Justice Department suing AT&T to block $85B bid for Time Warner
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
AT&T and Time Warner to merge together?: "It would mean higher monthly television bills and fewer of the new, emerging innovative options that consumers are beginning to enjoy."
Yes I know the FCC is not the DOJ, or the FTC. Just seems like Republican-led departments and commissions can't seem to get their story straight on whether mergers and fewer options are beneficial to customers or not.
I'm not for this merger. But certainly seems like Trump's interference in this is probably going to udnermine any semblance of partiality by the DOJ.
The FCC always does the wrong thing. After eight decades of constant efforts to retard progress and competition in media and radio technology, we can't really be surprised now. I for one am not sad to see other regulators attempt to pick up the slack. I'd certainly like to see a more active FTC, for example.
For instance, a number of european countries have a strong public broadcaster to provide a neutral source of news. PBS or NPR aren't really comparable in most cases.
And in many cases, local stations aren't owned by a corporate entity, completely making such rules irrelevant.
Public channels are also funded by the government, so there can be institutional pressure to present the government actions in a good light. Even if there isn't, a change in public policy might mean less spending on the public channel, which might mean journalists lose their jobs, which is significant incentive to promote pro-status quo viewpoints on the channel.
Giving air time to flat-earthers isn't neutral, it's pandering to idiots.
Neutral is clear and factual reporting on issues, regardless of where on the political spectrum that lands you.
Reports are factual, there is little to no opinion and government issues are frequently included. Atleast in my experience they have been very good at keeping neutral.
And no one could argue that the US media market needed more centralisation.
Net Neutrality: impinges on profits of big telecoms.
Sinclair: amazing opportunity to simultaneously reward a major republican donor and disseminate overtly biased, conservative talking points in millions of American homes.
ATT: great opportunity to kneecap CNN, which the President hates.
There is little to no truly balanced and fact-oriented media. Obviously, except for those perceived as such by their respective viewers on either side of the political spectrum.
BBC (UK), PBS (US), NPR (US), ABC (Australia) etc are surely examples.
These deals are never good for consumers. When a few companies have too much power and control their only goal is to get more at the expense of the consumer. This is dangerous and should not be taken lightly.
I absolutely agree, this merger should be blocked. It's against the interest of the consumers. The DOJ is doing their jobs. But everything else the federal government is doing lately isn't. They've been repealing regulations left and right. Anything to increase corporate freedom is an immediate go, except this merger. If they want to work in the interest of the consumers, how about protecting net neutrality? Instead, they only work in the interest of the consumer when it's also working against the interest of an entity that the president has declared an enemy, which makes it hard to believe that they're doing the right thing for anything other than the pettiest of reasons.
They just let Sinclair buy most regional tv stations and also changed the the rules to favor them: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2017/11/fcc-sinclair-media-...
You don’t get to enforce the law selectively against your political opponents and then grandstand about protecting the market.
Better to split them up even further with regulations on things like sharing lines to force them to improve speed and service.
That is not to say that municipal alternatives don’t have a place. My view is that state and local governments should get rid of build out requirements that restrict the development of competition while building municipal service to areas left unserved by the market. That’s a traditional government function: serving as the safety net. But that’s not what’s usually proposed.
Such as that the USPS must be self-sufficient and doesn't take tax revenue.
Increased jobs, in the case of walmart, come at the price of workers having to apply for foodstamps to live. Cheaper prices come at the cost of driving local stores out of business. Google and amazon are shitty companies too, no matter how much they pay for good PR.
Throwing out ad hominems before you've explained any reasoning is protesting a bit too much.
Really the only thing that's preventing Trump from being one of the worst leaders in history is that he's so bad at his job that he can't successfully implement his own bad ideas.
You think federal judges give a rat's @ss about what Trump tweets? Plus it will be appealed and appealed.
Yes, in fact there already have been multiple cases where his tweets were used against him.
No doubt Trump wants to screw CNN, but the courts will not care what he wants. That was my point: "don't give a rat's @ss" meaning thy will not follow /bow to him.
Never though I would be on the side of AT&T or a cable company.
You can oppose the AT&T merger and also call bullshit on the whitehouse if that does turn out to be the motivator here. They aren't mutually exclusive.
I find it shady if that's the only reason for this happening. But mostly just shady because it hasn't taken place in previous deals where it should have.
However... That doesn't mean I'm any less against the AT&T merger.
The DOJ is asking for either DirecTV or Turner Broadcasting be excluded from the deal, because being under the same roof would be a huge boost to DirectTV over its competitors - cable companies and Dish Network.
Turner Broadcasting includes several channels. Both TNT and TBS are probably more important to the deal than CNN (the former has higher ratings than CNN across the board; the latter does in primetime); the idea that it's the sole focus for DOJ is highly questionable.
Furthermore, how does DOJ's actual demand hurt CNN? AT&T could spin out Time Warner and keep the Turner channels. Or even if Time Warner spun out the Turner channels, they wouldn't go away (they were independent of Time Warner in the 1990s).
I'm as anti-Trump as the next guy, but the idea that there's not a rational basis for DOJ's demand is simply mistaken.
The reason AT&T is purchasing Time Warner is to gain their content production capability. You don't see how forcing the sale of a major part of that would affect AT&T's reasons for even doing the merger?
The issue with forcing the spin off of Turner isn't the believe that Turner including CNN would somehow no longer exist. It is the believe that it is being to done for political purposes to allow a journalistic outlet critical of the administration to be purchased by an organization friendly to it.
This along with the FCC media ownership changes are despot 101, gain control of the media.
What I'm saying is that "Trump doesn't like CNN" is a silly explanation for DOJ wanting either AT&T to spin off DTV or for Time Warner to spin off Turner Broadcasting.
Maybe the latter scenario somehow influences CNN's coverage, but it's an extremely tenuous link.
Alright, give us your best pitch.
How do you see this happening, Trump calls DOJ and tells them to block AT&T merger because of CNN?
Any is it all of the sudden these people started loving monopolies. "Well DOJ wants to something about, we clearly have to oppose it and support exactly the opposite".
The same thing happened with the TPP. Every Bernie supporter was against TPP. As soon as the White House pulled out of the TPP, I saw messages on /r/politics about "Well, we can't support it now once that Trump did it", it wasn't even ironic.
Apropos DNC + Russia hack evidence:
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
You have that low faith in the FBI/CIA/NSAs conclusion?
Also CrowdStrike security firm isn't the only one, it is also Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant, SecureWorks and ThreatConnect.
I'm completely open to being wrong on this though, it just seems like the body of evidence points in a particular direction.
You can be on the same side for different reasons. Always going for the opposite of your enemy is a dangerous tactic.
Side note: with net neutrality going away, doesn’t AT&T have the ability to raise rates on Disney, Netflix, and others to stream across their network without a slowdown?
Why does this need the DoJ to sue?
In this case, a judge will need to look at the laws passed by Congress, any relevant regulation (and if that regulation was legally authorized by Congress), and determine if this merger would violate those laws.
No. It's power to stop or modify mergers is entirely by initiating legal action or negotiated consent agreements. Either the government gets a court order against the merger or it can move forward.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
I want DOJ to start doing their job and monopoly busting (without regard to politics). We have several industries engaged in anti-competitive behavior at a scale far larger than big oil.
The more you know.
They should split nbc from comcast as well.
I'm all for antitrust, but to block this (which is a largely orthogonal merger), break up Sinclair first.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/business/att-time-warner-...
They don't even have the decency to pre-approve deals before the companies in question go out on a limb and announce the plan.