Liberty Global CEO On Net Neutrality And Consolidation In Media Space

Mike Fries, Liberty Global plc - Class A Ordinary Shares LBTYA president & CEO, was on CNBC recently to share his thoughts on the net neutrality in US and Europe and on the consolidation happening in media space.

Net Neutrality

“US as you know has been trending towards this Title II, 1934 Act, which is when we actually held phones with two hands,” Fries said. “I don’t think personally makes any sense, fortunately for me I don’t operate in that market. I think, European regulators have been much more sensible much more practical about how to do this, they see the benefits of specialized services [in some instances] and […] has been talking about driverless cars and all these great applications, digitizing industry.”

He continued, “Well, that’s going to be hard to do on a best efforts internet where everybody is competing for bandwidth. So, the idea that certain applications and certain services shouldn’t have some kind of priority is kind of silly and I think the second point is that for Reed [Hastings] there’s a B2C and B2B components in net neutrality.”

“No Internet service provider is ever going to block sites or degrade services or prevent consumers from doing what they want, he is really talking about IP connectivity in the peering level and he is looking for certain outcome there that may or may not be right.”

Consolidation In Media Space

“I do think it’s good for industry, I think it’s smart. We need scale and the cable industry, we are competing with Google and Netflix, these hyper giants that have global scale and we are balkanized in certain cities and certain markets, it’s silly.”