Ownership

Democrats singled out the AT&T-Time Warner merger in their new messaging campaign on July 24, signaling a tougher stance on policing corporate consolidation.

In a set of documents posted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the Democrats laid out their “Better Deal” vision of cracking down on “extensive concentration of power” in a number of industries, including the cable and telecom fields. “Consolidation in the telecommunications is not just between cable or phone providers; increasingly, large firms are trying to buy up content providers,” the document reads. “Currently, AT&T is trying to buy Time Warner. If AT&T succeeds in this deal, it will have more power to restrict the content access of its 135 million wireless and 25.5 million pay-TV subscribers. “This will only enable the resulting behemoths to promote their own programming, unfairly discriminate against other distributers [sic] and their ability to offer highly desired content, and further restrict small businesses from successfully competing in the market.”

Cattlemen, wheat growers, "agri-women" and state agriculture departments are all pushing back on Microsoft's push for reserved TV spectrum channels for unlicensed use, saying broadcasting is vital to rural connections (even as Microsoft is arguing it needs the spectrum to provide rural broadband connectivity). That is according to a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai from nine agriculture groups to the FCC.

Chairman Pai has made rural broadband a prime directive for the agency. "While our organizations certainly understand the need for improved broadband access in rural America and support the deployment of high-speed broadband in our communities, this proposal will only serve to deprive our members of critical access to local broadcast television coverage." The National Association of Broadcasters, which circulated the letter to reporters, has told the FCC that Microsoft's proposal should be a nonstarter. The agriculture groups, which include the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, agree and sung the praises of local ag news in their letter.

[Commentary] Economists see market concentration as the culprit behind some of the US economy’s most persistent ailments—the decline of workers’ share of national income, the rise of inequality, the decrease in business startups, the dearth of job creation, and the fall in research and development spending. Can Big Tech really be behind all that? Economists are starting to provide the evidence.

David Autor, the MIT economics professor who famously showed the pernicious effects of free-trade deals on Midwestern communities, is one. A recent paper he co-wrote argues that prestigious technology brands, using the internet’s global reach, are able to push out rivals and become winner-take-all “superstar” companies. They’re highly profitable, and their lucky employees generally earn higher salaries to boot. They don’t engage in the predatory behavior of yore, such as selling goods below the cost of production to steal market share and cripple competitors. After all, the services that Facebook and Google offer are free (if you don’t consider giving up your personal data and privacy rights to be a cost). However, academics have documented how these companies employ far fewer people than the largest companies of decades past while taking a disproportionate share of national profits. As they grow and occupy a bigger part of the economy, median wages stagnate and labor’s share of gross domestic product declines. Labor’s shrinking share of output is widely implicated in the broader economic growth slowdown.

In 1956 the US forced Bell Labs to license its patents to all comers. The result was a deluge of innovation (semiconductors, solar cells, lasers, cell phones, computer languages, and satellites) commercialized by new companies (Fairchild Semiconductor International, Motorola, Intel, and Texas Instruments) and the formation of Silicon Valley. Why not require the tech superstars to do the same? Who knows what forces that might unleash.

We live in an age of innovation and disruption, of opportunity and cost, of benefit and risk. As communications technologies continue to evolve, I believe digital equity is within reach, but to achieve it we must continue to bridge gaps – in both access and understanding – and to work together for the communities we all serve. For our part, AT&T looks forward to continuing to support and develop a diverse workforce, to support minority-owned vendors and suppliers, to creating jobs for diverse communities, and to investing in technology and networks that will transition us to a 5G future, which will further bridge the digital divide, creating economic opportunities for communities that need them most.

In the menagerie of television talking heads who have come to prominence advocating for Donald Trump, Boris Epshteyn is hardly the most memorable. Yet he’s perhaps the best surrogate to study if you want to understand where the Trump/TV industrial complex goes next. Epshteyn briefly worked in the White House—the job ended not long after Politico reported that he’d gotten into a “yelling match” with a booker at Fox News—but since April he’s been employed as the chief political analyst for the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair is likely to get larger yet.

