When a Time-Warner outage knocks millions offline, it's a reminder that centralization makes the net fragile. That's why it might not be the best idea to let the merger of TWC and Comcast to go through. Maybe it's to their advantage to grow bigger, but given the monopoly each has in the areas they serve, it's definitely not to our advantage.

I speak from experience. I had a terrible time dealing with Comcast in Berkeley because I am a software developer, and sometimes my experiments would have bugs and do lots more net access than others. A simple way to monitor network usage would have fixed the problem. But there was no incentive for Comcast to find out what was going on. They warned me once, then shut me off. I was stuck with DSL because they own the cable wires to my house.

I now use TWC. With the merger, guess who becomes my network service provider? Talk about having no choice. Moving clear across the country didn't save me from the beast.

Let's exercise a little self-interest here, people -- speak up. Let's stop this.