Financial Times

The year 2017 is shaping up to be a landmark in the US telecoms sector, with industry executives and analysts predicting a frenzied period of mergers under the more deal-friendly regulatory regime of President Donald Trump.

The sector is readying itself for a period of upheaval. “Now is the time to consider that, which in an earlier time might have been unthinkable,” says Jonathan Chaplin, analyst at New Street Research. A “Big Bang consolidation” is inevitable, he says. President Trump has boosted confidence that his administration will be more open to megadeals since assuming the presidency. He picked Ajit Pai — a Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission sympathetic to arguments that telecoms groups need to merge to compete with Silicon Valley rivals — to chair the US telecoms watchdog. And Jeff Eisenach, a consultant who has supported previously blocked telecoms mergers, is head of the FCC transition team. The prospect of lighter regulation has lifted shares across telecoms companies since election night.

The British government is aiming to connect an extra 600,000 homes in rural areas to superfast broadband, after BT released almost £300 million of funds back into a scheme designed to address the gap between speeds available in the countryside and in cities. The original subsidies provided by the government to BT to roll out superfast broadband — of speeds of at least 24 Mbps — to rural areas included clawback mechanisms if take-up was better than expected. The cash was described as a “windfall” by the government, which was criticised during the early stages of the Broadband Delivery UK project for handing all the contracts to BT and being unclear about when specific regions would benefit and how the costs would be shared.

Britain’s surveillance laws have been deemed illegal by the European Court of Justice in a case that throws into question the fate of the UK’s new Investigatory Powers Act. The ECJ ruled the legislation was illegal because it allowed “general and indiscriminate” retention of electronic communications. The judgment said member states could perform “targeted retention of that data solely for the purpose of fighting serious crime” but not the mass and indiscriminate data collection of everyone in Britain allowed by new UK spying regime. This type of legislation “cannot be considered to be justified within a democratic society, as required by the directive, read in the light of the Charter,” the ECJ said, referring to the charter of European human rights.

Silicon Valley practically invented the reality distortion field, so it should not have been surprised that president-elect Donald Trump told technology executives on Wednesday to “like me — at least a little bit” because of “the bounce”. But the only chief executive at Trump Tower to have experienced much of a bounce was Ginni Rometty of IBM.

It is time to cheer up. Taken at its worst, the nationalist, anti-free trade, anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric of Mr Trump would be bad news for the US tech sector, which relies on a steady supply of overseas engineers and the tolerance of foreign policymakers. But look at the financial sector. It would be hit by the same policies if they were enacted. Yet bank investors’ glasses are half-full: they are assuming much of the rhetoric is bluster and greedily anticipating action on deregulation. As Peter Thiel says, people should take Trump “seriously but not literally”. Much of the world cannot afford to be so blasé, but the tech sector can. It should be looking forward to an even more compelling handout, should Trump make good on his promise of a tax holiday on repatriating foreign profits.

[Commentary] Something profound is happening in advanced democracies. The forces at work are cultural, economic, social and political, driven in part by rapid technological change. In political terms, Brexit and the Trump triumph highlight the decline of the party system and the end of the old left/right divide. There is a widespread disillusion among western democracies with globalisation. The progressive abandonment of controls on capital, goods, services and labour, epitomised by the launch of the single European market and the single currency, reached its apogee in the summer of 2007. In 2016, we saw, finally, that this period — call it Globalisation 2.0 — is over. Free trade has become ever harder to sell to a public worried about job security and the competitive threat from developing countries.

Free movement is also in question. Trump’s winner-takes-all approach and his lack of respect for minority rights violates a cornerstone of democracy and free society, as set out in the 10th of the Federalist Papers written by James Madison, one of the founding fathers. His position mirrors the more extreme Brexiter demands that the “will of the people” be respected at all costs. Anyone who raises objections — the media, the opposition or, indeed, the judiciary — risks being branded “enemies of the people”. This is not merely populism run rampant. It is a denial of politics itself, which, as the late scholar Bernard Crick reminds us, is the only alternative to government by coercion and the tyranny of the majority. We have been warned.

[Lionel Barber is the FT’s editor]

Donald Trump’s transition team has reassured AT&T that its acquisition of Time Warner will be scrutinised without prejudice despite the President-elect vowing to block the deal because it concentrated too much “power in the hands of too few.”

America’s largest telecommunications group by market value has been encouraged by Trump’s appointments to his transition team of two former competition officials with a hands-off record on antitrust enforcement, people close to the company said. President-elect Trump picked as his antitrust advisers Joshua Wright, a former federal trade commissioner with traditional Republican views on competition policy, and David Higbee, who worked in the business-friendly administration of George W Bush. After talking with the president-elect’s team, AT&T executives are confident that their deal has a good chance of passing regulatory scrutiny.

Having been elected president, Donald Trump’s ambitions to become a media mogul appear to have been deferred indefinitely. Instead, he will have to settle for the opportunity to reshape the entire telecoms playing field.

As quickly as technology has evolved in the Obama era, displaced market leaders have tried to use their heft to keep up. But they had to contend with a Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission that became sceptical of a laisser-faire attitude to increased market concentration. While President-elect Trump has railed against corporate power, a rally in shares of cable television and broadband providers suggests he will let companies decide for themselves what services they will provide to consumers and at what cost.

Virgin Media is to test Europe’s network neutrality rules after launching 4G services in the UK that offer free access to Facebook’s messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger.

Those services will be “zero rated,” meaning that they can be used without eating into a customer’s data allowance. Although European Union telecoms regulations do not forbid zero-rating, guidelines published by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications — which will oversee the enforcement of the rules — have curtailed its usage. Networks are prohibited from providing free access to some apps if the data allowance is used up, for example.

During the first dotcom boom, CenturyLink was a barely considered long-distance telephone company serving about 2 million customers in the deep south of America. A little more than a decade later, the company stands to be transformed through the acquisition of Level 3 — a former darling of that tech boom and now one of the largest global internet providers critical to data-intensive businesses such as Netflix and Google. CenturyLink has grown rapidly in recent years to become the third-largest fixed-line telecoms player in the US behind AT&T and Verizon, as well as a major competitor in the market selling telecoms services to companies. But the acquisition of Level 3 will give the group global significance for the first time, propelling it above Verizon in the US enterprise market and greatly expanding its internet services business as data use rapidly increases.

CenturyLink will buy Level 3 Communications, which runs infrastructure that allows businesses connect to the internet, in a $34 billion deal. The tie-up with Level 3 will provide CenturyLink, which has historically focused on phone networks, the ability to increase its fibre-optic capacity, something that is especially important as it works to bring broadband internet to rural areas.

“The digital economy relies on broadband connectivity, and together with Level 3 we will have one of the most robust fiber network and high-speed data services companies in the world,” said Glen Post, CenturyLink’s chief executive.