Since Comcast announced it would be buying Time Warner Cable, we’ve brought you story after story highlighting the various reasons that the merger should be stopped. But for all the thousands of words, charts, graphs and maps we’ve used, none has summed up the reason for blocking the merger than a recent quote from a former Kabletown staffer.

The Verge’s Adrianne Jeffries has written a compelling and thoughtfully researched piece that anyone even vaguely interested in this topic should read.

But it’s a closing comment from a former Comcast billing systems manager who left the company in 2013 that puts the cherry on top:

“This is not getting bigger to provide cheaper service, or economies of scale, or to provide better service,” the onetime Comcast staffer explains. “This is getting bigger for the sake of bigness. This is really like, ‘I own 10 Subway stores and now I want an 11th one.’… Well, if your 10 Subway stores have Cs from the health department, I don’t know if you should get an 11th one. Maybe you should work on getting them cleaned out.”

That’s a message that every FCC commissioner and every antitrust investigator at the Justice Dept. should have pinned to their cubicle wall.

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