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Judge Rules AT&T Can Acquire Time Warner (wsj.com)
A federal judge said Tuesday that AT&T's $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner is legal, clearing the path for a deal that gives the pay-TV provider ownership of cable channels such as HBO and CNN as well as film studio Warner Bros. From a report: U.S. District Judge Richard Leon announced his decision in a packed courtroom, ruling that antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department had not proven their case against the merger. The decision, in one of the biggest antitrust cases in decades, is a milestone victory for AT&T as it looks to reposition itself in a rapidly evolving media landscape. Its deal for Time Warner, valued at roughly $80 billion, has been pending since October 2016. The acquisition means AT&T will be the nation's top pay-TV distributor, through its ownership of DirecTV, as well as the owner of some of the country's most sought-after channels: Time Warner's Turner networks -- including CNN, TBS and TNT -- as well as HBO, the most popular U.S. premium network.
Now, our business has the choice of exactly *one* shitty ISP. Fucking wonderful.
It's really difficult to run a business in the US due to our shocking lack of regulations.
I don't respond to AC's.
Just have AT&T divest its wireless and broadband services as a condition of the merger.
Have gnu, will travel.
This calls for the more complete form of my sig:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
You have hit on the key term "~5" in your brief comment. Zero or one choice is not a meaningful choice. Two is the starting point of freedom, but most of us actually max out around 5 choices at a time. By the time you get up to 20 or 30 choices, you're helpless and the advertisers or slick salespeople are going to pull your strings, driven by the same kind of insane profit maximization that ATT is worshiping with this EVIL merger.
Short summary: Capitalism is deader than Communism. Socialism is sick and Libertarianism is a sick fantasy. The most successful governments now appear to be Putin's style of Kleptocracy or Xi's style of slightly benevolent Dictatorship. #PresidentTweety wants to combine the worst of those two, though he also likes Kim Jong-un's style. We are so phucked. Corporate cancerism RULZ.
In religious terms: There is no gawd but profit, and ATT wants to be a YUGER prophet!
Solution? Don't hold your breath, but how about a progressive tax on corporate profits linked to market share. In your [DogDude's] situation, now that ATT is the monopolist in your market, they would have to pay the highest tax rate on all of the profits they earn there. The goal would be to encourage them to reproduce by fission, but if they don't, then the taxes will pay for (1) extensive monitoring by honest [LOL] and unbribed [ROFLMAO] government regulators (to make sure they aren't abusing their customers too badly) and for (2) research into ways to break the monopoly. (LTE is actually such a technology, though it is actually being used by the cancers that own it to prevent breaking their monopolies.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
elections have consequences. You're the first person I've heard make the point that it's hard to run a business due to a _lack_ of regulations. I'm not saying you're wrong (you're dead on actually). But I've just had the narrative of regulations making business harder pounded into my skull so long it's hard to imagine the opposite, even when I logically what you're saying.
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none whatsoever. The judge is letting it proceed as is. You have more conditions buying a candy bar from 7-11 than they're getting buying a competitor.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
folks. And then at your mid-terms. If you want change you need to start voting these bums out. Don't forget most judges are appointed. The party that appointed this judge didn't. That's why this merger sailed through with zero conditions. And it's why you'll be paying $200/mo for high speed internet in a few years.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The tone of your comment makes me think that you regard monoploies as bad, but they're not.
As everyone knows giving ordinary people choices just makes them confused and angry. Things will be much better when there is only one huge business in America, then no-one will need to be confused or angry when they need some service or product.
This will also have the benefit that the one company left will not need to employ any political lobbyists, as the senators and congressmen (not to mention the president) will know exactly how to vote, because the laws can be supplied directly by the one company.
See? That's market efficiency at it's finest.
Ah yes, another communistic jab at capitalism. But you and your red comrades are wrong here: Free markets absolutely depend on regulation. Capitalism in general just doesn't work without it. (And as it turns out, neither does communism, in spite of that idiot Marx claiming that it doesn't even need any government.) The problem many have is that some regulations are quite heavy handed. Think about it, if in a free market, people were allowed to just steal from you through securities fraud without any repercussions, you're probably going to have fewer investors that think it is worth the risk, which means your economy will suffer.
