mr. kimmelman, can you comment as well? >> i'll only address the competitive kinds of conditions that i think are important here to customers, users, consumers. in the kinds of regulations that have been sited in this hearing and the kinds of benchmarks that have been there and used in the past that some are trying to rely on. the difficulty here is that none of them are absolute. none of them are -- you may absolutely do x and you may absolutely not do y. now i'll have to rely upon reasonable business practices, common practices of the lead companies in the industry, and the difficulty here is with the size of comcast combined with time warner, they could drive what those practices are. it becomes a bit of a circular reasoning of what is reasonable is what they do, what is acceptable in the industry is what they decide. the standards are determined by them. that's the concern. my suggestion, senator, would be that for all conditions in a transaction like this the oversight agency should go back and review whether they work

mr. kimmelman's suggestion. no, mr. bosworth's suggestion that perhaps what should be happening is the doj should engage in basically continuing oversight, to make sure that new independent networks, others who want to come into the marketplace to provide choices for consumers will have a fair opportunity to compete. would you agree that that would be something to consider in this market that is changing so rapidly? >> i would agree entirely. the fcc should engage in ongoing oversight. and in fact, it does. there is a very well-developed set of program access rules and carriage access rules to make sure that independent programmers have the ability to be carrying and to make sure that people who have content must share it with other cable operators and other satellite operators. there are some complaints, people that don't get what they want out of the process. the correct solution to fix that process, so it's available for everyone instead of using a americaner to do a company specific solution that will only affect th

mr. kimmelman's suggestion. no, mr. bosworth's suggestion that perhaps what should be happening is the doj should engage in basically continuing oversight, to make sure that new independent networks, others who want to come into the marketplace to provide choices for consumers will have a fair opportunity to compete. would you agree that that would be something to consider in this market that is changing so rapidly? >> i would agree entirely. the fcc should engage in ongoing oversight. and in fact, it does. there is a very well-developed set of program access rules and carriage access rules to make sure that independent programmers have the ability to be carrying and to make sure that people who have content must share it with other cable operators and other satellite operators. there are some complaints, people that don't get what they want out of the process. the correct solution to fix that process, so it's available for everyone instead of using a americaner to do a company specific solution that will only affect th

mr. kimmelman kimmelman. mr. cohen and i agreed that the cost of the sports programming are rising and in fact they are rising astronomically and should better reflect consumer demand. by question to you is our consumers the best judge of what a fair price for programming should be an wooden prices come down if they had more choice specifically the way to break the cycle of ever-increasing cost for sports programming instead of giving consumers some more choice through À la carte programming and i wonder if you could comment on the potential effects of disciplining the market and bringing down the cost of cable as a result of À la carte. >> i truly believe you are correct. one of the concerns that wasn't addressed earlier was that we have numerous studies that show with vertical integration wind up with higher prices on the regional sports channels that are integrated than the ones that are independent and one of the related concerns are that competitors who wants porch programming in the market had a very diffic

mr. kimmelman -- i think this goes to bundling too. i know that in some of those talks right after the talk of the acquisition there was pledges to push bundling, to up sell your product. mr. kimmelman, won't this give comcast more leverage? >> absolutely, senator franken. they're giving us examples of things that show the market is highly concentrated but not monopolistic. we did use the numbers in our analysis. there's enormous market power that could be leveraged, and on top of that, there is the very popular nbcu programming. that can be leveraged. that, understandably, maximizes profits for comcast to keep it in a big bundle, to charge as much as possible, and the increasing trend for consumers is to buy at least two services. broadband and video, if not three. so they know that they can drive up prices to competitors and benefit from raising their rival's costs and if some people want to drop those rival services, says most likely going to be business going to them. that is where their financial senate lies, and we would expect t

mr. kimmelman about this paid peering. >> your statement is 100% correct. for the first time netflix is paying for connection to our internet backbone directly to us, but netflix has always paid for connection to our internet backbo backbone. all edge providers pay for connection to the backbone. this is not net neutrality. it doesn't deal with a part of our service that goes to the last mile. this is how internet edge providers connect to the internet backbones of isps, and since the internet was born, those are paid transit relationships, and as professor yoo said, in comcast's case, comcast has agreements with 40 companies for settlement-free peering. they, by the way, go out and sell access to their networks to connect to the internet. so even though they're not paying us anything, they're charging internet edge providers to be able to connect to our isp as well as everyone else's. we have over 8,000 free and -- free peering and paid arrangements, and that market is intensely, intensely competitive. in the netflix case, i hate to say this, this was netf