Innovation or monopoly? AT&T, Time Warner CEOs defend deal

Now their tone has become more encouraging.

At a Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing Wednesday, chaired by Sen.

The senate panel that faced the two telecom companies was made up of Republicans and Democrats, The Wall Street Journal reports, which made the discrepancy between the two parties incredibly clear with the direction of their questions.

“There are too few players in these markets already”. “The consumer is benefited from the aggregation”, he said. David Perdue (R-Ga.). “That is called capitalism”. “So they said on the record they wouldn’t discriminate”.

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.

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“We got a really aggressive letter from the Federal Communications Commission about zero-rating – that’s regulating pricing”, said Stephenson, speaking at the Business Insider Ignition conference. AT&T and Time Warner have not officially submitted their deal for regulatory review; the review might not include the FCC.

Kimmelman, invited to rebut that point by the subcommittee chairman, Sen. “My expectation is that the Department of Justice will make the determination whether this is competitive or not”.

But he was also concerned that President-elect Donald Trump, whose administration will decide whether to approve the merger, had said during the campaign that it should be blocked.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Bewkes tried to allay fears the new company would be too powerful.

Stephenson says he’s confident the merger will be approved despite the president-elect’s objection.

AT&T’s chief executive, Randall Stephenson, told CNBC before the hearing that he had not had contact with the Trump transition team. Kimmelman said that unless AT&T and Time Warner can show that their merger will do neither of these things, the government should reject it.

Stephenson told Klobuchar that the company would offer fair distribution. He, like Eisenach, supported an attempted deal between AT&T and T-Mobile. He added that AT&T had just introduced a streaming service with 100 channels for less than most cable television packages.

“For the first time in a long time we’re doing business plans”, he said. She also said AT&T could favor its own shows over independent content. It’s a big-time bet on synergy between a company that distributes information and entertainment to consumers and one that produces it. Their competitors have multiplied, he said.

“We need more companies with the ability to compete with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook”, said Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, which is a proponent of the merger. Delivering content to consumers in this app-driven world is not easy, it is very expensive and hard.

Stephenson touted DirecTV Now as “a 5G service being launched on a 4G network”, and noted products like it will help drive efforts to make 5G a reality. The controversy started quietly in late November, when the FCC sent a critical letter to AT&T accusing the company of “unreasonably discriminating” against other video services by offering its own DirecTV Now video service without the cost of data charges-something that companies like Netflix and SlingTV could never do without owning a wireless network.