Commerce Commission Vodafone-Sky ruling

The Commerce Commission declined the proposed Vodafone-Sky merger saying it would decrease telecommunications competition.

Sky has all the important content rights tied up. It owns or sub-licenses all the popular sporting codes. Most of all it has the rights to Rugby.

At the moment Sky has a deal with Vodafone to sell its services over broadband as a bundle. But in practice anyone with a broadband account can buy services from Sky.

Vodafone says it doesn’t plan to stop Sky selling to all comers, but that’s not a legal obligation. It could have made a formal undertaking to continue the practice, but did not.

Vodafone-Sky exclusive

Therefore, Vodafone could at any point decide that its customers get access to some or all channels. The moment, say, an important sporting fixture, becomes a Vodafone-Sky exclusive, then all other broadband companies would be in trouble as their customers switch telecommunications service provider.

This will be twice as effective if exclusive Sky material is distributed to Vodafone mobile phones.

The temptation to do this will be great. It is also why Sky was worth the price Vodafone was prepared to pay.

After all, what is the point of having a monopoly if you can’t milk it?

Clearly the move has other telcos rattled. A little over half of all homes have Sky. There’s the potential for them to be locked out of those customers. This applies to both broadband and mobile.

Integration

There’s also vertical integration. Telcos love vertical integration. It is anti-competitive.

The point of the government building the UFB fibre network and splitting Chorus from Telecom was to break vertical integration.

Having said all that, TV over broadband, especially over fibre, is, in general, a good thing.

That would have been a positive. It would be good if Sky could find another way to move all its business online.

A last point worth mentioning. The Commerce Commission can only say yes or no to a proposal. Overseas regulators, like, say, the ACCC in Australia, can impose conditions. The Commerce Commission can not. So it was not an option for the regulator to say to Vodafone “you can buy Sky, but must continue selling video services to all comers”.

Had that been the case, the ruling may have gone differently.