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FTC Approves AOL+Time-Warner In USA
alumshubby writes "The Washington Post, undoubtedly among others, reports that the AOL & Time-Warner merger has gone through. Note that it was unianimous, and the FTC extracted a promise that the new behemoth would 'protect consumer choice.'" And, on the more amusing side check out this alternative coverage. On a more serious note, we've also got information from the FTC, and coverage from CNNfn, and ABCNews.
So will it get better when you combine Americas #1 online service and #1 cable modem service? Well, at least AOL will not be able to auto disconnect it's broadband customers after so many minutes, my feeling is it's just going to deliver the same old shit and spam, at higher speeds. wahoo.
Adler
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
Seriously, though, the people will stop them. That is, if they haven't yet been properly brainwashed by the Microsoft-AOL-Time-Warner owned media.
You are forgetting the majority of Americans admire "the brilliant" Bill Gates and think the DOJ should back down against Microsoft. These same Americans also make AOL the largest ISP. "It's so easy to use, no wonder it's #1!"
cpeterso
Flashback from JULY 27, 2000....
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MERGER MADNESS: TIMEWARNER HEAD WARNS OF 'AMERICAN CULTURAL IMPERIALISM'; SEES CORPORATIONS TAKING 'GOVERNMENT ROLES'
AOL chief executive Steve Case and TIME WARNER chief executive Gerald Levin testified Thursday before a complete panel at the Federal Communications Commission.
But it is candid comments made by Levin earlier this year during a media roundtable that have some lawmakers in Congress concerned that something is foul with the latest greatest media marriage.
Levin recently warned in the post-Cold War era there is only "American cultural imperialism."
"There's no countervailing force, that's a significant problem," declared the man who will become the most powerful media executive in history if the AOL/TIME WARNER merger is approved by federal regulators.
Levin sees a future where major media corporations take on responsibilities currently administered by governments.
"We're going to need to have these corporations redefined as instruments of public service because they have the resources, they have the reach, they have the skill base, and maybe there's a new generation coming up that wants to achieve meaning in that context and have an impact, and that may be a more efficient way to deal with society's problems than governments," predicted Levin.
A summary of Levin's past comments circulated behind committee doors this week, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned, including Levin's belief that an "old-fashioned regulatory system" has to give way to a new "global concern."
"It does appear that Mr. Levin has greater designs than simply running an entertainment conglomerate," said one Republican lawmaker, who would like to question Levin on his fellings about "American cultural imperialism."
At the TIMEWARNER Global Forum gathering in Shanghai last year, Levin introduced China's Communist President President Jiang Zemin , calling him "my good friend
Levin presented him with a bust of Abraham Lincoln. Levin, who refused to meet with human rights representatives, told vaunted visitors that Jiang can reel off the Gettysburg address from memory.
But can Jiang - or Gerry, for that matter - recite Lincoln's reported letter to William F. Elkins, November 21, 1864?
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country...corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
I don't have my Latin dictionary handy. What's it mean? Something about single-cell life forms?
-no broken link
Pretty soon, we'll have only one corporation. Things will be so simple then!
I'd rather be a unix freak than a freaky eunuch
Ewige Blumenkraft!
OK, I'll admit that I am karma whorin' a bit, but I think that I wrote a fairly good essay and someone might even like reading it. I wrote this essay for my final project in an english class. While it is not comprehensive, even in my own knowledge, and certainly a small fraction of what is really evil about huge companies it was written to give people who just didn't understand what the big deal was about having large corporations in charge. I wrote it with the average person in mind (dumbed down and not at slashdot level). I do think that is a fairly good essay to show people to give them a solid idea of why you feel anger towards large corporations (if you do) without having to write an essay yourself or give a speech to every person you want to tell. I know that some things might not be entirely accurate but I did try to cover all angles, so don't come down too hard on the mistakes. Also, if you ever wanted to know just how much the big record companies screw artists out of money check out This link It is Steve Albini (producer of In Utero) talking about the manipulations of some recod companies. My point in this is that something like this WILL NOT help consumers, and is only used as a tool for further influence by large corporations. So anyway ...
