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AT&T's $85B US Bid For Time Warner Sparks Antitrust Fears in Washington (www.cbc.ca)
An anonymous reader writes: The two top members of the Senate's antitrust subcommittee said Sunday that they plan to probe a colossal deal between AT&T and Time Warner. In a statement, Mike Lee, R-Utah., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. -- chairman and ranking Democrat, respectively, of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights -- said AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner "would potentially raise significant antitrust issues" that the panel would "carefully examine." AT&T Chairman and Chief Executive Randall Stephenson announced the $85 billion deal Saturday as "a great fit" that will combine the "world's best premium content with the networks to deliver it to every screen." Among those new properties are HBO, Turner Broadcasting System and Warner Bros., which would give them ownership of Cinemax, CNN and DC Comics, to name a few. Last year, AT&T completed the purchase of DirecTV, the country's largest satellite television provider. In an interview with NBC News, Klobuchar pointed to past mega-media acquisitions -- including the purchase of NBCUniversal by Comcast in 2011 and of Time Warner Cable by Charter Communications -- and said the "sheer volume" of the deal should give regulators pause.Presidential candidate Donald Trump has said that he would not approve of this deal if elected as the President. In the meanwhile, Bernie Sanders have also asked Obama administration to kill this agreement. The Vermont Senator said, "The deal would mean higher prices and fewer choices for the American people,"
AT&T's $85B US Bid For Time Warner Sparks Antitrust Fears in Washington
An antitrust suit? In 2016? Where have these guys been?
We don't do antitrust in America any more. If we encumbered our industrialist plutocrats by forcing them to follow laws and stuff, we'd get eaten alive by the Soviet Union, I mean Mexico, I mean Japan, I mean China, I mean the Martians.
Congress needs to shut up and start doing its job, which is to completely fail to learn from history, and convince the electorate to do the same, by inciting them to focus on largely irrelevant cultural distinctions.
At this point we should be smashing media and internet companies apart not letting them get bigger.
Where's our bribe money?
Then the free market would never allow it. Therefore, it is our fault for not making the market free.
In conclusion, steal cable.
Forgot the DNC's cut.
Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders oppose this merger. Sanders is calling on Obama to kill it. Trump has threatened to kill it if he's elected.
"Would potentially raise significant antitrust issues" - no kidding, eh? It won't matter though, a few bribes later they'll let the deal go through.
A good rule of thumb is that if a large telco thinks a major business decision is good idea, it's probably bad for consumers.
There's obvious exceptions to this rule... building out and maintaining telco infrastructure is usually a good idea, but even there you have to scrutinize the fine print or you'll find your copper landlines left degrading while they roll out fibre and wireless.
Log in or piss off.
Where were these fears when Comcast and NBC Universal got together?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The solution is stop consuming the entertainment they put out.
Ignore it.
this strategy fails when others fail to follow it
aw, basement dweller power fantasy thinks he can survive in an anarchy.
Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders oppose this merger.
The fact that he might have a position that agrees with Bernie Sanders on some random issue is actually rather high since Trumps opinions are selected apparently at random. Anything that comes out of his mouth may as well have been chosen by throwing darts at a list of policy options. And he has a high probability of denying his positing ever having been his position the following day even if he was recorded saying it. But some amount of them will agree with Sanders just by pure chance.
it is interesting. There are 6? big media companies, and they each have a share of a TV network, some cable channels, many own movie studios. WB owns DC, Disney owns Marvel, etc.. There are many different universes, and scripts, sitting around for years, until a network needs to fill a spot in their schedule, and something is a current fad. As for a telecom company owning a media company, I guess there is ease in content price negotiations, but I guess that is it.
We do antitrust routinely, we just don't do a lot of it. We do much more deal-blocking than we do company-busting, which hasn't really been done much in a long time. With populist sentiments rising on both sides of the aisle, the environment might almost reward politicians who favor a return to more robust antitrust activity.
Now, Congress is talking about it because of the election. It is the downside of announcing a major merger two weeks before an election. On the other hand, AT&T donates a lot...
Real lawyers write in C++
We learned from Standard Oil that it's a bad idea to let one company own both the pipes and the stuff the flows through them.
Under no circumstances should a merger be allowed that creates the biggest company in any industry. Patently anti-competitive.
Trump never solidly supported the Iraq War.
Trump never solidly supports any position. He changes his mind more often than a teenage girl changes moods. I don't actually mind someone changing their mind about a topic when they learn new information or even if they give a matter serious consideration. Trump never gives anything serious consideration. His policy positions are the very definition of fickle and certainly aren't based out of any ideology or even pragmatism but instead out of whatever whim strikes him at the time. He basically plays to whatever crowd he is facing and lies almost all the time.
Hillary Clinton voted for the war; that's a bit more serious.
So did most of congress at the time and they did so largely based on bad data from our intelligence agencies and the Bush administration. A mistake I think but not one that makes me think Trump would be a better choice as commander in chief.
You are probably familiar with The Oatmeal's take on customer service. Absolutely brilliant. This merger is going to take customer service to new depths, the likes of which we have never seen.
"Thank you for scheduling a service appointment with AT&TW. Your service window is scheduled for 2018. Our service agent will call you 30 seconds before arrival. If you are not present, you're screwed."
Where were these fears when Comcast and NBC Universal got together?
Chalk it up as hindsight. Enough people thought Comcast/NBC wouldn't be so bad, Comcast arguing that the magical Internet itself created the competition, and the old men bought it. Now, we should know better. We can actually see that prices didn't go down, that service didn't improve, that Comcast leverages its content ownership like... duhhhh.... of course they would.
