Ownership

Makan Delrahim, who heads the Justice Department’s antitrust division, has spent months laying out a case for greater scrutiny of the country’s powerful technology industry, making the argument in speeches from Chicago to Rome. And his rhetoric — he told an audience at the University of Chicago in April that "enforcers must take vigorous action" if digital platforms harm competition — is being closely watched in the tech industry amid fears that Washington's souring view on Silicon Valley could eventually result in a crackdown.

The AT&T/Time Warner case could be decided any number of ways. Judge Richard Leon could rule in the government's favor, forcing AT&T to abandon the deal or to sell off key assets such as Turner or DirecTV to move forward. Judge Leon could side with AT&T, saying there is no threat to competition and allowing the deal to proceed unimpeded. In that scenario, AT&T would not be required to divest anything or make any other concessions and could close the deal by June 18.

The two events in Washington (net neutrality June 11 and AT&T/Time Warner ruling June 12) could lead to further consolidation of wireless, cable and content giants, public-interest advocates say. And they fear that behemoths like AT&T might someday prioritize their own TV shows and other content over rivals’. Internet service providers (ISPs) deny that they would engage in such a practice — yet consumer watchdogs worry that people would have little legal recourse if they did.

Two pivotal developments this week could dramatically expand the power and footprint of major telecom companies, altering how Americans access everything from political news to “Game of Thrones” on the Internet.

Disney’s offer to buy 21st Century Fox. CVS’s bid for Aetna. T-Mobile’s proposed merger with Sprint. The path for these blockbuster deals and others could be transformed in an instant on June 12, when a federal judge is expected to issue his opinion on the government’s effort to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner. It is one of the most influential antitrust cases in decades, enthralling Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue. If the merger is blocked, some executives are likely to slim down their deal aspirations.

Tech companies know that they have a race problem. But their efforts to address it have so far yielded little. Facebook Inc. says that 3 percent of its U.S. workforce is black, up from 2 percent in 2014, while black workers in technical roles stagnated at 1 percent. Only 2 percent of Google's workers are black, a figure that has remained static for the past three years. The Alphabet inc unit's efforts to increase that have sparked an internal backlash, with one former employee suing because of perceived discrimination against white and male candidates. Among 8 of the largest U.S.

On May 14, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai responded to several Members of Congress over recent reforms of the FCC's broadcast ownership rules.  "I must respectfully decline your request not to implement any changes made to the media ownership rules in our 2017 Order on Reconsideration," he wrote. "The FCC has a statutory duty to ensure that our broadcast ownership rules keep up with changes in the media marketplace, and there is no reason to further delay the implementation of 2017 reforms that were themselves unreasonably delayed.

As many as 14 million Facebook users who thought they were posting items that only their friends or smaller groups could see may have been posting that content publicly, the company said. According to Facebook, a software bug, which was live for 10 days in May, updated the audience for some user’s posts to “public” without any warning. Facebook typically lets users set the audiences who get to see posts; that setting is “sticky,” which means it remains the default setting until manually updated.

Apparently, the US Department of Justice is examining how the proposed merger between T-Mobile and Sprint could affect prices for smaller wireless operators.  A T-Mobile and Sprint merger would eliminate competition between the two carriers that have been the dominant players in selling network access to wireless companies that often serve pre-paid or price-conscious consumers, and could lead to higher prices for those users.