Ownership

AT&T and Time Warner are extending the deadline for their pending merger as they wait for approval from the Department of Justice. Both companies agreed to an extension “for a short period of time to facilitate obtaining final regulatory approval required to close the merger,” according to a filing AT&T made with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct 23.

The $85 billion deal had received approval on Oct 18 from Brazil, one of the last countries AT&T and Time Warner need to complete the deal. The deal has already been cleared by regulators in Mexico, Chile and Europe. AT&T still expects the deal to be completed by the end of the year but is waiting to receive clearance from the DOJ. Experts say the agency is likely to approve the deal because of its proclivity to clear vertical mergers between companies in different industries.

The long-rumored and much-anticipated merger of T-Mobile and Sprint merger may be happening soon. Both companies have decided to forego the investor question-and-answer sessions that typically take place after the carriers release their quarterly earnings.

T-Mobile struck first Oct 23 releasing its third-quarter earnings a day earlier than expected and, instead of a live Q&A with telecommunication analysts, the No. 3 wireless carrier opted for a video blog starring CEO John Legere. "With all the rumors and speculation out there we decided that we wanted to make sure you all saw and focused on our Q3 results," he said in the video. Also on Oct 23, two days before its own second-quarter results are released, Sprint said it will not host a conference call Wednesday.

You can’t trust the media, according to President Donald Trump — unless the media happens to tell you that many people don’t trust the media. In that case, you can trust that the media is reporting trustworthy information about the public’s distrust of the media.

President Trump claimed in a tweet Oct 22 that almost half of Americans believe major news outlets fabricate reports about him. He didn’t cite his source, perhaps because it was Politico, which he has consistently called unreliable. "It is finally sinking through. 46% OF PEOPLE BELIEVE MAJOR NATIONAL NEWS ORGS FABRICATE STORIES ABOUT ME. FAKE NEWS, even worse! Lost cred," the President tweeted.

Facebook is testing a major change that would shift non-promoted posts out of its news feed, a move that could be catastrophic for publishers relying on the social network for their audience. A new system being trialled in six countries including Slovakia, Serbia and Sri Lanka sees almost all non-promoted posts shifted over to a secondary feed, leaving the main feed focused entirely on original content from friends, and advertisements.

The change has seen users’ engagement with Facebook pages drop precipitously, by 60% to 80% . If replicated more broadly, such a change would destroy many smaller publishers, as well as larger ones with an outsized reliance on social media referrals for visitors.

With Alphabet’s engineering resources, Jigsaw translates this research into internet tools that combat hate speech, detect fake news, and defend against cyberattacks. Jigsaw CEO Jared Cohen’s eight-day visit to Pakistan in December provided firsthand insights into what methods extremists are now using to recruit new members online, which Jigsaw aims to circumvent using targeted advertising to counter terrorist propaganda. Although Cohen’s mission sounds philanthropic, Jigsaw operates as a business, no different from any of Alphabet’s moonshots. Yet Cohen says there’s no stress on the group to generate a profit. For now, its value to the enterprise is the ancillary benefits of protecting Google’s myriad other businesses—Android, Gmail, YouTube—from the world’s worst digital threats. And if, in the process, Jigsaw can help address some of the most acute unintended consequences of digital communication, all the better.

“I don’t think it’s fair to ask the government to solve all these problems—they don’t have the resources,” says Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt. “The tech industry has a responsibility to get this right.”

The story of Alice Rogoff and the Alaska Dispatch News is a cautionary tale that shows the limits of what a wealthy owner is willing, or able, to do for a struggling newspaper in the digital era. In the three years that Rogoff owned the paper, its value declined ninety-seven per cent. Of course, Rogoff’s debacle is emblematic of a much bigger financial crisis in American journalism. Even with the arrival of a handful of rich backers—Bezos, at the Post; the Sandler family, at ProPublica; and Laurene Powell Jobs, at The Atlantic—the broader industry has failed to find a viable digital-news model as traditional forms of revenue—advertising and subscriptions—continue to evaporate like rain in the Sahara.

Creating indispensible journalism—whether at the local or national level—is not without cost. It does not want to be free. If people aren’t willing to pay for it, like they pay for the Internet or cell-phone service, then it will surely disappear, sometimes right before your eyes.

I think it is important to address the elephant in the room. There is currently a merger pending before the Commission that some argue will benefit from, and is the reason for, any changes to our media ownership rules. While I make no comments regarding this, or any, merger application, let me be clear: this transaction is in no way the catalyst for FCC action on these issues.

First, the statute requires the FCC review its media rules. Having failed that, we now have pending petitions before us to reconsider the past shoddy effort. Second, I have been calling for media ownership reform since joining the Commission and as a staffer in the U.S. Senate before that. It’s not a new position or reaction to a pending application. Instead, for the first time, we finally have a Chairman receptive to these ideas.

Sens Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mark Warner (D-VA) took the first steps toward regulating online political advertising in a manner similar to the way the government already regulates these ads in traditional media. The Sens say their Honest Ads Act will protect against foreign interference in elections by requiring platforms like Facebook to make details about ads’ buyers, pricing, and targeting publicly available. Now the question is how much momentum the bill can generate.

In addition to the Sunlight Foundation, it received endorsements from advocacy groups, including the Campaign Legal Center, Issue One, the Brennan Center of Justice, Common Cause and Public Citizen. For Sens Klobuchar and Warner, that represents a good start. But the real battle is only beginning. And with lobbyists ramping up their involvement, much of the fight over transparency in advertising will play out behind closed doors.

Nearly two dozen major companies in technology and other industries are planning to launch a coalition to demand legislation that would allow young, illegal immigrants a path to permanent residency.

The Coalition for the American Dream intends to ask Congress to pass bipartisan legislation in 2017 that would allow these immigrants, often referred to as “Dreamers,” to continue working in the United States, the documents said. Alphabet's Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com, Facebook, Intel, Uber, IBM, Marriott International Inc and other top U.S. companies are listed as members.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition is threatening to rally Latino leaders against Verizon for its removal of Univision from the Verizon Fios service. Verizon's blackout comes as the country recovers from Hurricane Katia and a pair of earthquakes, all of which hit in September.

In a letter to Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, the group's president and CEO Alex Nogales said the NHMC "is outraged that at a time when catastrophic events have occurred in Mexico and Puerto Rico, Verizon has chosen to blackout Univision, the primary source of news for millions of Spanish-speaking and bilingual Latinos residing in the United States." Verizon removed Univision from its network Oct 16 when the two could not reach an agreement. Univision President and CEO Randy Falco charged Verizon with not acting in good faith in a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.