Ownership

A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union. On Nov 2, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.

The biggest corporate acquisition of the year is inching closer to resolution. With President Donald Trump's top antitrust official, Makan Delrahim, getting up to speed in his new job, many analysts predict the Justice Department could rule on AT&T's purchase of Time Warner in a matter of weeks. At this point, it seems, things could go either way. The Justice Department is still talking to the companies involved, as well as outside parties, to try to understand how the deal could affect competition.

On Oct 31’s technology-executive hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a key tension at the heart of the internet emerged: Do American tech companies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, operate as American companies? Or are they in some other global realm, maybe in some place called cyberspace?

Over four dozen Democratic House members have written Sinclair President Chris Ripley asking for answers to over a dozen questions related to the proposed Tribune merger and its impact on the public interest, as well as suggesting the company commit to not raising retransmission fees for its newly acquired stations. The letter comes as the Federal Communications Commission is about to start its informal 180-day shot clock on the merger after pausing it to give the public more time to comment on Sinclair's response to the FCC's second request for info on the deal.

Apparently, the Justice Department is considering a lawsuit challenging AT&T's planned acquisition of Time Warner if the government and companies can’t agree on terms that would satisfy antitrust concerns. The department’s antitrust division is preparing for litigation in case it decides to sue to block the deal. Simultaneously, the department and the companies are discussing possible settlement terms that would lead to the deal winning government approval with conditions attached.

In 2010, when Google paid $700 million to acquire airline-data company ITA Software, the Department of Justice scrutinized the deal for antitrust issues. The deal was ultimately approved, but one condition of the approval required Google to allow others to access the data for five years. Now, seven years later, Google is cutting off access to ITA data for some companies that rely on it. This week Google announced it would cancel QPX Express, an airline-data service it has offered to small businesses and startups since 2014.

On October 17, President Donald Trump launched a vague, yet ominous Twitter-driven attack on NBC, rhetorically asking, “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?  Bad for country!” The short answer to the President’s question is “never.”  A slightly longer answer is that there is no license to challenge and, even if there were, no broadcaster should worry that its license would ever be in jeopardy because of disagreement with its programming. [Andrew Jay Schwartzman]

Senators who called tech giants to Capitol Hill on Nov 1 to answer for their roles in Russia’s election interference differed along party lines over the Kremlin’s role in swaying the race, with Republicans offering an implicit defense of the legitimacy of President Donald Trump’s victory. After months of publicly sidestepping the issue, several Republicans used a high-profile hearing with executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter to dismiss the impact of Russia’s use of the sites to spread misinformation and buy ads to try to tip the election in President Trump’s favor.

The House Antitrust Subcommittee took a whack at the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules Nov 1, specifically the role of antitrust law in governing broadband access provider conduct. That came as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is expected to circulate an order rolling back Title II classification of ISPs as early as later in Nov. It also came at about the same time that the FCC Democrats went to Capitol Hill to push back on that Pai proposal.

[Commentary] The proposed mega-merger of Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media would create the nation's largest television broadcast company in history, reaching over 70 percent of households nationwide.