Ownership

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the following items are tentatively on the agenda for the December Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Thursday, December 14, 2017.

Charter Communications recently announced the winners of its Spectrum Digital Education Grants, an initiative for nonprofit organizations aimed at educating community members on the benefits of broadband. Charter announced the program in June. The grants, totaling about $400,000, are part of a $1 million commitment by Charter to provide digital education in its communities. Charter said it received more than 200 eligible grant applications and awarded Digital Education grants to 17 nonprofit organizations. 

Facing an onslaught of competition from internet companies like Netflix and YouTube, the big media companies are conducting a radical self-examination and deciding they need a makeover.  A few weeks ago, Disney began expressing interest in buying 21st Century Fox, looking for new content from the company's movie studios and cable operations. A few days later, Comcast, the parent company of NBCUniversal, also expressed interest, and now Sony and Verizon are taking a look. At the same time, AT&T, the phone giant, is trying to acquire Time Warner, which owns Warner Brothers. Their goals?

[Commentary] Despite what AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson thinks, the Department of Justice’s suit blocking AT&T from acquiring Time Warner’s assets in an $85 billion merger is a great moment for antitrust in America. It’s late, but it’s welcome.

The nation’s technology industry at first glance looked like a winner in the Justice Department’s move to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner. A merged company probably would be a stronger company, allowing it to control, for example, both the creation of “Game of Thrones” and the delivery of episodes to millions of fans. Stopping that merger, experts say, stands to help potential rivals, including a cohort of ambitious tech companies — such as Google, Facebook and Amazon — that in recent years have forced their way into the battle for American entertainment dollars.

In a matter of hours this week, the Trump administration twice weighed in on one of the central issues shaping business and society today — just how much market power big companies should be allowed to amass. Yet in back-to-back developments, two federal agencies arrived at starkly different conclusions, and one company, AT&T, found itself on opposite sides of the debate.

[Commentary] There is some grounds for asking whether the Trump administration actions have a lot more to to with President Trump’s dislike of CNN than with a supposed concern about monopolies. Judging from other actions, President  Trump and his appointees don’t harbor a serious concern about the impact of media consolidation on the American public.

Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genakowski, now a partner with The Carlyle Group, is troubled by the Department of Justice's efforts to block AT&T from buying Time Warner. He said, "This lawsuit creates unprecedented uncertainty for media companies trying to scale in this new media world where cord-cutting is pressuring revenue and they're competing now with multiple, much larger tech companies.