GE "called reports of an exit package ‘not true,'" the Post said.

Finally, in non-directly-Comcast-NBCU news, the FCC is reportedly enrolling 10,000 volunteers to see if cable companies are actually providing the broadband speeds they're promising. This could be interesting since preliminary research seems to indicate that cable Internet speeds average only about half the advertised rate.

For more:
- see this blog post
- and this story
- and this story

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