Ownership

[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.

President Donald Trump said that AT&T's planned merger with Time Warner is "not good for the country."  Personally, I’ve always felt that that was a deal that’s not good for the country,” President Trump told reporters at the White House. The president's comments came a day after the Justice Department sued AT&T to block the $85 billion Time Warner merger, arguing that the deal would create a media behemoth and ultimately hurt U.S. consumers.

The perception that President Donald Trump has a vendetta against CNN might not factor into a court's ruling on the AT&T-Time Warner deal, but it could backfire in a different way on a president who styles himself as a champion of American business. “The U.S. has made an enormous effort over the past decades to advocate sound antitrust policies abroad,” said Anu Bradford, an antitrust specialist at Columbia Law School.

In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing, employment or credit. But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company’s monitoring of the rental market. Last week, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads on Facebook, but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users, such as African Americans, mothers of high school kids, people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers.

I thank the Chairman for circulating the items for the December meeting and look forward to reading each one.The time has come to overturn the market disrupting net neutrality and common carrier regulations that sacrificed decades of precedent and the independence of the agency for political ends while doing nothing to protect actual consumers. The Internet was a vibrant place of commerce and public discourse before the rules ever took effect and will continue to flourish after we discard this unnecessary and harmful regulatory overhang.