Ownership

Verizon is in advanced talks to acquire Frontier Communications in a deal that would bolster the company’s fiber network to compete with rivals including AT&T. A deal would be sizable, given Frontier’s market value of over $7 billion. The company, cobbled together by several deals over the years, provides broadband connections to about three million locations across 25 states. Verizon, the top cellphone carrier by subscribers, has faced increased pressure from competitors and from cable TV companies that offer discounted wireless service backed by Verizon’s own cellular network.

A federal judge recently told us what we already knew: that Google is a monopolist in the Web search market. In his scathing 277-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta noted that Google has an 89.2 percent share of the overall search market and a 94.9 percent share of searches conducted on mobile devices. Fixing the problem will be tricky.

The reasons why municipalities and cooperatives build community-owned broadband networks are numerous, often fueled by years of frustration with the spotty, expensive service offered by the big monopoly incumbents.

While billionaires have pushed Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA) to depart from President Joe Biden’s antitrust policy, the Democratic Party seems to be doubling down. The word “competition” comes up 18 times in the party’s 2024 platform, compared to nine in the 2020 version.

U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett blocked Discovery, Fox, and Disney's new sports streaming service, Venu, from launching, a major blow to the effort. Judge Garnett that the new offering would “substantially lessen competition and restrain trade.” Fubo, a sports-centric streaming service, sued the three companies earlier this year after they announced the joint venture.

A federal judge is actively considering breaking up Google after a landmark ruling last week that the tech giant has illegally abused its search monopoly.  A court

A recent San Francisco fundraiser for Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA), which raised more than $12 million, was the latest in the Harris campaign’s outreach to tech Democrats and an extension of a relationship with Silicon Valley elites that goes back more than a decade. Harris has extensive ties to some of the tech industry’s most influential players and prolific donors, in part due to her time as California’s attorney general and later,

Brightspeed, the company that bought Lumen Technologies’ copper assets in 20 markets, has won $3.7 billion in new financing to spend toward its fiber buildouts. The financing comes from a syndicate of bankers and other investors led by Brightspeed’s parent company Apollo Global Management. Apollo paid $7.5 billion for Brightspeed in 2022. Brightspeed CEO Tom Maguire said, “The same people who funded the original go-around are back again. I take that as a good sign.

A federal judge said on August 5 that Google broke the law to kneecap competition in web search in ways that entrenched the company’s power. The next steps, which involve proposing legal fixes to undo Google’s behavior, are essentially about imagining an alternative future in which Google isn’t Google as we know it. We have the internet we have, and it’s hard to imagine something different or if you’d like it more, but here are six possible alternati

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, Judge Amit Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business. Judge Mehta said that Google had abused a monopoly over the search business.