Tag: Competition law

Nearly everyone uses Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and nearly everyone can see how smaller businesses have been hurt by their dominance. Nearly everyone has an opinion about whether they are too powerful, whether they know too much, whether they ought to be admired or feared. There are stark differences between, say, Senator Bernie Sanders’s calls to “break them up” (usually a reference to banks), and former Vice President Joe Biden’s “cooperative” approach. Mr. Biden (still undeclared), has taken the position that big corporations should not be “singled out” and that their chief executives can be persuaded to shoulder their responsibilities toward workers and communities. (In the late 1970s, Mr. Biden resisted efforts to strengthen the antitrust laws, though his views may have changed as the law has grown weaker.) The largest question mark among the major candidates is Senator Kamala Harris of California, who represents the state where the largest tech monopolies are headquartered. She was tough in her questioning of Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, during congressional hearings last year, but she has been silent on the questions raised by tech monopolies. The variety of antitrust positions in the emerging Democratic field means that it will no longer be enough for a candidate to mutter a few platitudes about big corporations and let the party’s technocrats decide what the nation’s approach to monopoly power ought to be. Such questions of economic policy affect us all and therefore should sit at the core of a majoritarian democratic process. Indeed, they once did: Today’s interest in excessive corporate power recalls a time — 1912, to be exact — when antitrust policy was the central economic issue in the presidential race.

But the trial itself, starting later this month, is shaping up to be a fight focused on classic issues in antitrust law. In court filings on Friday, the Justice Department and AT&T laid out the arguments that they plan to make in the trial. Just the opposite: It is about making Time Warner and AT&T more competitive during a revolutionary transformation that is occurring in the video programming marketplace.” The trial, one of the biggest antitrust showdowns in decades, will begin March 19 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. AT&T originally argued to the court that the Justice Department’s suit was a case of “selective enforcement” — that the government was essentially blocking the deal because the president was against it. The company would have a leading position to negotiate licensing deals with rival telecom and media firms. Rivals such as Comcast, Dish and Sony are expected to be called as witnesses to reveal details about their business dealings with AT&T and Time Warner in the past. The Justice Department is expected to argue that a combined AT&T and Time Warner would have the incentive to make it harder for competing media companies to distribute their programming through AT&T, and for Time Warner brands to limit their distribution outside of AT&T. AT&T said it would challenge the government’s arguments that the merger would increase consumer prices and hamper competition by raising licensing fees for Time Warner content. The company said it would argue that the merger of two companies that do not compete would be a stronger competitor in a market that had many new companies from Silicon Valley, like Facebook and Netflix. “As will be demonstrated at trial, the new video revolution is defined by the spectacular rise of Netflix, Amazon, Google, and other vertically integrated, direct-to-consumer technology companies as market leaders in both video programming and video distribution,” AT&T said in its brief.