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Comment by profquail | Hacker News Reader

> What is going on with our regulators?

AT&T has reached an agreement to buy TWC. The deal has been neither reviewed nor approved by regulators (yet).

Time Warner Cable [1] used to be a part of Time Warner Inc., but:

> In the past, other major divisions of Time Warner included Time Inc., AOL, Time Warner Cable, Warner Books, and Warner Music Group. All of these operations were either sold to other investors or spun off as independent companies between 2004 and 2014.

AT&T made a deal to buy Time Warner Inc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner_Cable

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Warner

One could look at it another way... the fact that they think that this could even be possible and are willing to go through the motions to reach the agreement speaks volumes about what these giant companies think of the "regulators".

It's not that simple. Announcing a merger doesn't necessarily a high chance of success. A recent, relevant example is Comcast's 2014-2015 merger with TWC that was called off after regulator push-back.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/04/28/com...

Or the AT&T merger with T-Mobile... that not only didn't go through it resulted in a massive contract clause with a $1B payout for T-Mobile...

Time Warner Cable is not involved. AT&T is buying Time Warner (the content company) and not TWC.

> AT&T has reached an agreement to buy TWC. The deal has been neither reviewed nor approved by regulators (yet).

Then let me ask something else.

What is going on with the boards of these two companies? Do they think this will fly? I believe they certainly must.

I assume that the people in charge of these companies are rational and experienced, and that they considered the regulatory hurdles before moving forward with this deal. They must think they can get away with this plan, otherwise why bother with the trouble and expense of setting it up in the first place?

They believe it because it almost certainly will fly. Comcast and NBC/Universal went through and we haven't seen any signs of reduction in competition. Especially now that the FCC has made net neutrality the law, there shouldn't be any fear about vertical monopoly over media.

It's absurd to think that media can be constrained into traditional mediums anymore. Television is dying.

Hell, AOL already did this exact merger without any problems.

Did I misread something? How is TWC involved?

No but they obviously have some amount of confidence or they wouldn't have entered into discussions at all.

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