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Large Media Corporations are Abusing Their Power By: Simeon Bassett
The larger the corporation, the more collective influence they will have over their industry. There is a point in the rise of power of anything that can work as whole that the power becomes too great, and it is abused. It has happened in every society that has given power to a specific person or a group with similar motives. One example is the emperors of ancient China. One emperor, Quin Shihuangdi wanted himself to be remembered as the first emperor of China, and went on a crusade to erase anything from the past and to make China start over under his rule. He burned literature and destroyed libraries, reminiscent of the thought control portrayed in George Orwell's 1984. He originally wanted to have his personal army buried alive with him after his death to protect himself in the afterlife. This nightmarish example of tyranny seems to be almost cliché in history, but thought is not given seriously to the parallels of the present. The United States of America was founded so that people would have choices throughout their lives when dealing with their religious beliefs and any other elements that affect them. Branches of government were created to balance the power and create subtle conflict so that decisions are not made out of personal interest from a select few in power.
The biggest culprits of corporate over-control and consumer neglect are the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Sure, there are companies such as Microsoft, which is under scrutiny because of their monopolistic practices with their huge (90%) user base on desktop computers. Intel, which is out of hot water because of a recent rise of competition, took their time releasing incrementally faster microprocessors until they had someone to compete with (Advance Micro Devices). Cisco, who has a much-overlooked tendency to buy up competition before they turn into a threat, seems like the Microsoft of the networking world, but never seems to be under corporate pressure. All of these are examples of companies that have clearly abused their power in many instances, but they pale in comparison to the two giant alliances of media powers.
To quote Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, when talking about digital movies: "Our attorneys believe we need to pursue this very cautiously. Industry wide compacts where you sit down and say, `This is what seven or eight companies are going to do' - that's very dangerous ground." To say that this is hypocritical is something of an understatement. Seven giant companies acting collectively is, for the most part, what the MPAA is. It is an organization made up of the following major film companies: Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Universal Studios, Inc., and Warner Bros. Each one of these companies is a household name and together they make a massive monolith that has influence on almost everyone in the country. Unions of workers were created to give more power to the working class. A union of giants gives exponentially more power back to the titans of the corporate world. You can observe the control of the MPAA yourself by looking for their logo. Have you ever seen the symbol at the end of the credits of a movie with the oval shape, inner oval, and five dots in the middle? If you haven't, look for it and you'll find it - on almost every movie you see.
While I won't go into everything the MPAA has done that crosses the line between business tactics and monopolistic practices, and I won't debate whether or not Ronald Regan was right in cutting the separation of the movie industry and movie theatre chains, I will go into one recent, blatant, and insulting event that has taken place at the hands of the MPAA.
I say recent because the court decision in favor of the MPAA is still in the appeal process, blatant because hopefully it will be easy to see why this is such an extreme violation, and insulting because it flies in the face of the first amendment. A program written by Jon Johansen called DeCSS decrypts (unscrambles) the encoding that the MPAA has put onto all DVD movie discs (more on this later). He put the source code into the public domain, and not only was he attacked by the MPAA, but so were web sites that merely linked to places where the DeCSS source code could be acquired. Source code, which is text describing a program, can be read just as anything else can, and not jut by a computer. So why is it that it is not protected under free speech laws? The MPAA's answer would be that its primary purpose was the unauthorized copying of DVD discs. They maintained this stance throughout the trial even though they could not document one case of piracy due to the program. The intent as stated by the author and the users of the program was that they wanted to create their own DVD movie playing software so that they wouldn't be contained to using the software made by other companies, which is mostly sold commercially. It would enable them to watch the DVD movies they own on any computer they wanted to program for, not just ones sanctioned by the MPAA. This would actually increase the number of potential buyers of DVDs but the MPAA still came down hard. Even if the intent of the software was for copying DVD movies, it should still be considered free speech. If something can be sung in a song, or put on a t-shirt then clearly it can and should be treated as speech. In fact, both of these things were done, the song was taken down from mp3.com for "offensive lyrics" and the retailers of the t-shirts, copyleft.net, were given a subpoena by the MPAA. At least they're consistent.
Even if you overlook all of atrocious logic of the MPAA, the fact still remains that they sued and won their case against 2600 magazine for merely providing a link to the source code of the program. This is the equivalent of one person telling another where to buy gasoline and getting blamed because that person could potentially use it to harm someone. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the judge presiding over the case, Judge Kaplan, is a former employee of the MPAA. How do they get away with all of this? Maybe it's the huge political involvement they have, from the parties thrown at Republican national conventions to the large amount of financial support for the Democratic Party.
