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FCC Chairman Says His Agency Won't Review AT&T's Time Warner Purchase (engadget.com)
Today, FCC commissioner Ajit Pai confirmed that his agency would not review AT&T's Time Warner purchase, clearing the way for the Justice Department to likely approve the deal. Engadget reports: Last month, AT&T revealed how it might structure its deal to acquire Time Warner without having to go through FCC review. The communications giant noted that it "anticipated that Time Warner will not need to transfer any of its FCC licenses ... after the closing of the transaction." That means that the FCC wouldn't need to review the transaction. "That is the regulatory hook for FCC review," Pai said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "My understanding is that the deal won't be presented to the commission." The WSJ notes that this would leave the Justice Department as the only governmental agency reviewing the potential deal. Time Warner has said that it has "dozens" of FCC licenses, but the company believes those won't need to be transferred to AT&T as part of the merger, thus keeping the FCC out of the deal. The report notes that the deal still might not go through even if the FCC won't review the transaction. There's a lot of opposition to it from consumer advocacy groups, and President Donald Trump has said he opposes the deal.
Back? We are already there, this is just two smaller monopolies becoming one larger monopoly.
Sure there is "some" competition out there, lets not act as though we had something awesome before now when we did not have much of anything.
AFAIK the only FCC license Time Warner holds anymore is for a somewhat also-ran TV station in Atlanta that used to be the great WTBS, but has since been outsourced to the owner of another station there and has no ties to the TBS cable channel anymore. It will probably be sold to the owner of said other station in all likelihood.
TW also holds a few commercial licenses for satellite distribution of things like HBO, but those are not the typical licenses in a merger/acquisition that would involve a full "public interest" FCC review(*). Selling the TV station (essentially) removes the administrative authority for the FCC to review the merger (no authority, no review).
Regardless of whether you are in favor of, or against, a full review, this appears to be the right decision for the FCC under their regulatory authority.
(*) And if the FCC believed those licenses were meaningful, TW could almost trivially transfer them to some other company and simply contract for the service.