In May the company announced it was buying Tribune Media Co. for $3.9 billion. Among other assets, Sinclair would add 42 TV stations—including major ones in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—if the deal is approved by regulators. The expansion wouldn’t have been possible if President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, hadn’t voted a few weeks earlier to ease a major restriction on local media ownership...President Trump remains a protected figure on Sinclair airwaves. Even as the company has occasionally furnished its stations with ads made to look like journalism, it’s adopted President Trump’s tactic of hammering its competitors for producing “fake news.”

On the anniversary of the ouster of the most influential man in conservative politics, who died in May, a legacy is revealed in Trump's anti-media venom, Rupert Murdoch's unrest and a vision that has jumped cable news to become the dominant historical current. It was Roger Ailes' tacit support of Trump that, in part, made his removal from Fox all the more urgent for the Murdochs. And it was not just the liberal sons who were agitated by Ailes' regard for Donald Trump, but also the father, whose tabloid, the New York Post, helped create Trump, but who found him now, with great snobbery, not of "our" conservative class. ("When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?" Murdoch senior tweeted the day after Trump officially declared himself a candidate.)

Murdoch instructed Ailes to tilt to anyone but Trump, Ailes confided to me before he was fired, even Hillary. (Ailes, for his part, characterized Murdoch's periodic efforts at interference as similar to Nixon's instructions to bomb this or that country — best ignored.) After the election, a confounded Murdoch had to call on his ex-wife Wendi's friends, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, to broker a rapprochement with the disreputable Donald. Now, to Trump's great satisfaction, a humbled Murdoch is a constant caller.

[Commentary] Investors do not put high values on the infrastructure over which all the data travels. Telecom operators, which often control the backbone of their local broadband networks, mostly trade at enterprise values of about six times their earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Data, for them at least, does not pay. Tech trades on at least double that ratio. While no one expects to see the valuations of telecom operators roaring back soon to their highs of the early millennium, the infrastructure of the internet deserves a higher rating.

Apparently, Univision Communications, the owner of the dominant Spanish-language broadcaster in the US, has been fielding interest from potential bidders after the media company’s initial public offering was delayed. Among the suitors has been cable mogul John Malone, some of the people said. Malone and Greg Maffei, chief executive of Malone’s Liberty Media Corp holding company, held talks with Univision’s owners about the possibility of acquiring a significant stake, apparently.

Malone andMaffei met with Univision backers billionaire Haim Saban and Providence Equity Partners’ Jonathan Nelson at the Sun Valley media conference in July. However, the two sides were far apart on valuation, and it is unclear if a deal—with Malone or anyone else—could be reached. It is also unclear what terms were discussed.

The relationship between President Donald Trump and the 21st Century Fox executive chairman Rupert Murdoch has alternated between tumultuous and friendly over the last few decades. But three unflattering stories that appeared in Murdoch-owned papers during the course of a week have raised new questions about whether the media mogul is distancing himself from an increasingly unpopular political figure — and why.

One theory: "There is the beginnings of a fall-out" between Trump and Murdoch, spurred by Sinclair Broadcast Group's May 8 deal to snap up Tribune Media for $3.9 billion, a Washington, D.C.-based individual active in Republican circles and familiar with the president's and key adviser's thinking said. President Trump, this individual argued, has essentially greenlit the deal, which Murdoch disproves of for competitive reasons. The merger, if approved, would put a large swath of the local television market under Sinclair's control. "He was surprised that Trump is letting it go through," the individual said of Murdoch, who this person said is no longer speaking to Trump as frequently as he once was. "I hear he's pretty upset with the president."

Prior to the July 12 protest, news outlets were warning their readers to “prepare to be assaulted” by the extent of the protest, after major players like Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon announced their participation in the Day of Action. But as many of those same news outlets have since pointed out, the aforementioned major players barely did anything to promote the protest where it counted: on their most visible and highly trafficked homepages and within their mobile apps. “If you blinked, you missed yesterday’s net neutrality protest,” Recode declared, while Politico hedged that it “may have flown under some radars.”

Protests in support of net neutrality have occurred almost semiannually since 2010, with major events taking place in 2012 and 2014 to comment on pending regulations. The 2012 net neutrality blackout, which successfully campaigned against the restrictive Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), was particularly notable because major websites like Wikipedia, Reddit, Tumblr, and Google went dark or displayed prominent site interruptions for the full day. These stances were dramatic — especially compared with the mild, unintrusive efforts made during the July 12 protest.