This isn't an isolated problem either; the RIAA is just as bad or worse than the MPAA. They're recent bought with digital music distribution methods like Napster, have been much publicized by the media, but the sheer legal aggression that they have shown in their battle to maintain their current revenue stream without increasing their quality of service, has been passed over for the most part. To quote the RIAA website directly: "RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States." Ninety percent control is a lot. Especially when it covers the entire industry. Microsoft has about a ninety percent control over the operating systems of desktop computers (the program that keeps everything running) with Windows, but a parallel example would be if they controlled ninety percent of all the software commercially sold. To be fair, the RIAA is composed of many more companies than the MPAA. Any record label that meets their requirements can apply. This should make everything fine as long as being a part of the group doesn't require monopolistic practices like price control. But it does. They even have an acronym for it - MAP. MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price scheme. It says that no company can advertise CD's for below a certain price. Shouldn't the FCC step in and do something about this? They are, and it's about time. Deals have been struck out of court so that companies that don't agree with advertising for a certain price, like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City don't get angry. But now the FCC is finally stepping up and alleging that fixed pricing schemes have cost consumers $480 million.
This is a typical pattern for the RIAA; they seem to want both ends of every deal. Another example would be that they receive royalties from any blank CD sold. This is supposedly to compensate for anticipated piracy, but the cost is spread around to everyone who buys CD-R discs, whether they use the blank CD's to copy and resell music or not. If I as a musician want to make music and distribute it recorded on CD-R discs, then I am not only paying the company that made the disk, I am paying the RIAA, my major competitor, with every CD I create. You would think that they would be satisfied, but they have still created large-scale efforts against supposed music piracy. I guess the compensation isn't enough.
One such effort is the ongoing lawsuits against music distributors such as mp3.com and Napster. Napster has made no money at all from its efforts at the time of this writing and even though they distribute no music themselves, and the people that do distribute music do it with no money changing hands at any point, the RIAA still feels that they are a threat created through illegal means. Even more odd, is that Napster should technically be shielded by the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992, which states that any distribution of music that is not being sold by any standard is legal. It was meant to facilitate the copying of music between friends and such, and at the same time, compensate the RIAA with royalties from the mediums of choice. Now that there is no medium, as with network file sharing, there are no royalties and the piece of legislation that the RIAA personally created, lobbied for, and oversaw through congress, is now Napster's suit (pun intended) of armor, and what the RIAA is fighting against.
Another battle being waged is over mp3.com. A service offered by mp3.com allowed people to listen to music they owned whenever they were at a computer connected to the Internet. This was seen as a violation of the RIAA's property and mp3.com was attacked in a lawsuit, which they lost, and which crippled the entire company. Now mp3.com must pay royalties on every song that is "owned" by the RIAA and that the service offers, which has forced them into charging fees for the users (the service was originally free). In the end people are paying more money to listen to songs they already own. Could all this tight control be that the RIAA is looking out for the interests of the artist? Not likely. Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana's "In Utero", stated in an essay that in a typical situation with a hot band the money is distributed as follows: Lawyer: $12,000, Agent: $7,500, Previous Label: $50,000, Studio: $52,000, Manager: 51,000, Producer: $90,000, Record Company: $710,000, Band member net income each: $4,031. That's a total of $976,531 that the band has made. It is unfortunate that each band member gets 00.41% of the money they create. Yes, less than half of a percent comes back to each band member.
The RIAA and MPAA do not care about the consumer, or the artists that are making them rich. They have used tactics and business practices that go far beyond the limits of capitalism. As I have alluded to, there is much more to the story and many more instances of the RIAA, MPAA, and many other large companies flexing their corporate muscle to gain an unfair advantage in their industry, and to ultimately exploit consumers.
Bibliography 1. Music retailers irked by CD discounting (2000). 5 Dec. 2000. http://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/Music/12/05/cds.r
2. Who we are (2000). href="http://www.riaa.com/About-Who.cfm
3. Cave, Damien. A hacker crackdown? (2000). 7 Aug. 2000 http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/08/07/yoin
4. Sabin, Rob. The Movie's Digital Future is in Sight and it Works (2000). 26 Nov. 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/26/arts/26SABI.htm
5. Albini, Steve. The Problem With Music. href="http://www.negativland.com/albini.html.
6. Gross, Robin D. Court Uphold Right to Digital Music (1999). 29 June. 1999 href="http://www.mp3.com/news/283.html?lang=eng
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
NATION HAVING HARD TIME GIVING SHIT ABOUT AOL-TIME WARNER MERGER
Largest Merger in Media History Seen as Historic, Revolutionary, Whatever
DULLES, VA. (SatireWire.com) -- Continually bombarded by news that the AOL-Time Warner merger would create the world's first fully integrated media and communications company -- a potentially anti-competitive Goliath that could dominate broadband interactive services for decades -- the majority of Americans have no idea what I just wrote, and they don't care.
