The $45.2 billion Comcast and Time Warner merger is buying the telecommunication giants antitrust hurdles and consumer worries.

“This looks scary from a consumer perspective,” said Dana Frix, telecommunications lawyer and partner at Chadbourne & Parke.

Credit - Flickr user vkx462
Credit – Flickr user vkx462

Part of the worry comes from the sheer size of the combined companies, which would be 30 million subscribers or 30 percent of American households. Comcast and Time Warner are the largest cable companies in the US, and Comcast is the largest Internet service provider.

“The size of the overall company is really going to give pause to consumers, lawmakers and regulators. It seems like an awfully big company and it seems like a  there are enough of their consumers around the country that whatever policy they adopt will become de facto standards for the country,” said Frix.

If Comcast/Time Warner created data caps or pricing, other companies will likely follow suit just to stay competitive. There are already concerns of price increases, but the merger is also reviving the net neutrality debate. Despite the court ruling against the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, they still apply to Comcast until 2018 as part of their 2011 purchase of NBC. It’s likely that Time Warner customers will be covered by that as well as part of the merger.

“One could easily imagine that if the FCC were to approve this merger, that one condition that it might attach on to the two companies would be an extension of the existing Comcast agreement regarding net neutrality … [or] the FCC requiring that the agreement be extended a few years into the future, from it’s current 2018 sunset,” said Paul Feldman, telecommunications and privacy attorney at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth. “If the FCC were to approve the merger, and if those conditions were part of it, it in essence would impose de facto net neutrality rules on a significant number of subscribers in the country regardless of what the court recently said about the FCC’s recent authority.”

The possible net neutrality extension doesn’t mean that other service providers will ignore the ruling and follow suit.

“It’s hard to know right now if other ISP providers are operating in a manner consistent with the obligations currently imposed on Comcast,” said Feldman. “They don’t seem to be doing anything, as far as we can tell, that is blatantly contrary to them. But I don’t know if anybody really knows exactly what they are doing.”

The questions against Comcast are not limited to its sheer size and Internet regulations. Because it also owns NBC, Comcast will become a content producer with a larger share of who distributes it.

“This gives double pause from an antitrust perspective. It will cause the regulators and the Department of Justice to look harder at the question if whether or not, given the overall shape of the market place, perhaps this deal ends up giving Comcast too much control over the development of content over the US,” said Frix.

The merger will also have to deal with claims about vertical integration. In a blog published by The Hill, Matthew Polka, CEO of the American Cable Association, asked the FCC to reject the merger because it will decrease competition among cable providers.

While there is no indication yet as to how the Department of Justice will side, Representatives Bob Goodlatte (R –  Va.) and Spencer Bachus (R – Ala.) are pushing for hearing before House Judiciary Committee on the antitrust issue.

Even with these early worries, Frix thinks that Comcast is in a good place to pass federal regulators since they have agreed to part with 3 million customers.

“They are suggesting that they will comply with the ownership cap the FCC would like to have in place. By complying with what they know is the FCC’s intention they are looking to be reasonable,” said Frix. “Comcast has publicly positioned themselves well.”