Ownership

Tech companies like Google and Facebook grew giant in part by rolling up startups that are now fully integrated into their businesses. Despite heated antitrust rhetoric, it would be a tall order for regulators to reverse hundreds of deals or force divestitures of the essential business lines those transactions helped build. As regulators review a decade of tech industry acquisitions for signs of monopolistic behavior, proposing remedies is going to be a tough challenge. Washington still has some tools to help counter competitive harms stemming from past mergers.

T-Mobile has laid off a number of employees within its Metro by T-Mobile prepaid business. The extent of the layoffs is unclear. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) union expects more layoffs after the merger is completed.

In the last quarter of every even numbered year, the Federal Communications Commission must publish a Communications Marketplace Report that, among other things, assesses the state of competition in the communications marketplace, including competition to deliver voice, video, audio, and data services among providers of telecommunications, providers of commercial mobile service, multichannel video programming distributors, broadcast stations, providers of satellite communications, Internet service providers, and other providers of communications services. In assessing the state of competiti

YouTube is a private forum and therefore not subject to free-speech requirements under the First Amendment, a US appeals court ruled. "Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said.

Less competition almost always means diminished service and higher prices. Telecom companies, seeing how the wind is blowing, are responding to the rise in streaming services by jacking up prices for broadband internet access. I get that pay-TV companies are sticking it to customers in part because their programming costs keep soaring. I also see how, from a purely business standpoint, if one part of your business is growing and another is declining, you increasingly rely on the growing part for profit.

AT&T President and COO John Stankey is worried about tech companies’ power. Stankey said he’s “really concerned about the concentration of economic power” in big tech companies and how they approach their “platforms’ influence on society.” Stankey’s concern about concentrated economic power is particularly funny given that AT&T now owns Time Warner, which controls HBO, Turner, and Warner Bros. It already operated DirecTV. It, too, has a lot of concentrated economic power.

Ethos Capital voluntarily committed to limit price hikes on .org registrations for the next eight years. Ethos framed this as a concession to the public, and strictly speaking, a 10 percent price hike limit is better for customers than completely uncapped fees. But 10 percent annual increases are still massive—far more than inflation or plausible increases in the cost of running the infrastructure powering the .org registry. Ethos Capital's proposed limits are also much more than historical increases in the .org fee.

Sprint and T-Mobile have agreed on new terms for their merger, as the wireless carriers race to close the deal. The parties will improve the exchange ratio in the all-stock deal for T-Mobile’s parent, Deutsche Telekom AG. Originally, 9.75 Sprint shares were to be exchanged for each T-Mobile share. Under the revised deal, SoftBank Group, which owns more than 80% of Sprint’s common stock, will exchange the equivalent of 11 of its shares for each T-Mobile share.

A trend that all Americans should be aware of — and angry about: Across industry after industry, sector after sector, power and market share have been consolidated into the hands of handful of players. In 2019, New York University economist Thomas Philippon did a deep dive into market concentration and monopolies in