Ownership

If regulators approve their merger proposal, Sprint and T-Mobile promise to offer in-home internet services to roughly 9.5 million American households by 2024, or about 13% of the country. The company said that figure would give it a market penetration of around 7%, making it the nation’s fourth largest in-home ISP based on current subscriber counts.

T-Mobile and Sprint have filed with the Federal Communications Commission for approval of their proposed merger, and promised in their public interest statement that the deal would create more jobs, more choice in video and business service, and world-class 5G service, while lowering consumer prices and helping close the rural high-speed divide. They said the goal is to beat AT&T and Verizon, not emulate them. They pointed to Verizon and AT&T getting into other businesses, saying that is not their strategy. 

Verizon is pledging to stop selling information on phone owners’ locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy. The data has allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners’ knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known CA-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly — LocationSmart and Zumigo.

Facebook, Google, and Amazon all have business models that require them to scoop up large amounts of data about people to power their algorithms, and they derive their power from this information. Like the oil barons at the turn of the 20th century, the data barons are determined to extract as much as possible of a resource that’s central to the economy of their time. The more information they can get to feed the algorithms that power their ad-targeting machines and product-recommendation engines, the better. Their dominance is allowing them to play a dangerous and outsize role in our polit

AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner will create a media conglomerate that combines premium content with a vast distribution network to deliver it to consumers. One of its first experiments in marrying the two will be a "skinny bundle" called AT&T Watch, providing Time Warner content (minus sports) to mobile customers.

Several major acquisitions have helped Google and Facebook on their way to unprecedented dominance over the advertising supply chain, antitrust analysts argued at the Open Markets Institute forum. There are six acquisitions that experts cited as missed opportunities by regulators at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to curb the advertising market dominance of Google and Facebook.

Antitrust has two main theories of competition. One is to try to ensure that lots of rivals compete in open markets to create better products and services. Call this the democratic theory. The other is to allow a few giants to control everything, then use antitrust only to make sure there are enough giants to create some competition, here and there. Call this the Godzilla versus Rodan theory. Godzilla is, of course, the Japanese irradiated sea monster and Rodan is a flying beast strong enough to fight Godzilla.

AT&T will soon offer a new streaming video service thanks to its acquisition of Time Warner, and it will be buying more companies in order to beef up its advertising platform, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said. The streaming service will be free for AT&T mobile customers who subscribe to unlimited data plans and $15 a month for everyone else. AT&T will announce more acquisitions soon to improve its advertising system.

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to buy most of 21st Century Fox’s assets in a deal worth $52.4 billion, but things got complicated recently when Comcast made a rival offer that valued the business at $65 billion. It may stoke visions of blistering negotiations between high-powered media executives with big egos barking into phones or ruminating in closed-door meetings, but there are rules of engagement around mergers that are designed to civilize the process.

The Federal Communications Commission has opened a comment docket on the proposed T-Mobile-Sprint merger and signaled the deal is about to be filed with the commission. The two wireless companies announced April 29 that they had struck a deal to merge that valued the combined company at $146 billion (including debt). It is only the latest in a flurry of merger activity, from the approval of the AT&T-Time Warner deal by a federal judge to Comcast's announced play for 21st Century Fox assets.  The FCC has even set up its 180-day shot clock on the proposed T-Mobile-Sprint meld, though it w