Not so fast, doc. Justice department appeals AT&T Time Warner decision

15 July 2018 by Steve Blum
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In a terse filing, the federal justice department gave notice last week that it is appealing a judge’s decision to allow AT&T to buy Time Warner’s content companies, with no strings attached.

The justice department didn’t outline a specific goal, but one possibility is that it wants AT&T to give up some of its new empire, perhaps Turner channels such as CNN. According to a story in Variety by Ted Johnson, it could turn out to be a risky maneuver…

Larry Downes, senior industry and innovation fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, said that the Justice Department’s appeal carries risks for the government. Leon’s decision does not hold precedent, he noted, while the D.C. Circuit decision likely would.

“The court could use the opportunity to comment generally on the legal standards for opposing vertical mergers, for example, or reaffirm in broad terms the general principles of consumer harm that have guided antitrust law for the last forty years — rejecting, in effect, recent calls for expanding antitrust to take into account the economics of online platforms that don’t charge consumers and therefore don’t raise prices when they acquire other companies,” he said via email…

“The DOJ is really gambling — and could wind up losing not just this case but its ability to challenge future deals in a wide range of industries currently undergoing disruption,” he said.

Perhaps. But federal trust busters won’t get anywhere by rolling over and playing dead either. Immediately after the decision, Comcast saw daylight and moved to add Fox to its menagerie of captive content. AT&T followed up with a price hike for its Internet video service, DirecTv Now, repudiating lawyerly claims it made during the trial that consumer costs would come down.

Vertical mergers – where a company acquires its supply chain – aren’t always anticompetitive. But it always will be when dominant, monopoly model Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast can manipulate broadband traffic to favor in-house content, as the end of network neutrality allows them to do.