Ownership

Our 2019 policy priorities lay out a proactive agenda for the new year and the new Congress, to move us closer to building media and communications systems that empower everyone to connect and communicate freely and safely. We’ve identified four major priorities:

I believe that Louis Brandeis’ progressive framework can help us navigate the future of antitrust:

In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest-ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.

President Donald Trump took part in an event celebrating Diwali Nov 13 at the White House alongside several administration officials. During the ceremony, President Trump teased Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, who was in the room. "I just didn't like one decision he made but that's all right," President Trump said as he was introducing Pai, potentially referencing Pai's decision on a merger between Sinclair and Tribune Media. "Not even a little bit. He's independent," President Trump joked, as the group of administration officials behind him laughed.

President Donald Trump continues to comment on antitrust matters related to media companies he doesn't like, and experts worry the resulting political fray could hinder the Justice Department's ability to independently evaluate mergers. Media companies looking to merge amid an already difficult economic climate now have to consider this reality as a part of their business decisions. 

In the 1990s and 2000s, the web and the internet were new and everything was going to be different forever, and the chaos made it easy to think that bigness—the economics of scale—no longer really mattered in the new economy. After a decade of open chaos and easy market entry, something surprising did happen. A few firms—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—did not disappear. Unfortunately, antitrust law failed to notice that the 1990s were over. Instead, for a decade and counting, it gave the major tech players a pass—even when confronting fairly obvious dangers and anticompetitive mergers. 

The Department of Justice announced that it has reached a settlement with six broadcast television companies — Sinclair, Raycom Media, Tribune Media Company, Meredith Corporation, Griffin Communications, and Dreamcatcher Broadcasting — to resolve a DOJ lawsuit alleging that the companies engaged in unlawful agreements to share non-public competitively sensitive information with their broadcast television competitors. “The unlawful exchange of competitively sensitive information allowed these television broadcast companies to disrupt the normal competitive process of spot advertising in mark

House Democrats plan to investigate whether President Donald Trump abused White House power by targeting — and trying to punish with "instruments of state power" — the Washington Post and CNN, said incoming-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA). Rep Schiff said President Trump "was secretly meeting with the postmaster [general] in an effort to browbeat the postmaster [general] into raising postal rates on Amazon." "This appears to be an effort by the president to use the instruments of state power to punish Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post," Rep Schiff said.

The American Cable Association called on the Justice Department to open an antitrust investigation into Comcast-NBCUniversal. It would be a way to keep Justice overseeing the company after the conditions DOJ imposed on the merger expired earlier in 2018.