Ownership

Sinclair Broadcast Group is selling WGN-TV (Chicago) to a Maryland auto dealer but would remain in control of the station in what critics say is a bid to skirt ownership limits and win federal regulatory approval for its proposed $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media.

AT&T raised the price of one unlimited smartphone data plan by $5 a month and lowered the price of another by $10, for single-line users. Instead of the entry-level unlimited plan costing $60 and the better plan costing $90, the single-line prices are now $65 and $80 a month (plus monthly taxes and fees and a one-time $30 activation fee for each line). AT&T raised the family plan prices by $5 a month for both of these unlimited plans. For example, four-line plans that used to cost $155 or $185 a month now cost $160 or $190.

[Commentary] The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a pivotal antitrust case involving American Express (“AmEx”). The decision could have a profound impact on the way platform-based companies such as Google and AmEx will be treated under the law. Some of the Court's questioning was truly impressive, showing knowledge of both economics and the inner workings of credit card markets. Other questions? Not so much. Before pointing out the uneconomic utterances, let’s quickly review the case. Credit card companies make money two ways.

In the early years of the 20th Century, Louis Brandeis was America’s most influential advocate for antitrust enforcement but his contributions to antitrust have been much debated ever since.

The Federal Communications Commission announced that Straight Path Communications and Verizon Communications have paid a civil penalty of over $600 million dollars to the US Treasury in connection with a January 2017 settlement that Straight Path entered into with the Commission’s Enforcement Bureau—prior to the sale and transfer of its licenses to Verizon.

Multisided platforms are ubiquitous in today’s economy. Although newspapers demonstrate that the platform business model is scarcely new, recent economic analysis has explored more deeply the manner of its operation. Drawing upon these insights, we conclude that enforcers and courts should use a multiple-markets approach in which different groups of users on different sides of a platform belong in different product markets. This approach appropriately accounts for cross-market network effects without collapsing all of a platform’s users into a single product market.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) launched an attack on the market power of large tech companies. "I’m not looking for a lot of regulation, I’m looking for responsibility," Chairman Walden said. "If responsibility doesn’t flow, then regulation will." Chairman Walden raised multiple areas for possible regulation:

A majority of Americans are now concerned that the government won't do enough to regulate how US technology companies operate, according to an Axios-SurveyMonkey poll. Across the board, concern about government inaction is up significantly — 15 percentage points — in the past three months. In a previous Axios-SurveyMonkey poll in November, just after Facebook, Google and Twitter testified before Congress, only about four in 10 Americans were concerned that the government wouldn't do enough to regulate the tech companies. Now that number has jumped to 55 percent.

Sinclair remains locked in a prolonged battle with Justice Department antitrust officials over how many stations it must sell to get their approval to buy Tribune Media. It is latest cloud over Sinclair’s $3.9 billion deal, coinciding with an internal investigation underway at the Federal Communications Commission into the agency’s relationship with the company. At issue is how much power Sinclair, the country’s largest broadcaster, will have over local media markets and national television audiences.

Supreme Court justices wrestled with Microsoft’s dispute with the US Justice Department over whether prosecutors can force technology companies to hand over data stored overseas, with some signaling support for the government and others urging Congress to pass a law to resolve the issue. Microsoft argues that laws have not caught up to modern computing infrastructure and it should not hand over data stored internationally. The Justice Department argues that refusing to turn over easily accessible data impedes criminal investigations.