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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 to the days of monopolies and kings queens and peasants. ISPs are utilities and should be regulated as such
It's now a toss-up for me as to whether they're still Deathstar Telecom or if they've become something more akin to The Doomsday Machine from classic Trek. Once satisfied to rule the galaxy, AT&T's appetite for acquisition has turned its primary weapon into a gaping maw into which many alternative options for consumers have found themselves trapped.
Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition!
FCC Chairman Says His Agency Won't Review Anything That Might Benefit Consumers (or inconvenience the wealthy).
I remember when AT&T took over my @Home cable modem service. The prices went way up and the service got really really bad. Back when I had @Home I had 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up (originally 10M up and down). Back then that was still pretty insane. Then AT&T took it over and it became ATTBI. AT&T decided that 1Mbps was too much bandwidth and lowered it to 128Kbps up. On top of that, they aggregated EVERYONE's bandwidth through the same 128Kbps, so now I'm sharing 128Kbps up along with all of my neighbors. At the best of times with ping I only got 40% packet loss. Needless to say, dial-up was a lot faster than my "broadband". It was like this for 9 months. AT&T support consisted of "did you reboot your computer and router and modem?" which, of course, did absolutely nothing. AT&T eventually fixed it, but even newspaper articles describing their crappy service didn't change matters.
Finally Comcast took it over and Comcast was a godsend compared to AT&T. You know things are bad when you praise Comcast. Even Comcast's crappy customer service is orders of magnitude better than what I experienced with AT&T.
I will NEVER use AT&T again. I currently use Comcast business, which, while expensive, is much better than residential.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Approving mergers generally falls under the purview of the FTC (see merger review).
The only reason the FCC came up is due to the fact that the two companies may have had to transfer FCC licenses as part of the deal. Since it appears no transferal is taking place, the FCC is not involved.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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.
This isn't a "cable/telco" merger because TWC hasn't been part of TW since 2009 and is not involved.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The FCC is not the right agency to review mergers for anticompetitive issues. FCC is about tech, not competition.
The relevant agency is the F *T* C (Federal Trade Commission).
Now maybe they need some legislation to give them a budget bump and/or a juristictional tweak/clarification if they're to (once again) take on the telecom giants over antitrust issues. But if so it's high time that was done.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Have a look at a franchise map and get back to us on that. The New York map is entertaining because there are so many places where one company is permitted to operate on one side of the street, amd another company on the other side of the street. Yes there are several companies in New York, each granted legally enforced monopolies in specific neighborhoods.
This is about the time someone pipes up and says "cities aren't allowed to grant monopolies anymore." Read that law and see what it actually says, or if you're in hurry just go to the New York City web site and look at the map of monopolies enforced by the city. To summarize the law in one sentence:
Cities may not grant brand new legally enforced monopolies - unless they hold a hearing first.
the tumpanzees will NEVER admit they made a mistake.
as long as they are STIGGINIT to the 'liburals' they are happy.
they could lose their health insurance, be jobless and still think that they 'won'.
we really should have an IQ test for voters. if you aren't at least average, you don't get a vote.
dumb voters are why we are in the shitty state of things. they are so easily manipulated (BUT, HER EMAILS!) and they are entirely the wrong people to decide the future of this country, as a whole.
You do realize that Obama appointed him FCC commissioner in 2012, right?
Trump? A constitutionalist? Are you mad? That consideration has never crossed his mind, which isn't saying much since most considerations haven't. And he never met a deal he couldn't find a way to pervert to shining his halo.