Bloomberg

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is said to be planning a vote in July on limits to how many TV stations a company can own, rules he has said are too restrictive and that could factor into Sinclair Broadcast Group’s planned purchase of Tribune Media Co. Apparently, Chairman Pai is poised to schedule a July 12 vote on altering rules that cap broadcasters’ reach at 39 percent of the national audience. A vote in July could head off a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in Washington that is considering a challenge to part of the existing rules.

[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.

Tech companies know that they have a race problem. But their efforts to address it have so far yielded little. Facebook Inc. says that 3 percent of its U.S. workforce is black, up from 2 percent in 2014, while black workers in technical roles stagnated at 1 percent. Only 2 percent of Google's workers are black, a figure that has remained static for the past three years. The Alphabet inc unit's efforts to increase that have sparked an internal backlash, with one former employee suing because of perceived discrimination against white and male candidates. Among 8 of the largest U.S.

Justice Department Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim, who is leading a review of the proposed $26.5 billion merger of T-Mobile US with Sprint, says the elimination of one major competitor in wireless service isn’t necessarily a deal killer. The law and market economics will be the crucial factors, Delrahim said. “I don’t think there’s any magical number that I’m smart enough to glean about any single market,” he said. 

Seattle (WA) levied an annual tax of about $50 million on big companies recently to help solve the city's homeless problem. The tax was watered down from the original proposal but it was controversial and pitted the city against its most powerful corporate resident, Amazon.com. Now the action moves to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.