Washington Has Delivered a Tangled Message on AT&T’s Power

In a matter of hours this week, the Trump administration twice weighed in on one of the central issues shaping business and society today — just how much market power big companies should be allowed to amass. Yet in back-to-back developments, two federal agencies arrived at starkly different conclusions, and one company, AT&T, found itself on opposite sides of the debate. On Nov 20, the Department of Justice sued to block AT&T’s proposed $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner, a deal that would unite one of the country’s biggest internet providers with the company that owns CNN, HBO and the Warner Bros. film studio. It was a signal from antitrust enforcers that an era of breakneck consolidation might be coming to an end, and that mergers would be evaluated by a new set of standards. Then on Nov 21, the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to dismantle network neutrality rules. The move would let companies charge higher fees and block access to some websites, and was effectively a green light for big internet service providers — including AT&T — to freely wield their influence against rivals. In each development, there are signs that the Trump administration is trying to reckon with a media and telecommunications industry that has become intensely concentrated in recent years; most Americans now get their internet and phone services from one of a few providers, and most TV shows and movies are produced by a handful of big companies. “We have one government, but two separate agencies with opposing views,” said Spencer Kurn, an analyst at New Street Research. “You’ve got one agency saying that marrying content and distribution results in too much market power, and another agency saying there’s no problem with a distributor favoring their content over someone else’s.”