Ownership

AT&T will soon offer a new streaming video service thanks to its acquisition of Time Warner, and it will be buying more companies in order to beef up its advertising platform, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said. The streaming service will be free for AT&T mobile customers who subscribe to unlimited data plans and $15 a month for everyone else. AT&T will announce more acquisitions soon to improve its advertising system.

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to buy most of 21st Century Fox’s assets in a deal worth $52.4 billion, but things got complicated recently when Comcast made a rival offer that valued the business at $65 billion. It may stoke visions of blistering negotiations between high-powered media executives with big egos barking into phones or ruminating in closed-door meetings, but there are rules of engagement around mergers that are designed to civilize the process.

The Federal Communications Commission has opened a comment docket on the proposed T-Mobile-Sprint merger and signaled the deal is about to be filed with the commission. The two wireless companies announced April 29 that they had struck a deal to merge that valued the combined company at $146 billion (including debt). It is only the latest in a flurry of merger activity, from the approval of the AT&T-Time Warner deal by a federal judge to Comcast's announced play for 21st Century Fox assets.  The FCC has even set up its 180-day shot clock on the proposed T-Mobile-Sprint meld, though it w

The US Supreme Court agreed to hear Apple's bid to kill an antitrust lawsuit over the market for iPhone apps in a case that could shield e-commerce companies from consumer claims over high commissions. The lawsuit accuses Apple of monopolizing the app market so it can charge excessive commissions of 30 percent. Apple, backed by the Trump administration, says it can’t be sued because the commission is levied on the app developers, not the purchasers who are suing.

To spare you the pain of reading the 170-page opinion [of AT&T/Time Waner] yourself, I went through and pulled out some highlights.  You will note again and again that Judge Leon goes into incredible detail about the businesses of the past, like how the deal might affect cable TV negotiations, while naively glossing over the details of how media works in the present and future. (Buying Time Warner will allow AT&T to… put together clips of CNN to show on phones? Very innovative.) You will also note that the government put on what seems like a very, very weak case.

A Q&A with John Stankey, the new AT&T executive in charge of new Time Warner properties. 

Historians may look back on this week as a turning point in the evolution of the internet. First came the end of net neutrality rules which ensured that broadband and wireless providers couldn't act as gatekeepers picking and choosing who succeeds on the internet and who doesn't. Then a federal judge decided to allow AT&T, one of the largest broadband and wireless providers in the country, and Time Warner, a major media company, to merge without any conditions.

Ultimately, the internet could someday look like the current cable model where the internet service provider takes a portion of advertising revenue and subscriber fees. “This would be gradual and would most likely affect new services that would have been free, but we may now have to pay for,” said Marty Puranik, chief executive officer of cloud service provider Atlantic.Net.

AT&T announced it had completed its $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The Justice Department still has 60 days from the date of the ruling to file an appeal, even if the companies close the merger, and such a filing remained a possibility. There was a time limit on when the government could seek an injunction, because the merger agreement between the companies expires on June 21. If an injunction had been granted, the companies would have had to extend the date or AT&T would have had to pay Time Warner $500 million in what is known as a reverse termination fee.

As the race to become the first company worth $1 trillion enters the final lap, technology monopolies are dominating the stock market. The five biggest companies by market value are US tech stocks: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook. Between them they accounted for more than a third of the $2.7 trillion increase in value of the S&P 500 in the past 12 months. Worse, the top five now make up more than 15% of the S&P, the most for any top five since early 2000. Is it time to worry that the market is getting top heavy?