Ownership

The Federal Communications Commission has approved John Malone’s (Liberty Interactive)  $1.1 billion deal to buy Alaskan cable and phone company General Communication Inc. (GCI). The Justice Department signaled last July it had no antitrust issues with the deal. GCI has about 108,000 cable sub in Alaska and is the state’s largest telephone and wireless company.  The FCC imposed no conditions in granting the application, saying it posed no potential harms to the public interest. In the same order it denied the petitions to deny or condition the deal.

[Commentary] Few stories in tech have been more breathlessly hyped on the way up and gleefully eulogized on the way down than Google Fiber. Since Google announced last fall that it was pausing Google Fiber’s expansion into new markets, Access, the Google subsidiary that houses Google Fiber, has laid off more than 20% of its workforce, faced continued delays in Fiber’s existing markets and gone through three chief executives (or four, depending on how you’re counting). By any traditional yardstick of success, Google Fiber has been a failure.

"Of all those companies, Comcast is the most perfectly positioned because they are really on the distribution side in a significant way, and they're on the production side also in a significant way," said Barry Diller at the Internet Association's Virtuous Circle Summit. "Whichever one you bet on for having the ability to grow in the period when big technology companies take over almost anything, that's a pretty good bet." The era of a handful of traditional media companies dominating the landscape is over as more technology giants get in the game, Diller said.

The Justice Department is encouraging AT&T to address antitrust officials’ concerns about the $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner before the Nov. 23 Thanksgiving holiday or face a lawsuit to block the deal. The Justice Department wants to keep AT&T, the biggest US satellite-TV provider, from gaining Time Warner cable networks like TNT and CNN and then withholding their programming from competitors such as Comcast. AT&T has said it has no incentive to do that.

Rupert Murdoch is one of the most driven moguls in media, defying the odds for more than a half-century to build a global media empire from a small newspaper in Australia. So many people were startled to learn the 86-year-old tycoon and his sons appear willing to sell some of their prized 21st Century Fox media assets.  Walt Disney Co approached the Murdoch family in recent months to inquire about buying key Fox properties, including the Los Angeles-based movie and television studios, cable TV channels FX and National Geographic, and Fox’s international TV operations.

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley said he is investigating whether Google violated Missouri’s consumer-protection and antitrust laws. In one respect, Hawley’s investigation is “one AG in one state,” says Bradley Tusk, a political fixer for Silicon Valley companies. But, he says, the bigger concern for Google is that “the worm has turned” in public perception of the search giant.

Facebook says that it supports the government’s push to further regulate election ads on digital platforms, but qualifies that it wants flexible rules.The company explained in comments it sent to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that new regulations should give “advertisers flexibility to meet their disclaimer obligations in innovative ways that take full advantage of the technological advance.” The firm explained that by “technological advances,” it means instead of firm rules requiring specific text to show up on political ads on its platform, Facebook would instead like to see a pro

A dispute between The Los Angeles Times and the Walt Disney Company has ignited a battle between the paper’s employees and its new top management. On the morning of Nov. 3, the newspaper published a note to readers revealing that Disney had barred its journalists from attending advance film screenings in response to a Times investigation into the entertainment company’s business ties with Anaheim (CA). Outrage over Disney’s move was soon rocketing around social media.

Apparently, AT&T will try to dig into whether the White House influenced the Justice Department’s review of the company’s planned takeover of Time Warner if the government sues to block the deal.  In the event of a trial over the $85.4 billion deal, AT&T intends to seek court permission for access to communications between the White House and the Justice Department about the takeover, apparently. The Justice Department’s antitrust division is poised to file a lawsuit to stop the deal if it can’t reach an agreement with the companies.

Journalists working for Facebook say the social media site’s fact-checking tools have largely failed and that the company has exploited their labor for a public relations campaign. Several fact checkers who work for independent news organizations and partner with Facebook said that they feared their relationships with the technology corporation, some of which are paid, have created a conflict of interest, making it harder for the news outlets to scrutinize and criticize Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation.