In AT&T-Time Warner, the Government Went After the Wrong Merger

[Commentary] The government's insistence on bringing such a weak lawsuit [AT&T/Time Warner] does not bode well for the immediate future of antitrust. There are going to be plenty of mergers over the next few years that will have far more serious consequences than the AT&T-Time Warner deal. Having been slapped down in this lawsuit, the Justice Department is unlikely to be willing to go after those worthier targets, even when they raise important issues of innovation and consumer choice.

I've previously argued that we need an evolving theory of antitrust that can deal with the dominance of the big tech companies. But this requires the government to be able and willing to bring aggressive suits, and to make innovative arguments. If that doesn't happen, Big Tech is going to become so powerful it will snuff out any company that even thinks about trying to compete. That's not good for the tech industry, and more important, it's not good for the country. I had hoped that [DOJ antitrust chief Mark] Delrahim, as a longtime antitrust expert, would be the person to lead such a charge. But that hope is now lost. In the short term, the government's willingness to bring this dumb case means that AT&T and Time Warner's merger was delayed a bit, but the combined company can soon start competing with the likes of Netflix and Amazon. In the long term, it means that antitrust enforcement has been significantly weakened. That's the true tragedy of the government's suit.

[Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business.]