Justice Dept. won't block AT&T purchase of Time Warner, mega-merger can proceed

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/14/att-timewarner.html

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Wow! This is just like a game of Monopoly being played out in real life. When do we all get mad and flip the game-board over?

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It’s worth noting that it’s not uncommon for DOJ to appeal mergers even after they’re consummated and get a court order unwinding them.

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And two more mergers were immediately announced after the decision.

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Well duh! It’s the Trump era! Monopolies are a requirement before you’re allowed to build real estate on properties you own!

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we can’t ever fix this now but a tiny partial workaround is to force municipal fiber to every home in the USA as if we were actually a modern country preparing for the future and internet is like water or electricity

then you kill the giants with 1000 cuts of micro-content providers, producers will be able to go to direct funding from netflix, amazon, etc. who do not care who your ISP is

it is a bit “fun” to watch msnbc go into convulsions trying to cover this though, since trump didn’t want the merger some newsreaders cover it as a good thing, but then they remember they are supposed to pretend they are progressive and not for mega-monopolies, but then they remember they work for a mega-monopoly, then they remember it’s a competing mega-monopoly

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Trump is against the merger for stupid reasons, of course, so it’s okay to ignore him this time.

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i just assumed he was against it because his palm wasn’t being greased enough.

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Perhaps, but he’s also mad at CNN, which is included in the merger. He wanted Time-Warner to sell the network before the merger could proceed. That’s the stupid reason.

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What happens if we all just stop watching their crap?

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I thought you just needed 4 little houses before you could build a hotel…

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Houses and hotels can only be bought when all of the spaces in the monopoly are owned by the same player.

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It will all be more convenient when we can have everything on one bill. And I mean everything, from cell phone bill to cans of soup.

I wonder if AT&T will get into health care soon. I’m look forward to more super-ultra-mega-mergers.

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“The department had six days to seek an injunction after a federal judge approved AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner on Tuesday. That decision is expected to prompt a series of other mergers, especially in the media industry.”

I wonder what a Federal Judge costs these days?

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The one thing I am reminded of is how a different company bought up Time Warner to be a juggernaut. How did that work out for AOL in the end, by the way? :face_with_monocle:

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Time for a rebranding of USA? UCA, United Corporations of America.

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I’m guessing somewhere between “more than I’ll make in my life” and “less than seems understandable as motivation for compromising an economy.”

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What I don’t get is why this was classified as a vertical move. There is this fiction at play whereby we are all supposed to pretend that AT&T and Time Warner are not direct competitors. We have to pretend that the AT&T Audience network which produces original content does not exist and doesn’t have 26 million subscribers.

I’d favour something more on the nose; like the Cabal, the Conglomerate, or the Mob.