October 2016

AT&T and Time Warner chief executives Randall Stephenson and Jeffrey Bewkes are pushing back against “uninformed comments” from top politicians attacking the pending $85 billion deal to combine their companies. The two business leaders also announced a new, $35-a-month streaming content service called DirecTV Now, which will likely include Time Warner content among 100 “premium” channels and will compete nationally with pricier cable plans.

A spokesman for AT&T said the company does not expect the merger with Time Warner to be approved before the planned late-November launch of DirecTV Now. The launch of the new service is just the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of its collaboration with Time Warner. “These are uninformed comments,” the AT&T executive said, stressing the $35 monthly price point of AT&T’s new DirecTV Now streaming service. “Anybody who characterizes this as a means to raise prices is ignoring the basic premise of what we’re trying to do here.” Stephenson also pointed out that the merger was a classic case of “vertical integration,” where two companies occupying different stages of production in an industry come together. “Vertical integrations are rarely a means for raising prices,” said Stephenson. “You’re not changing the market structure in any way, shape or form.” He added that while he’s sure regulators “will have some concerns with this,” the federal government has historically approved vertical integrations.

A core component of the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau’s mission is to empower consumers in the telecommunications marketplace. True empowerment requires that consumers be active participants in the FCC’s processes. That is why, in January 2015, the FCC launched the Consumer Help Center. Through the Help Center, the FCC not only modernized and revitalized the consumer complaint intake process, these improvements also introduced new resources for educating consumers and sharing complaint data. Since the Help Center’s launch, we have made concerted efforts to continue to improve the quality of visitors’ experience, increase transparency around the complaint data we collect, and develop new ways to engage consumers.

Our latest enhancements to the Consumer Help Center is the “Tell Your Story” feature that gives consumers a new way to share with us their concerns and observations about a provider, a policy, or an issue affecting them or their communities generally. The redesigned Help Center webpage also provides easier access to all of the FCC’s consumer guides as well as the latest updates to consumer-related information on FCC.gov.

When you “Tell Your Story,” your comments will not be formally served on your provider as is our practice with complaints about service and billing. Instead, they will be used by Commission staff to inform policy making and identify practices that may be ripe for potential enforcement action. This differentiation will better allow the agency to focus its complaint resolution resources on those types of issues while maintaining and enhancing consumers’ ability to give voice to other concerns and thoughts.