SOURCE: TECH DIRT

 

Encouraged by AT&T’s massive merger victory this week, Comcast has made its own $65 billion acquisition offer for a large chunk of 21st Century Fox. According to the Comcast announcement, the company’s all cash $65 billion dollar offer is a notable step up from Disney’s own $52.4 billion all-stock package, setting up a showdown between two companies that have had a contentious relationship since Comcast’s 2004 failed hostile takeover attempt of Disney.

The deal includes the FX Channel, numerous regional sports networks, and a minority stake in European cable TV giant Sky, which would all be tacked on to the NBC Universal assets Comcast acquired back in 2011. Fox will however retain Fox News, Fox Sports, and Fox broadcasting, which will all remain under the existing Fox brand. In its statement, Comcast rolled out the usual claptrap about how the combination would be lovely for all involved:

“We have long admired what the Murdoch family has built at Twenty-First Century Fox. After our meetings last year, we came away convinced that the 21CF businesses to be sold are highly complementary to ours, and that our company would be the right strategic home for them.”

Comcast had previously hinted that it was waiting to see the outcome of AT&T’s own merger battle with the DOJ before making its own bid for Fox. Comcast and many analysts believe that the comically broad nature of AT&T’s court victory (based on a pinhole narrow reading of the markets by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who clearly has never heard of things like zero rating or net neutrality), means the precedent set will likely result in a DOJ that’s more hesitant to intervene in potentially problematic merger moving forward.

That’s especially true of vertical integration mergers, where modern U.S. antitrust law tends to be ill-equipped to handle some of the more complex new media anti-competitive concerns that pop up. Combined with the death of ISP privacy rules and the neutering of net neutrality, we’re creating a brave new landscape where there’s very little to stop giants like Comcast and AT&T from using their last mile monopolies–combined with massive ownership of content needed to compete with these giants–as anti-competitive bludgeons against consumers and competitors alike.

For example, there’s now nothing of note preventing AT&T and Comcast from exempting its own content (like HBO or a regional sports game) from arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps, while penalizing those who use a competitor’s service (Netflix, or the next Netflix). Similarly, there’s nothing stopping Comcast or Verizon from arbitrarily throttling competitors at interconnection points, driving up the cost for competitors to access their broadband subscribers. There’s an ocean of creative ways to hamstring competitors the government is now largely helpless to effectively police, and as the AT&T court win shows, the ISP claim that this isn’t a problem because antitrust will save us all clearly isn’t a valid argument.

With the FCC making it very clear it’s a glorified rubber stamp, that leaves the DOJ as the only real wild card in terms of whether any meaningful conditions get applied to this deal. Granted if you followed the NBC Universal merger, you’ll recall that Comcast has a pretty terrible history of ignoring merger conditions when it suits it, and regulators from both parties tend to do little more than grumble when the company tap dances around imposed restrictions (though that was a major reason why Obama-era regulators blocked Comcast’s 2014 attempted acquisition of Time Warner Cable (not to be confused with Time Warner)).

Obviously there’s still plenty of folks that see zero problems with massive broadband monopolies gobbling up countless media empires while paying millions of dollars to neuter state and federal oversight. And their theory that these kinds of deals are no problem because the market self-regulates (ignoring there is no free market competition in broadband to organically hold them accountable) will soon have a perfect opportunity to put their theories to the test.