Ownership

The prospect that "third parties [could] undercut...federal enforcement decisions" — such as the pending T-Mobile/Sprint merger — is one of the greatest concerns in the new antitrust environment, Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim explained. He reminded people that the Federal Communications Commission, the Department of Justice, and many states approved the merger in 2019. But then attorneys general from 10 states and the District of Columbia sued to prevent the alliance. A decision is still pending.

AT&T's decision to prevent Time Warner-owned shows from streaming on Netflix and other non-AT&T services reduced the company's quarterly revenue by $1.2 billion, a sacrifice that AT&T is making to give its planned HBO Max service more exclusive content.

The death of former WorldCom chief Bernie Ebbers at 78 brings back memories of the “broadbandit” era of telecoms around the turn of the century, when a bubble burst that inflicted huge damage on the industry and its investors, contributing to the rise to pre-eminence of China's Huawei today. Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years in jail in 2005, but was released in Dec 2019 on compassionate grounds to spend his final weeks with his family. He was convicted for orchestrating an $11 billion accounting fraud at WorldCom that led to the biggest bankruptcy in US history at the time.

Since day one as a Federal Communications Commissioner, I have been speaking up and speaking out to advance diversity in broadcast media. I am also focused more broadly on what we as public servants should be doing to achieve the mandate in the Communications Act of making communications available to all Americans. We must do better in fulfilling the FCC's obligation to promote ownership by women and people of color.

Here are the leading presidential candidates’ positions on Big Tech.

T-Mobile and Sprint are waiting for a federal judge to rule on whether they can merge, but the companies face another hurdle even if they overcome that legal challenge: the California Public Utilities Commission. The state utilities overseer is the only such body that hasn’t yet blessed the $26 billion deal, and its continuing review threatens to further delay—or even derail—a merger that has dragged on for nearly two years. The state body has until July to vote but might extend that timeline further.

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google took a public lashing at a congressional hearing at the University of Colorado in Boulder (CO), where some of their smaller rivals, including Sonos and Tile, pleaded with federal lawmakers to take swift action against Big Tech. Democratic and Republican lawmakers at times appeared stunned as they heard tales of technology giants wielding their massive footprints as weapons, allegedly copying smaller competitors’ features or tweaking their algorithms in ways that put new companies at a costly disadvantage.

The House Communications Subcommittee was in agreement that more needed to be done to boost minority media ownership, but Republican members focused more on what they said broadcasters and cable operators were already doing to address the issue. The hearing, "Lifting Voices: Legislation to Promote Media Marketplace Diversity", looked at various bipartisan bills to promote more diversity data collection and analysis at the Federal Communications Commission and provide more access to capital.