Regulatory Barriers to Time Warner Cable Deal Limited Regardless of Buyer

US regulators who didn’t act as cable-TV prices almost tripled in the past two decades are poised to remain hands-off on mergers among the industry’s biggest providers. Few regulatory or antitrust barriers would prevent a potential acquisition involving Time Warner Cable, the second-largest US cable operator, by any of its three largest competitors, communications and antitrust lawyers said.

Any merger involving Time Warner would go before the FTC or Justice Department, which focus on competition, and the FCC, which has broader authority to ask whether a combination advances the public interest. A deal involving Comcast would provoke closer scrutiny than other deals because of the company’s ownership of programmers including the NBC network, said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a Washington-based communications lawyer. Conditions may be imposed to ensure programming is distributed to competitors, he said.

[Dec 23]