Ownership

The Federal Trade Commission announced the agenda for its Hearings initiative with three full-day sessions, co-sponsored with the Global Antitrust Institute and held at the Antonin Scalia Law School of George Mason University in Arlington (VA) on Oct 15-17, 2018. The three-day event will examine the potential for collusive, exclusionary, and predatory conduct in multi-sided, technology-based platform industries.

I write on behalf of the American Cable Association (ACA) regarding your upcoming hearing on antitrust enforcement. [W]e believe we can provide a unique perspective on two sets of issues facing antitrust enforcement:

Breeze Broadband, a wireless internet service provider owned by Union Pacific Railroad, is shutting down its service. The company didn’t provide any further details about the action except to say that it “allows us to focus on our core business.” Breeze Broadband operated like many other fixed wireless providers: It broadcasted a signal from its cell towers to receivers on nearby homes and offices in order to deliver internet service.

In the latest episode of the podcast Crazy/Genius, we ask why the dream of the digital revolution has proven so disappointing for some of its early advocates. One of those dreamers was Meredith Broussard, a computer scientist and a data journalist, who entered Harvard University in 1991, just months after Tim Berners-Lee launched the first website. “The early Internet was deeply groovy,” Broussard said, a place where idealistic young men and women thought they could redesign the rules of society.

Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA) introduced the Truth-In-Billing, Remedies, and User Empowerment over Fees (‘TRUE Fees’) Act, legislation that requires phone, cable and Internet providers to include all charges in the prices they advertise for service, and provides remedies for consumers when they have been wrongfully charged. Specifically, the True Fees Act requires cable and Internet providers to include all charges in the prices they advertise for service; allows customers to end their contract without early termination fees if the provider increases fees during the term of the contract; prevents a

Facebook is widely expected to refashion Instagram into a fully integrated sub-unit of Facebook — which, given Facebook’s record, suggests minimal privacy and maximized advertising. But it’s also clear, in retrospect, that the Instagram acquisition helped reinforce the dominance by Facebook of the social-networking world. A key question has been lost in coverage of the transition: Just why is Facebook in control of Instagram, its greatest natural competitor, in the first place? Isn’t antitrust law supposed to stop companies from buying off their rivals to achieve market dominance?

Journalists are telling a federal court that there were solid reasons to believe that President Donald Trump's animus toward CNN played a role in the Administration's attempt to block the merger of CNN parent Time Warner with AT&T and that a lower court should have allowed that "selective enforcement" defense to be introduced and evidence of that claim presented.

The Justice Department’s top antitrust enforcer, Makan Delrahim, is receptive to complaints that tech companies such as Google and Facebook may be hindering competition with their dominance but believes regulators lack the economic evidence that would be needed to prove such a case in court. Delrahim that there are “very valid concerns at some level” about whether companies in Silicon Valley are getting too big, or “stifling innovation or consumer choice.” In principle, those complaints could ultimately lead to an antitrust suit, Delrahim said.

Department of Justice Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joe Simons and European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager sat down for a meeting in Washington, a moment captured in photo proof posted to Vestager's Twitter feed.

The Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council (MMTC) and the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters (NABOB) are challenging the Federal Communications Commission's proposed incubator program, petitioning the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to review one element of the program—its comparability standards of ownership rule waivers—which they said was arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of discretion, and thus illegal. MMTC and NABOB support the underlying goal of helping diversify media ownership and the incubator program specifically.