Innovation or Monopoly? Panel Looks at AT&T-Time Warner Deal
AT&T, which controls a huge percent of the mobile telephone market, could exempt its mobile customers from data usage charges if they stream CNN content, but streaming independent news networks like Newsmax might continue to count against high-speed data caps.
Senators from both sides of the aisle needled the leaders of AT&T and Time Warner over the colossal merger in a almost 3-hour long session, which also included Dallas Mavericks owner, Shark Tank investor, and media entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who spoke as an expert witness.
During the hearing, Sen.
As a candidate, Donald Trump vigorously opposed the deal but he has not commented on the merger since the election, report John D. McKinnon, Thomas Gryta and Shalini Ramachandran for the Wall Street Journal.
You can have deals that help consumers, deals that don’t and this one is very complicated in terms of where that outcome is. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah – AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson kept making the promise that the merger would actually result in more choices and lower prices.
“Although vertical deals typically raise fewer concerns than horizontal deals, such deals nevertheless may still tend to substantially lessen competition”.
“Using bitcoin for speculative trading or people buying and selling bitcoin because they think it’s fun – that’s not an interesting business for us”, Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s chief executive and co-founder, said in aninterview with Reuters.
Mr Stephenson said the two firms, with no overlap in their services, would make it easier to offer innovative content and distribution in an era facing disruption from online services such as Netflix and Amazon.
Recently, the Department of Justice sued AT&T and its subsidiary DirecTV for price fixing and illegally colluding to harm consumers. Concerns have been raised that AT&T’s planned merger with AT&T would result in the company making it more hard and expensive for streaming competitors to license the content they need (HBO, etc.) to compete with AT&T’s new DirecTV Now streaming video service.
Kimmelman says the Justice Department should block this merger unless AT&T and Time Warner can show that it would benefit customers and not diminish competition. “I don’t see that opportunity here”.
He pointed to his own negotiations with AT&T involving getting Newsmax television on AT&T’s DirectTV satellite distribution system.
The deal was announced in October but was immediately met with opposition. The FCC also wrote to Verizon, which exercises zero-rating policies as well. What’s key is whether exempting certain apps favors an internet provider’s in-house service over those offered by rivals.
“The consumer is benefited from the aggregation”, said Sen. Orrin Hatch told BuzzFeed News. Even given all of this, Senator Al Franken and others had numerous doubts. “But I don’t know what part of the deal he’s referring to”.
That didn’t stop senators from lobbing questions at AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes.
United States politicians have grilled chief executives of the communications giants AT&T and Time Warner about whether their plans for one of the year’s biggest mergers would end up harming customers.
Since then, some of Trump’s appointments to his transition team have raised speculation on Wall Street that, despite Trump’s campaign statements, the merger may ultimately be viewed more favorably by the Department of Justice, which is tasked with reviewing the transaction. Time Warner’s TNT, TBS and CNN are among the 10 most expensive basic channels for those distributors, according to data from SNL Kagan.