Brent Kendall

Early signs suggest the legal fight over AT&T’s $85 billion Time Warner takeover will focus heavily on the small screen, drawing much of its evidence from the companies’ video rivals. Those competitors argue the telecom company will use Time Warner’s entertainment assets against them.

AT&T and Time Warner said an explosion of online programming has spawned a “golden age for television—and for consumers,” in its first court filing countering government claims that their planned merger would stymie competition and hurt customers. AT&T, in a formal written answer to the lawsuit, said the video marketplace is changing quickly and is “intensely competitive,” and that nothing about the Time Warner deal would harm that. AT&T said online rivals like Netflix and Amazon were spending billions of dollars on developing and streaming video content, and that leading tech c

Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department’s new antitrust chief, made clear he doesn’t favor approving mergers based on corporate commitments to refrain from particular conduct, another potentially ominous sign for AT&T-Time Warner. The issue has proved a key one in discussions between the companies and the Justice Department. The AT&T-Time Warner transaction is a vertical merger that combines complementary companies instead of direct competitors.

If the Justice Department sues to block AT&T's planned acquisition of Time Warner, the challenge will likely raise novel legal issues, making one of the most ambitious antitrust cases in decades hard to handicap. In the typical merger case, the government challenges a proposed combination of two companies that directly compete.

Apparently, the Justice Department is considering a lawsuit challenging AT&T's planned acquisition of Time Warner if the government and companies can’t agree on terms that would satisfy antitrust concerns. The department’s antitrust division is preparing for litigation in case it decides to sue to block the deal. Simultaneously, the department and the companies are discussing possible settlement terms that would lead to the deal winning government approval with conditions attached.

AT&T’s deal to buy Time Warner sails toward two cresting waves of opposition: resurgent antitrust enforcement in Washington and politicians fired by a new bipartisan populist rage.

It is too early to know how regulators will treat the AT&T-Time Warner deal. But after several quiet years, President Barack Obama’s antitrust team has switched into high gear in response to a recent spurt of deal-making. This trend is likely to continue in the next administration, as both presidential campaigns have signaled unease with the AT&T deal and with economic consolidation more broadly. Justice Department antitrust enforcers say they have sunk eight would-be deals over the past year and are currently waging court fights over three more, including two big health-insurance mergers. In all, the Justice Department has stopped 43 deals over the past eight years, more than double the mergers blocked by the preceding Bush Justice Department.

A federal appeals court revived Apple's legal claims that handset maker Motorola Mobility copied its iPhone patents, but the ruling could weaken a separate case Apple is pressing against Samsung Electronics.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that an influential Chicago-based federal judge made multiple legal errors when he dismissed competing patent-infringement claims by Apple and Motorola in 2012. The court said Judge Richard Posner wrongly excluded expert testimony in a case where Apple and Motorola were each pressing claims the other owed monetary damages for infringement.

The ruling means that Apple will have a new chance to argue Motorola infringed its patents. In the latest case, Apple is seeking $2.2 billion from Samsung for infringing five patents. Samsung has countered by saying that Apple infringed two of its patents and is seeking $7 million.