AT&T defends Time Warner megadeal to skeptical lawmakers

Now their tone has become more encouraging.

He noted that the Department of Justice, in reviewing past mergers like the combination of Comcast and NBC Universal, found that the combined company would have incentives to harm competition, and put in place conditions to try to prevent it.

“Neither is in any sort of dominant position by themselves”, Cuban testified. He further stated that technology giants such as Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon have changed the video landscape entirely.

Familiar to many television viewers as a judge on “Shark Tank”, Cuban appeared this afternoon before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights to support the deal. “The notion that a provider would offer to exempt content from monthly data caps strikes me as something consumers should applaud”, Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.). “That is called capitalism”.

Senators questioned the heads of AT&T and Time Warner on a range of topics related to their proposed merger Wednesday.

Time Warner owns HBO, CNN, Cartoon Network and the Warner Bros film studio.

Lawmakers said the antitrust division of the Justice Department, the lead agency reviewing the merger, will need to examine zero rating, the practice in which internet providers exempt certain services from counting against the data limits of their customers.

YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Republican Michael Lee of Utah opened the hearing laying out his concerns.

The Minnesota Democrat asked Bewkes how the committee or the Department of Justice could be assured that once merged, the corporations wouldn’t use loopholes to stifle competitors or drive up prices. He has singled out CNN, the cable news network owned by Time Warner, with particular rancor for its election coverage.

“Speaking bluntly, what I think, what any of my colleagues thinks, may make no difference whatsoever because Donald Trump has said he’s going to block this merger, and I take him at his word, ” Blumenthal said.

During the hearing, the companies pitched a message that catered to the new administration: a populist promise of lower prices and the potential to build more wireless infrastructure through the merger. “Alone it will be very hard if not impossible for either [AT&T or Time Warner] to compete”. Stephenson said that he had not talked to Trump’s transition team.

He also said that when Time Warner owned a cable distributor, Time Warner Cable, “it never occurred to us to do anything different or restrictive when we owned it versus after”. But executives offered a new Direct TV Go product that provides a 100-channel package for $35 a month as proof of their intent to drive down prices.

“We will not withhold content to disadvantage someone else”, Stephenson said at a Senate subcommittee hearing. Their competitors have multiplied, he said.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire sports and media mogul who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, played evangelist for the deal in a fast-moving world of media and entertainment content.

Time Warner chief executive Jeff Bewkes told lawmakers Wednesday that it would not be in the company’s interest to deny content to other companies – not when cord-cutting is forcing TV providers to distribute their programs on as many platforms as possible.

Right now, AT&T has 26.3 million pay TV subscribers through DirecTV and AT&T U-verse service – controlling about 25 percent of the USA cable market.

Gene Kimmelman of the consumer group Public Knowledge warned that allowing the deal to proceed would likely mean “higher costs and fewer choices for video services, and lower-quality and less diverse programming”.