Competitors and business affiliates of Comcast Corp. filed varying comments to FCC in the night of June 23, 2010 regarding Comcast’s takeover of General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal media units.  Comcast EVP for Public Policy David Cohen says they were struck by the comments filed since they involved not only transaction-specific issues but industry-wide concerns as well.

Companies like Bloomberg LLC and Dish Network Corp. have asked FCC to reject the acquisition to prevent Comcast from having significant control over NBC Universal's television and movie businesses.  This amounts to approximately $13.75 billion in cash and assets.  Internet portal AOL Inc. says that the acquisition would result to Comcast controlling a variety of advertising platforms such as broadcast and cable networks, local cable systems and online advertising.  FCC should therefore impose program access rules to online programming as well so that Comcast will be required to offer its programming to other video distributors as well, and at a fair rate.  When impose by FCC, this suggestion would be a significant change since program access rules don’t apply to online video contents.  This would open a whole new opportunity for new players to offer subscription-TV contents and satellite TV deals over the internet.

Consumers and local station owners have also expressed their concerns thru e-mails.    Consumers who wrote FCC were worried of having increased cable bills; while station owners are concerned that NBC sports programming may soon be exclusive to cable channels only once the Comcast-NBC deal is finalized.  Independently-owned local NBC stations said that they would only support the deal if FCC would enforce certain restrictions to Comcast, including a commitment not to directly feed NBC's national programming to cable.  Similarly, affiliates of the ABC, CBS and Fox networks said that they would only support this deal if FCC imposed several conditions on the negotiations to protect their own stations from NBC's.

Of the 32,000 comments sent to FCC, there were also hundreds of positive remarks about the impending takeover.  Comcast supporters include government officials, community groups and some media outlets.  There are also companies who are more interested in having restrictions so they could get better access in their network and programming from the cable and internet giant.

There are still a few big media and cable companies who remained publicly silent on the matter.  This group includes Walt Disney Co., Time Warner Inc., News Corp., Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. 

Comcast officials say they are expecting a decision to be made on the tie-up by the end of the year.