"Intellectually, I know this merger is important. I hear about it all the time on the news, and all these business magazines and Web sites are always playing it up like the Second Coming, but really, who gives a shit?" said Tina Desmond, a 34-year-old patent clerk from Cleveland, Ohio.
According to AOL chief executive Steve Case, everyone should give a... should care. "What we're talking about here is a revolution," Case insisted. "Our combined company will be the premier global company delivering branded information, entertainment and communications across rapidly converging media platforms and changing technology "
"You know what I just heard?" countered 19-year-old University of Miami sophomore Bob Strock. "Blah blah fuckin' blah."
Asked if it mattered if the merger is approved by the Federal Trade Commission, which is reportedly concerned about competitive access to Time Warner's cable transport facilities, Strock replied: "Go away."
The realization that no one really cares about the merger irks competitors such as Qwest Communications, which is fighting the deal. Even analysts who cover the companies and like the merger have fared no better generating interest.
"Every day I tell my wife, 'Honey, this new company will provide an important new broadband distribution platform for America Online's interactive services and drive subscriber growth through cross-marketing with Time Warner's pre-eminent brands,'" said IDG analyst Keith Sturgess. "And every day, she says 'Keith, shut up."
Case added that a combined AOL-Time Warner will spur a new era of innovation and robust competition and something something market leverage something, but we lost interest.
Copyright © 2000, SatireWire.
It seems to me that this concentration of power will certainly lead to abuse. I had been hoping that the FTC would impose restrictions on this new behemoth, but that does not appear to be the case. You've all heard the arguments before, but no one expresses the need for dissent better than Noam Chomsky.
... a step towards restricting control over the global media system to an even narrower range of private power interests, relying -- as is often the case -- on publicly funded initiatives, ideas, development, provided to them as a gift without public consent, even awareness."*
From Noam Chomsky:
"There's a general tendency for the whole system to move toward oligopoly, a small number of huge corporations which dominate one or another area and usually interact."*
"The current merger is
A good Chomsky resource.
For those with a taste for the ironic, here's the transcript of a chat with Prof. Chomsky in 1995 on AOL.
For general corporate news, try http://www.corpwatch.org/
Check out this concern from the ACLU about the possibility of censorship as a result of this decision.
FTC approval is not the final step. The FCC still has to approve the merger. They traditionally wait for the FTC and/or DOJ to make their ruling(s) first.
The FCC still has issues with content/distribution and AOL's fscked-up stance on Instant Messaging. Plus, the FCC's mandate also dictates that they must act "in the public interest". Not that they've done that in the past, but....
We're not scare-mongering/This is really happening - Radiohead
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700 Free hours of cable every month! Too bad Time-Warner doesn't do long distance.
You can tell a college man, but you can't tell him much.
As Ralph Nader would say, the federal government consists of people handing out more and more to the major corporations, and stomping all over consumers' rights. It is really a shame that we have evolved into a government of the corporations, and not a government of the people.
Major corporate mergers like this one should be seriously challenged. Instead, once a REPUBLICAN goes into office, the merger goes through unanimously. I don't think it would have taken too much longer had Gore been president-elect, though.
Another Naderism "The only difference between Gore and Bush is how fast their knees hit the floor when big business walks in the room."
How long will it take before two powerful companies decide to merge, the FTC says they can't, and they say "Screw you, we'll merge anyways"? If Microsoft and the AOL/Time-Warner groups decided to become one big huge conglomerate... who would stop them? Would we hit the point of cyberpunk-fiction where they'd be hiring armed guards to keep FTC-led cops from shutting them down? Or would the FTC just cave in and admit it has no real power?
Burn Hollywood Burn
You can't protect consumer choice by extracting half-hearted "promises" from executive types. Come on, these people give lawyers a run for their money in the scumbag department. It will be interesting to see just how quickly they violate the spirit of those promises if not letter of them.
The only way to protect consumer choice is by promoting competition.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.