The question is whether it's too late, get-used-to-it, mega Comcast companies are the reality now, or whether denying TimeWarner would make Comcast technically too large to exist.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Okay, Armchair Anarchist.
The only two providers where I live are AT&T and Time Warner. They're both very expensive for the speeds we get (when compared with other people on my IRC channel just a state over). And this is in a city of half a million, not the rural area where I was raised that still only has DSL. The only way to get a discount was to call and threaten to get your service from the other company. Now.... well, guess they'll be free to jack up the price without any repercussions.
All things considered, I would have rather seen Apple buy Time-Warner than AT&T -- though I'm sure that would have raised the same alarms about anti-trust.
From Apple's point of view, they sell the AppleTV, a nice little set-top box that's never achieved more than what they keep calling "hobby" status. Primarily, that's because Apple has always hoped to partner with a large selection of partners so users would be able to cut the cord on cable and have a similar amount of content with just the AppleTV. (Essentially, doing for TV and movies what iTunes did for music.)
Unfortunately for Apple, most of the big players are refusing to negotiate with them, or at least not on Apple's terms. Many are afraid that doing so would lock them into being unable to ask more money for programming down the road (similar to the record labels who really wanted to ask more than 99 cents per album track, but found iTunes pretty much nailed that down as "the price" they had to accept).
So now, while Apple keeps trying to tip-toe around the issue by pretending their big challenge is just building a better UI for TV watching .... they're *actually* facing the facts that they probably need to start offering a lot of good original programming as the reason to buy AppleTV. (Netflix and others are learning the same thing.) Buying Time-Warner outright would give Apple a big boost in getting to where they want to be, though.
With AT&T, by contrast? I'm not seeing how the acquisition would do much of anything to benefit me as the end-user? Possibly it will improve TV content for U-Verse customers, but that service isn't even sold out here in the Northeast. Otherwise, I guess since they own DirecTV now, they think it will give them some more options to sell on satellite? But again ... that's kind of a snoozer, in a world trying to cut cords and rid of programming packages with limited or no reasonable "a la carte" options.
The government broke up at&t in the 90's and now they are ready to strike again even though ma bell is far less relevant today than 20+ years ago.
AT&T sucks. You can't get actual service by humans in their actual stores. Only via phone (press one here). Can't buy new phones - I tried, or turn off lines there. They suck so bad.
Time Warner sucks. They have the "auto-advance" in prices that screws auto-pay. They jack prices for no value without warning. Their actual value per dollar is crap. They suck.
Of course they are going to merge. Neither wall street nor washington is capable of doing something that doesn't suck.
They are going to make the massively worthless organization a bigger way to screw over normal people. This isn't about value - it never has been about value. This is about how much can people be screwed before they start whining - or voting for someone else.
Of course it is going to happen. There is no value coming from these two companies. There hasn't been actual value creation by these service providers for decades. Only mergers and paper. Of course wall street and washington are only comprised of those two. No life there. No humanity there. No blood - only ink.
Who are you kidding. Of course it is going to happen.
Those are the best kind.
What I always find somewhat funny about that is that Bush was suppose to be the dumbest fucking person on the planet yet all these people in congress were fooled multiple times by him which should be fairly telling about the quality of the people in the house and senate.
It wasn't Bush doing the fooling. He was effectively little more than a figurehead who could get elected. The real movers and shakers were people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest. They were the tail that wagged the dog. Bush wasn't a strong enough leader to dominate the room when they were in it. Furthermore when the CIA, NSA and the rest of our "intelligence" agencies were feeding bad information it becomes hard to make a properly informed decision even at the best of times.
That said, a lot of congress isn't terribly bright or capable. Certainly not our best and brightest except maybe for purposes of looking out for their own interests.
That sounds like the militia, who want a farm they can retreat to so they don't get triggered. The liberals and conservatives have both gone so far in their respective directions, you can't tell them apart.
Learn to love Alaska
The "Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights" seems like an on-demand government department, created for the sole purpose of absorbing, misdirecting, and rendering inert through attrition any attempt to prevent the merger. Once the merger completes, the "Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights" will be dissolved.
Lobby dollars to the rescue! Swat those nasty antitrust fears away by lining a few pocket with some of that sweet sweet political bribe money.
you are simply on point with your retort.
Keep up the good work, Sir. I can't wait to hear more of this insightfulness from you!
Washington needs to either block this,
OR Better yet,
Require that the new merged company allow anybody to compete in their arena while also requiring that they sell off CNN and any other news group (separately).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Companies are trending towards data about you to find out how much you will pay for an item you are or will be searching for. These two companies specifically. They are attempting to combine forces to learn more about you and to help companies who sell you things set the price for as much as you will pay at the time you will be paying for it. This will in turn allow them to predict stock price rising and falling quasi-accurately and will attribute to the downfall of "capitalism as we know it" and the rise of "algo-capitalism" where computers (soon, AI) will make money for people who can afford it, and not for people who can't. This is a massive combination of workforces who produce a massive amount of content consumed by people on the internet, in games and on television. The data generated by those consumers is what is being collected and distributed. You all "know" this, ye who reads the comments. What's it going to take for a person like you to stand up and do something about it? This to me isn't an antitrust issue. It is a play on the economy, nay, the system of the world. Just my prediction(s). I'm hoping I'm wrong. Maybe I read too much /.
And you think you can live in a world without someone from the government telling you how to live and what to think, creating nice little safe spaces for when you get triggered.
Oh yeah. Our world is soooooooooooooooooo horrible.
How have we survived for 240 years with a government of some type? Oh it's terrible, TERRIBLE.