Ownership

[Commentary] The big Internet service provider gate-keepers may have bought the silence of Congress, but they cannot buy the silence of the people. We know there is overwhelming popular support for an open internet with strong net neutrality rules.  But we have to demonstrate this support and the power behind it.  We must make our voices heard.  Contacting Congress now on the CRA is vital—your Senators, of course, but your House members, too.  Tell them your vote in the next election depends on their vote now to restore net neutrality. 

He’s derided them as “bot-infested badlands,” “dysfunctional and sometimes dystopian,” and platforms for “the fake, the faux and the fallacious.” On a recent earnings call, he called them “mephitic,” prompting his spokesman to tweet the definition: “foul smelling.” No media executive has more tirelessly criticized Google and Facebook -- and done so with such a colorful vocabulary -- than News Corp Chief Executive Officer Robert Thomson.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is selling WGN-TV (Chicago) to a Maryland auto dealer but would remain in control of the station in what critics say is a bid to skirt ownership limits and win federal regulatory approval for its proposed $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media.

AT&T raised the price of one unlimited smartphone data plan by $5 a month and lowered the price of another by $10, for single-line users. Instead of the entry-level unlimited plan costing $60 and the better plan costing $90, the single-line prices are now $65 and $80 a month (plus monthly taxes and fees and a one-time $30 activation fee for each line). AT&T raised the family plan prices by $5 a month for both of these unlimited plans. For example, four-line plans that used to cost $155 or $185 a month now cost $160 or $190.

[Commentary] The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a pivotal antitrust case involving American Express (“AmEx”). The decision could have a profound impact on the way platform-based companies such as Google and AmEx will be treated under the law. Some of the Court's questioning was truly impressive, showing knowledge of both economics and the inner workings of credit card markets. Other questions? Not so much. Before pointing out the uneconomic utterances, let’s quickly review the case. Credit card companies make money two ways.

In the early years of the 20th Century, Louis Brandeis was America’s most influential advocate for antitrust enforcement but his contributions to antitrust have been much debated ever since.

The Federal Communications Commission announced that Straight Path Communications and Verizon Communications have paid a civil penalty of over $600 million dollars to the US Treasury in connection with a January 2017 settlement that Straight Path entered into with the Commission’s Enforcement Bureau—prior to the sale and transfer of its licenses to Verizon.

Multisided platforms are ubiquitous in today’s economy. Although newspapers demonstrate that the platform business model is scarcely new, recent economic analysis has explored more deeply the manner of its operation. Drawing upon these insights, we conclude that enforcers and courts should use a multiple-markets approach in which different groups of users on different sides of a platform belong in different product markets. This approach appropriately accounts for cross-market network effects without collapsing all of a platform’s users into a single product market.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) launched an attack on the market power of large tech companies. "I’m not looking for a lot of regulation, I’m looking for responsibility," Chairman Walden said. "If responsibility doesn’t flow, then regulation will." Chairman Walden raised multiple areas for possible regulation: