Advertising Ban the Latest Salvo in Fight Over Internet Cable Access

The already heated battle over access to cable companies’ high-speed Internet lines has spread to a new front: advertising.

Pacific Bell is crying foul these days over the fact that several area cable companies have refused the phone company’s advertising for digital subscriber line service, or DSL--a high-speed Internet offering that competes with the cable modem services sold by Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and others.

Cox and Time Warner Cable readily admit that their Southern California units turned down PacBell’s DSL ads for the sole reason that the service competes with cable modems.

Their response: So what? It’s perfectly legal, and they have repeatedly shunned ads from another competing service, satellite broadcasting companies such as DirecTV.

“We reserve the right to accept or reject advertisements for whatever reason we choose,” said Mike Luftman, a spokesman for Stamford, Conn.-based Time Warner Cable.

Still, the ad dispute speaks to an issue at the core of the larger cable access war: Can the cable companies own both the high-speed wires and the Internet service offering without abusing that exclusive access to the customer?

Or, as rival companies propose, should cable companies be forced to give unaffiliated Internet service providers the right to also use the souped-up cable networks?

Currently, cable modem customers are automatically hooked up to the Internet via Excite@Home or Road Runner, two Internet service ventures controlled by the cable companies.

Critics say the arrangement gives cable operators--specifically AT&T;’s newly acquired cable units--too much market power, and that the companies could ultimately use that dominance to control content and hurt competitors.

PacBell and other phone companies, fearful of the Internet competition and the growing use of cable lines to also carry local phone service, have teamed up with America Online in a big-money campaign to pressure operators to “open up” their broadband networks.

So far, federal regulators have declined to intervene in the debate, preferring to allow market forces to solve the access feud.

But PacBell and others cite the ad rejections as proof that the cable companies are not above limiting access to their systems when it threatens their business.

“This goes to the fundamental problem that once you give someone control over access, they will use that to promote their private interests,” said Mark Cooper, research director at the Consumer Federation of America, which favors forcing the cable companies to share their lines with unaffiliated Internet service providers.

Added Bill Mashek, a PacBell spokesman: “The federal regulators have said they want a vigorous marketplace for high-speed Internet service, but you’re certainly not going to get that if one of the main advertising avenues is shut off to competitors . . . this raises the issue of content control.”

But PacBell’s effort to link the two issues faces one major problem: AT&T;’s cable units, the primary target in the broadband access war, has not rejected the DSL ads.

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Times staff writer Elizabeth Douglass can be reached at elizabeth.douglass@latimes.com.