AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

Their professional reputations.

The burden to prove impact on competition is on the plaintiff. The article does not elaborate on the judge's argument about how they failed. I am curious about the other side's argument also.

Two statements to ponder: >>"The bulk of the third-party competitor testimony proffered by the government was speculative, based on unproven assumptions, or unsupported -- or even contradicted -- by the government’s own evidence," Leon wrote.

>> "I couldn’t help but notice that the more and more questions were raised during trial about the reliability of Professor Shapiro’s theory and model, the more the government appeared to be minimizing the importance of his analysis," the judge wrote.

I can only infer from this the judge felt DOJ did not have a consistent and non-speculative case (see above). I am not sure what they can bring up during appeals as new evidence. They can appeal the speculation argumentation I guess.

In general, I am not sure what else one can bring to the table regarding mergers. Yes, whatever you bring to the table is going to be some form of speculation. That in itself should not be enough for dismissal, in my opinion of course. The law says differently (substantial). The defendant can always claim they are not going to raise prices. If 5 years from now, the consumer is <place word of choice here with negative connotation>, nobody is going to recall this merge as the root.

People just find it too hard to understand the impact of financial actions (one of the reasons you do not see SEC filing more often).

I am awaiting for the written ruling, but having checked previous cases, and inaction from DOJ, I don't expect much.

P.S. I am not sure this is really a vertical merger. It doesn't seem this clear cut to me. Thoughts on this?

That leaves litigating after the merger goes through, or just giving up. Often the FTC or DOJ will chose not to keep litigating mergers if they lose in district court because even if they win later, they don't think they will be able to get a very effective remedy--the deal will have gone through and it won't be possible to put everything back to the way it was. (If you are an antitrust lawyer, you for some reason have to talk about this using the phrase "you can't unscramble the eggs.") But it does happen sometimes--Whole Foods/Wild Oats was a good example where, if I remember correctly, Whole Foods had to sell of some of the stores they purchased from Wild Oats years later after winning their merger case in district court but losing the appeal.

It is. And had it been successfully blocked, the message would be clearly understood by media outlet owners far beyond CNN's owner.

It is in fact lose-lose.

Same goes for whatever ends up happening to Amazon/WaPo.

This is the only anti-trust you can expect to see now.

http://blog.tmcnet.com/next-generation-communications/2011/0...

A lot of modern computing traces back to them and Xerox.

EDIT: Never mind, I was unaware of the split between the cable and internet businesses. (I still agree with the sibling comments that this isn't hugely important given that AT&T is still an ISP)

[1] https://www.internet2.edu/

Not producing content doesn't magically make an ISP a neutral provider and I don't see how vertical integration (owning the pipe and some of what's going through it) gives ISPs more leverage than they already have.

For example, take an ISP that is just the pipe with no content production arm. That ISP could charge premiums to content providers to be put in a "fast lane" and then slow down the content of everyone else. This would be to the advantage of big players at the expense of small competitors, just like you say, and doesn't involve vertical integration in any way. AT&T doesn't need Time Warner to do this.

What's catastrophic is that we don't have net neutrality. There are plenty of good arguments against this merger, but preventing vertical integration doesn't get us any closer to net neutrality.

Will they though? I don’t recall such a thing happening prior to NN. It always seems that people’s fantasies about what can happen without NN are worse than what will (or did).

Maybe that works for software engineering, where it's a good idea to pause a release in case someone uses scripts to send a shitload of bad requests to our API and crashes a server because of our bug or whatever, but I understand that that doesn't work 1:1 with the real world, where it doesn't make sense to not have the aviation industry until we perfect self-flying planes.

A lower district judge can't overrule a higher judge's opinions.

This is easily disprovable. Broadband providers invest tens of billions a year in infrastructure. The fastest cable or wireless connection available to you is probably 10x faster than it was a decade ago. By comparison, your Intel laptop is maybe 3-4 times faster, maybe less. That cost gobs of money--building cell towers, pushing fiber deeper into the cable network, reducing users per HFC node by a factor of 10, etc. This is all incredibly labor intensive and expensive; it's not just a matter of downloading "DOCSIS 3.1" onto some head ends and calling it a day.

> Some have taken government subsidies and threw elaborate parties and went on luxury cruises while not building anything.

Note also that the "government subsidies" are anything but. The article you link to is talking about Universal Service Fund money, which is actually taken from ISPs and given to other ISPs. It doesn't come out of general tax dollars.

> leads to California's and the US's subpar system.

According to Akamai, U.S. broadband is among the fastest in the world, faster than all the large EU countries: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t.... We're in the top 10, right after Denmark, and ahead of the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc. (the countries comprising 70% of the EU population).

> And it stays that way because hoards of people either apologize for it or just refuse to see what it is regardless of the evidence

Exactly the opposite is true. The actual evidence shows that the 1996 deregulation has been a monumental success in terms of amount of money invested and actual broadband speeds achieved. Proponents of heavy regulation have to deny the actual evidence (dollars spent, speeds achieved) because it suggests a shocking result: even deregulation that resulted in much less competition than anticipated is still better than the prior, heavily-regulated system. (I'm writing this as my awesome government-funded train system is stuck between Annapolis and D.C. for no apparent reason.)

What's holding us back from being even better (and which is why I have fiber but much of Silicon Valley does not) is state & local broadband regulation. Red tape that makes it hard to string up fiber (or forces you to bury it, at much higher cost), hard to create an "minimal viable ISP," etc. When I lived in Baltimore, for example, Verizon wanted to come in and compete with Comcast. The city literally wouldn't let them do it, and pleaded with Google to come build Fiber instead. Which Google wouldn't do, because, quite reasonably, Google only builds Fiber in places where cities are willing to waive requirements municipalities uniformly require for other providers: https://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come-seattle....

Like, say it ain't so, man.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...