Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

It's annoying, but no, not illegal, since they don't actually refuse to let you use a router.

Here's why (Woohoo, a chance to apply my two semesters of Antitrust law). It actually kind of makes a lot of sense. Routers are not the most intuitive thing for people to set up. There's little, if any standardization, so it's impossible to create a universal set of instructions. If hey have to instruct every consumer on how to set up a router, or even worse--if they have to train their service people to know how every single type of router works, they would have to raise fees to compensate.

But even more problemmatic is the support costs they can incur troubleshooting routers. Routers are not the most reliable pieces of equipment--especially the cheap $20-$50 kind that most consumers pick up at the store. They go bad, and they go bad often. It can take hours to troubleshoot the problem, and can leave the typical consumer very frustrated. The typical consumer sees computer devices more as phones or something--they assume they should "just work" and that any problems must be with the service. Again, this is very expensive problem for Comcast, both in reputation and in support labor.

Thus, Comcast says they'll support direct computer hookups--that's easy, it's all Windows. They'll also support one universal piece of equipment, and they can train their support people to handle problems with that. Furthermore, if they control the equipment, they control the quality of the equipment, which theoretically means they can have some effect on the number of failed routers and disgruntled customers.

Now if router manufacturers made better routers, there might be an Antitrust issue. Indeed, AT&T for the longest time refused to allow people to use any other phone than the one they provided them. The government allowed this for the very same reasons I've explained above. But as phones became cheaper to make (and, more importantly, cheaper to make well), the government became less convinced that AT&T had a valid excuse for tying their phones to their phone service. So, to make a long story short, we now can use any phone we want.

The sad thing is, this whole analogy won't make any sense to our children. Why on earth would you want to use a device connected to wires, they'll say.