AT&T U-verse is finding one of its most exasperating former opponents taking its side against Cablevision. Cablevision struck an exclusive deal with MSNBC in its service area.

Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal calls the deal anticompetitive and has asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate, according to a report in the Hartford Courant (story here).

Blumenthal said the deal prevents cable competitors, such as AT&T U-verse, from carrying MSNBC in Cablevision's service areas, which include several major markets in Connecticut, including Norwalk, Bridgeport and Torrington.

“The exclusive partnership could violate a federal law that prohibits cable companies from coercing program providers into exclusive agreements or retaliating against them for refusing to do so,” the paper quotes the AG saying.

According to Cablevision: "Connecticut is one of the most competitive telecommunications markets in the country, and our carriage of MSNBC is the result of a perfectly appropriate and legal agreement between GE and Cablevision. In fact, as AT&T itself knows well, arrangements of this sort are very common in telecommunications and throughout other industries, and we believe they can create better value for consumers."

Blumenthal is the same person that caused AT&T fits when the carrier was first attempting to roll out U-verse in Connecticut. AT&T was insisting that it did not need any franchise agreements from anyone to deploy U-verse. Blumenthal disagreed, and Connecticut courts upheld his objections. In response, AT&T vowed it would not deploy U-verse in Connecticut. The company subsequently gained a legal decision allowing it to roll out U-verse without securing franchises in each market.

Now Blumenthal is backing AT&T in its argument against the exclusivity of the Cablevision-MSNBC deal. “The purpose of cable competition is to provide consumers with the broadest range of video service products at reasonable prices. Exclusive carriage agreements allow companies like Cablevision to exercise their powers of incumbency to monopolize prime programming choices, restrict access of their competitors and provide strong disincentives for some customers to switch their cable providers,” the Courant quoted Blumenthal’s letter to the FCC. “As a result, these agreements harm the public interest because they limit the diversity of programming options and suppress capital investment in new competitive cable technologies.”