Court case

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has declined to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's restoration of the UHF discount on the grounds that the parties challenging it--Free Press, Prometheus Radio--did not have standing to bring the challenge. That could be a big boost to broadcast mergers and acquisitions, though it might not be the big boost for the Sinclair-Tribune deal given the FCC's other problems with the deal. The UHF discount means that only half of a UHF TV station's audience counts towards the 39% national ownership cap.

[Commentary] To be sure, the Department of Justice has a right to appeal [the Sinclair/Tribune decision], and it has done so well within the 60 days allowed from the handing down of the Judge Leon decision on June 12.

Watch for network neutrality arguments in future antitrust analysis of mergers, competition lawyers said. The Justice Department’s high-profile attempt to block AT&T from buying Time Warner didn’t address the possibility that the AT&T customers could see slowed internet traffic for some content. But that kind of argument could come up one day. The DOJ has looked at past merger cases on the grounds of its impact on open internet access said Ketan Jhaveri, a former trial lawyer at the DOJ’s Antitrust Division.

[Op-ed] The court decision allowing AT&T to acquire Time Warner is an example of the inability of our current system of courts and enforcement to prevent the decline in competition in the modern US economy. In the case of that merger, the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice gets credit for making an attempt to block what it viewed as an anti-competitive transaction. What’s more, that view proved prescient after the now-merged firm almost immediately raised prices after executives testified that the synergies from the deal would immediately cause lower prices.

1. What exactly did Google do wrong here? The European Commission has ruled that Google has been unfairly using Android (which Google owns and develops) to push Google Search (which makes up most of Google’s business) on users, giving them an unfair and uncompetitive advantage.

On July 9, President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. This week, we examine some of Judge Kavanaugh’s decisions on key communications policy issues, like net neutrality, the First Amendment, and surveillance. At 53, Kavanaugh is relatively young, consistent with President Trump's desire to appoint judges who can serve on the High Court for decades. Since 2006, Kavanaugh has served on the U.S.

DC Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appellate court decisions and public comments suggest that he will accelerate the trend toward a political system dominated by wealthy elites — often operating in the shadows, without any form of disclosure. At a March 2016 event at the American Enterprise Institute, Kavanaugh was asked point-blank if he believes that “money spent during campaigns does represent speech, and therefore deserves First Amendment protection.” His answer: “Absolutely.” In 2009, Kavanaugh authored an opinion in a case called EMILY’s List v.

The Justice Department filed an appeal challenging its loss in the AT&T-Time Warner antitrust trial. AT&T completed its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner a few weeks ago after a federal judge rejected the Justice Department’s argument that the deal would be anti-competitive. “My guess is that the government is going to try to show that a lot of important evidence was rejected by the judge, and the judge put too much weight on the testimony of the merging parties," said Gene Kimmelman, a former Justice Department antitrust official who now leads Public Knowledge. 

US District Court Judge Richard Leon’s decision to approve the AT&T-TimeWarner merger was a horse-and-buggy decision utterly blind to the realities of the twenty-first-century economy. His magnum opus means that one of the largest internet service providers is permitted to merge with one of the largest TV and film companies, thereby creating a powerful entity controlling the content and distribution of some of the most important programming in the market.  Marrying content and carriage creates gatekeepers with every incentive to favor their own services at the expense of their competito

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, is less likely to override Roe v. Wade than to rein in the agencies at the heart of the modern administrative state. Here’s why. In 1984, the Supreme Court decided in Chevron v. NRDC that unless Congress has spoken clearly on the subject of a regulation, the courts should defer to an agency’s decision as long as it is reasonable, even if the courts would have reached a different interpretation. Whenever a statute is ambiguous, the agency enjoys wide discretion.