Ownership

In its continued effort to gain approval for its merger with Sprint, T-Mobile has pledged to keep supporting Sprint's low-income Assurance Wireless brand "indefinitely." Assurance along with Sprint's other prepaid brands, Boost Mobile and Virgin Wireless, and T-Mobile's Metro are popular with lower-income and cost-conscious Americans for their cheaper alternatives to traditional plans than the main four wireless networks.  "The digital divide is real and we want to help eliminate it," T-Mobile president Mike Sievert said.

People in China use WeChat for everything from sending messages to family to reading news and opinion to ordering food to paying at vending machines to paying for a taxi. For Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, WeChat is both his greatest challenge and the model for the future of his company. WeChat is what Facebook has yet to become.

The internet consists of tiny bits of code that move around the world, traveling along wires as thin as a strand of hair strung across the ocean floor. The data zips from New York to Sydney, from Hong Kong to London, in the time it takes you to read this word. Nearly 750,000 miles of cable already connect the continents to support our insatiable demand for communication and entertainment. Companies have typically pooled their resources to collaborate on undersea cable projects, like a freeway for them all to share.

A Q&A with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons.

Rep Anthony Brindisi (D-NY) has introduced the Transparency for Cable Consumers Act to make operators that have been fined by state public service commissions to have to report back to the Federal Communications Commission.

New York government officials still haven't followed through on a July 2018 decision to kick Charter Communications out of the state. Negotiations between Charter and the state have dragged on for months past the original deadline, and the sides say they're getting closer to an agreement that would allow Charter to remain in New York. The state Public Service Commission (PSC) voted on July 27, 2018 to revoke its approval of Charter's 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC), after accusing Charter of failing to meet merger-related broadband expansion commitments.

The 63-page filing by T-Mobile the week fo March 4 was meant to demonstrate that its purchase of rival Sprint is in the public interest. Yet the filing’s appearance -- which prompted US regulators to pause their review -- had some observers wondering if it’s a sign of trouble for the $26.5 billion deal. “At this stage of the game, filing something elaborate like this is not a sign of strength,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a media lawyer at Georgetown University Law Center.

With Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, at least one chamber of Congress could be poised to meaningfully update consumer and competition protection rules for the internet age. In doing so, they would be well advised to follow Republican Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts in the industrial age. Today, the internet barons are making the rules for the new economy. Roosevelt’s admonition is simple: There must be a “still higher power” that makes rules for the protection of the public interest.

America’s big tech companies have achieved their level of dominance in part based on two strategies: 1) Using Mergers to Limit Competition Using and 2) Proprietary Marketplaces to Limit Competition.