Ownership

Verizon agreed to buy TracFone, a provider of wireless prepaid services, in a deal worth up to $7 billion in cash and stock, further consolidating the US cellular market. TracFone, a unit of Mexico’s América Móvil SAB, has about 21 million prepaid customers in the US under its namesake brand as well as StraightTalk and Net10. The company doesn’t run its own physical network in the US and instead rides on other cellphone carriers’ systems for a fee and then resells service under its own brands.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the items below are tentatively on the agenda for the Sept Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Wednesday, Sept 30, 2020:

When it comes to keeping monopolists in check, the government has played the leading role, from President Teddy Roosevelt battling the railroad at the turn of the century to the Department of Justice taking on Microsoft in the 1990s.

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division is creating the Office of Decree Enforcement and Compliance and a Civil Conduct Task Force.  Additionally, it will redistribute matters among its six civil sections in order to build expertise based on current trends in the economy.

American tech titans flew high before the coronavirus pandemic, making billions of dollars a year. Now, the upheaval has lifted them to new heights, putting the industry in a position to dominate American business in a way unseen since the days of railroads. A rally in technology stocks elevated the S&P 500 stock index to a record high even as the pandemic crushes the broader economy.

Trump-administration moves herald a new, more invasive American philosophy of tech regulation, one that hews closer to China’s protectionist one, though without the aims of censoring content and controlling the populace. The shift could hurt American internet giants like Facebook and Google, which have greatly benefited from the borderless digital terroir outside China, as well as Chinese internet giants like Tencent and Alibaba, which have tried to expand into the West.

Some Justice Department staffers have expressed internal concerns over plans to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Google—and what they view as an aggressive timeline favored by Attorney General William Barr. The department has been moving toward bringing a lawsuit as soon as this summer, but some lawyers involved in the yearlong investigation have expressed a belief that the department doesn’t have a camera-ready case right now and needs more t

Charter can charge Netflix and other online video streaming services for network interconnection despite a merger condition prohibiting the practice, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled. the decision overturns two merger conditions that the Obama administration imposed on Charter when it bought Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016.

The Department of Justice announced that CenturyLink has agreed to settle allegations that CenturyLink violated the court-ordered Final Judgment designed to prevent anticompetitive effects arising from its acquisition of Level 3 Communications. Despite provisions in the Final Judgment barring CenturyLink from soliciting customers that switched to the buyer of the divestiture assets, CenturyLink failed to comply, initiating contact on over 70 occasions over more than a year with former Level 3 customers who elected to switch to the divestiture buyer in the Boise City-Nampa, Idaho MSA (Boise