Court case

The head of Turner Broadcasting pushed back against one of the central arguments of the government’s case to block the AT&T and Time Warner merger, saying that his company’s channels would not be used as a weapon against rivals if the deal went through. The Justice Department has argued that Turner, which is owned by Time Warner, owns “must-have” channels like CNN and TNT that the merged company would use as leverage in negotiations with other cable and satellite TV operators.

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit will be hearing the appeals of the Federal Communications Commission's Restoring Internet Freedom order. That court has principal jurisdiction over FCC decisions. The court heard the two previous appeals -- of the 2011 Open Internet Order, which it overturned, and the 2015 Open Internet Order, which it upheld. The Judicial Conference lottery, which is held when appeals are filed in multiple venues, had chosen the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but there had been a motion, unopposed, to instead consolidate the cases in the DC Circuit.

Can a US technology company refuse to honor a court-ordered US search warrant seeking information that is stored at a facility outside the United States? Oral arguments in a pending case took place at the Supreme Court in February 2018, and they did not go well for Microsoft, the tech giant that is challenging a warrant for information stored at its facility in Ireland.

On March 27, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Oracle, finding that Google may owe billions in damages. Nearly 7.5 years after the original lawsuit was filed, the case will now be sent back down to federal court in San Francisco to figure out how much Google should pay. "Google’s use of the Java API packages was not fair," the court ruled. In October 2016 when the case was appealed, after Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems and acquired the rights to Java, it sued Google in 2010. Oracle claimed that Google had infringed copyrights and patents related to Java.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which has fought to preserve open internet access for more than two decades, filed its petition to intervene in the net neutrality case before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. CCIA has standing to directly intervene in this action because many of members will be affected by the FCC’s latest order that would abdicate its role in enforcing nondiscrimination rules on the internet. 

The biggest US antitrust case of this century kicked into high gear as a government lawyer warned that AT&T wants to buy media giant Time Warner to "weaponize" its must-have content — a move that would raise prices for consumers and hinder innovation. AT&T's added leverage over pay-TV competitors to withhold content from some of the most valuable assets in entertainment — including HBO, CNN, TBS, TNT and Warner Bros., Hollywood's largest TV and film studio — would cause prices to rise by more than $400 million a year for Americans, said Justice Department lawyer Craig Conrath.

Judge Edward Chen of US District Court for the Northern District of California has revived a lawsuit that angry customers filed against AT&T over the company's throttling of unlimited mobile data plans. The decision comes two years after the same judge decided that customers could only have their complaints heard individually in arbitration instead of in a class-action lawsuit. The 2016 ruling in AT&T's favor was affirmed by a federal appeals court.

As it became clear in November 2017 that the Department of Justice was heading for a legal  showdown with AT&T over its Time Warner merger, the company offered a proposal that it said would address the government’s concerns about competition. But thus far, only two percent of AT&T's rivals have expressed support for that plan. Of the 1,000 letters sent by AT&T to competing TV providers in November notifying them of the proposal, just 20 received a positive response. The lukewarm interest highlights the enormous stakes facing the entertainment industry. 

[Commentary] Whether the AT&T-Time Warner deal goes through or not is super important for all the usual reasons relating to media concentration, competition in telecommunications, and all that other stuff I usually care about. But the AT&T/TW trial raises a lot of super important questions for the future of antitrust enforcement. Specifically, does antitrust law care about vertical integration or not?

The high-stakes antitrust showdown over AT&T's planned $85 billion purchase of Time Warner began in a Washington courtroom as both sides sparred over some key issues that signaled their legal strategies. Opening arguments aren't scheduled until March 21 in a trial U.S. District Judge Richard DeLeon said could last six to eight weeks — about twice as long as originally estimated when the Justice Department sued last fall to halt the deal.