So many of you ...*ahem*...useful...people...like to come around here and make jabs at free markets by doing some kind of a drive by post saying something like well's fargo stealing from their customers is free market at work, get a bunch of high fives from some comrade moderators, and then think you did the world a service by making false assertions about something you couldn't explain if you tried.
Free market means one thing, and one thing only: Prices are governed only by the forces of supply and demand. That's it.
So you can put down your rhetoric already. Prices can't be governed by the forces of supply and demand if some entity, whether that is a government, crime organization, or monopoly. Examples of heavy handed regulations are tariffs, which is a form of price control.
Breaking up monopolies is orthogonal to free markets, what isn't is stopping anti-competitive behavior, or more specifically, behaviors meant to manipulate prices. Even companies that aren't true monopolies can do this, and we do give them the smack-down on occasion. Consider Nintendo, who was exerting tons of upward pressure on video game prices in the 90's, even though they weren't a monopoly. Here's how they pulled that off:
- They put strict controls on the supply of games that were sold by telling the developers exactly how many they'll produce, and how many games they can publish in a year. Artificially keeping supply low keeps prices higher, effectively being a price control.
- They forbade developers from also developing on competing consoles, and they told Toys R' Us that if they carried games for any other console, then Nintendo would cut them off from the supply chain. This meant that all of the most popular titles went to the dominant platform, and less to others. This artificially kept the demand for nintendo games higher since they also had more exposure.
In 1978 when the Islamists began attacking the republic of afghanistan because the government was introducing reforms aimed at improving the life of women, increasing education and ironically, removing usury, the Soviet union intervened to protect what most western people would think are better morals.
No comrade, that's not what happened. USSR invaded Afghanistan because they wanted to turn it into yet another soviet state as they had already been doing since WWII ended. The Afghanis didn't take kindly to that, and killed your fellow comrades, which actually made a decent contribution to what ultimately became end stage communism. You know that camo jacket and AK47 Osama was always sporting in his videos? He took them from a dead Russian general.
weak and fearful so they began arming the Mujahideen and provided them with support
Actually we didn't. This is the biggest myth among democrats, communists, and others that never seems to die. Osama bankrolled it himself with his oil money, refusing to have anybody assist other than muslims, referring to the ones sworn to him as mujaheddin (specifically referring to them as "his" mujahedin) whom he never would have allowed to accept support form the US. He did the same thing later to Kuwait when Iraq invaded, saying to them that only muslims should be allowed into what he called arab land (even though his "arab" land belonged to many more than just his race, like Persians, Kurds, Pashtun, Armenians, Azhjerbani, and many more.) Kuwait refused outright and opted for support from the US, which pissed him off, and nobody cared. In the USSR invasion of Afghanistan, the US armed and trained the northern alliance who hated both Osama and his fundamentalist crap alike, the same northern alliance that the US is working with in the modern Afghani war. And yes, the same US that has already lasted a lot longer in Afghanistan than the USSR did.
Anyways, I'm sorry we helped kill your communist paradise the USSR, I'm sure you loved and now miss the one and only vacation spot that existed in the entire soviet bloc with as much landmass the soviet bloc had that nobody ever wanted to visit, and the community grocery stores that were always out of food...those were your most cherished times...But it couldn't be helped. Gorbachev realized that it was simply impossible to prop up communism any longer, and the iron curtan was rusted and falling apart, so the wall wasn't going to last much longer. He made a bold move by establishing democracy, which the Russians didn't seem to care too much for given they keep electing a former member of the agency that used to terrorize them and now specializes in taking away their rights. Fortunately he, like virtually every other Russian of his time, understands just how shitty communism was, and how things improved for them once it ended, so while he's eroding your freedoms, at least he's not going to lead Russia in to that shitty existence again.