Judge Rules AT&T Can Acquire Time Warner (wsj.com) 172
A federal judge said Tuesday that AT&T's $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner is legal, clearing the path for a deal that gives the pay-TV provider ownership of cable channels such as HBO and CNN as well as film studio Warner Bros. From a report: U.S. District Judge Richard Leon announced his decision in a packed courtroom, ruling that antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department had not proven their case against the merger. The decision, in one of the biggest antitrust cases in decades, is a milestone victory for AT&T as it looks to reposition itself in a rapidly evolving media landscape. Its deal for Time Warner, valued at roughly $80 billion, has been pending since October 2016. The acquisition means AT&T will be the nation's top pay-TV distributor, through its ownership of DirecTV, as well as the owner of some of the country's most sought-after channels: Time Warner's Turner networks -- including CNN, TBS and TNT -- as well as HBO, the most popular U.S. premium network.
Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really difficult to run a business in the US due to our shocking lack of regulations.
Re:Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:4, Funny)
Free market == monopoly (Score:2)
This is the free market's outcome right now. Unregulated, ie: free for businesses, only has monopolistic outcomes. Oh, and that same unregulated situation also leads to slavery.
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As everyone knows giving ordinary people choices just makes them confused and angry. Things will be much better when there is only one huge business in America, then no-one will need to be confused or angry when they need some service or product.
This will also have the benefit that the one company left will not need to employ any political lobbyists, as the senators and congressmen (not to mention the president) w
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oh, I had mod points yesterday but didn't use them.. that is funny :) LOL . Thanks :)
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Ah yes, another communistic jab at capitalism. But you and your red comrades are wrong here: Free markets absolutely depend on regulation. Capitalism in general just doesn't work without it. (And as it turns out, neither does communism, in spite of that idiot Marx claiming that it doesn't even need any government.) The problem many have is that some regulations are quite heavy handed. Think about it, if in a free market, people were allowed to just steal from you through securities fraud without any repercu
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Technically it is NOT illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to use your monopoly to take over other markets or other segments of your existing market. However, there is a secondary problem that has developed in the sense that now companies are so diversified that it is impossible to tell which markets they are not part of. I'm not sure the best solution ,but one thing that might help would be a 'truth in branding law' that requires a company to a single registered name / brand/ trademark. At least t
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Breaking up monopolies is _not_ orthogonal to free markets, since it is one tool to stop anti-competitive behaviour.
False. Having a monopoly does not equal anti-competitive behavior, rather breaking up a monopoly is one among many remedies that can be used. In the case of Nintendo (not a monopoly,) the remedy was fining the crap out of them, and fining them harder if they continued. The remedy for Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior was basically the same, and ultimately did not require a breakup to have the desired effect.
Google, for all intents and purposes, has a de-facto monopoly on search in Europe. By that I mea
Re: Free market == monopoly (Score:2)
The fact that there are different types of corporate entries at all is part of the government regulations of a free market. Laws need to be balanced to ensure the exercise of Commerce and user choice, while at the same time preventing one actor from destroying the ability of others to conduct commerce. It is a not an easy equation. More over the specific laws need change depending on your goals. Is it better to optimize wealth or optimize average wealth. It is bad for society line general if any busine
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Free markets can only exist without Government regulation - what people forget is that includes corporations, limited liability and 'intellectual property ', to name a few. They are all forms of government interference in the market.
If that was true, then it wouldn't be a free market, instead it would more closely resemble anarchy, and furthermore we wouldn't have any free markets at all as every single one of them is regulated. It only stops being a free market once price manipulation begins. Did you have a lobotomy, or did the meth cause permanent damage?
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If you want a choice of internet providers you should probably ask your local government to stop granting monopoly rights to a single company.
Which ISP has been granted a monopoly by the government? It would be nice to know which one I shouldn't be dealing with as a way of punishing one of them.
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Re:Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:4, Informative)
It's the typical business model in most cities as far as cable companies go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Thank you for your lecture. I've been involved in cable franchise issues before. You seem to know about the act of 1984, but can't remember the followup federal law that prohibits exclusive franchises. Without an exclusive franchise, there is no government-granted monopoly.
You cited the franchise ordnance for Seattly, but apparently failed to read it. Refer to 21.60.050 A. Read all the words.
Technically there's nothing there that necessitates a monopoly,
Nothing necessitates a monopoly, and nothing there GRANTS a monopoly, either.
but there's also nothing stopping a company from acquiring a non-compete clause either
Do you understand that federal law overrides local law in this area? It is against FEDERAL LAW for the city of Seattle to grant an exclusive franchise to ANY cable operator. (Since there are no franchise requirements for ISPs, that's the only franchise issue here.)
Comcast was quite notorious for doing that.
Of course Comcast would try for exclusive franchises while they were still legal. It's common sense for them. BUT -- they've been illegal for more then twenty years. The last franchise agreement between Seattle and Comcast was reached in 2017 -- and the expiring one wasn't exclusive either. The franchise ordnance you cite is explicit on this.
There are also a large number of states which have laws that attempt to hinder or outright prevent local municipalities from creating their own ISP,
This has nothing to do with cable companies, and in any case does not create a government-granted monopoly. It's irrelevant.
Personally I'm of the opinion that cities should be in charge of their own infrastructure
That's a different issue. You've claimed that Comcast has a government-granted monopoly in Seattle, and the existence of three franchised cable companies, along with federal law, proves you wrong.
and allow various companies to offer competing services to the city's residents.
I've already made friends with Google, and it tells me that there are at least 6 residential and 14 business ISPs serving Seattle, and of those 14 at least 7 are gigabit. This is what you call "no competition"?
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Thank you for your lecture. I've been involved in cable franchise issues before. You seem to know about the act of 1984, but can't remember the followup federal law that prohibits exclusive franchises. Without an exclusive franchise, there is no government-granted monopoly.
Which law specifically are you referring to, as there were laws in the mid-90's that stated as much, but many of those previsions were stripped away in subsequent revisions to those laws or other federal acts passed at later dates. There likely were (and perhaps still are) laws that prevent a monopoly on internet service in a general sense, but those were easily circumvented as long as some telco was selling dialup. A de facto monopoly is just as good as a de jure monopoly.
Nothing necessitates a monopoly, and nothing there GRANTS a monopoly, either.
I somewhat picked Seattle at rando
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There likely were (and perhaps still are) laws that prevent a monopoly on internet service in a general sense,
There is not now and never has been a government-granted monopoly for internet service. The cable television laws that allowed exclusive franchises and now prohibit them deal with cable television services, not ISPs.
The fact that there are 14 business-class ISPs at least for Seattle kind of proves this.
Some free market advocates seems to think that this means outlawing any kind of publicly owned entities from participating in the market,
This has nothing to do with outlawing municipal broadband. The reasonable restriction on municipal broadband systems is that they are deliberate and explicit attempts at bypassing the franchise contracts t
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When Seattle comes up in these conversations someone usually points out that once you get out of the city proper, internet coverage goes right into the toilet, with most addresses covered by only one or two options. Is this not true?
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with most addresses covered by only one or two options. Is this not true?
I don't know, and it is irrelevant to the issue of whether there is a government-granted monopoly status to any of them. The answer to that is "no".
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I'm losing track of who ate whom.
Time Warner was consumed by Spectrum. So is AT&T buying Spectrum or some leftover part of Time Warner?
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I'm losing track of who ate whom.
Time Warner was consumed by Spectrum. So is AT&T buying Spectrum or some leftover part of Time Warner?
Charter bought the ISP part of Time-Warner and branded it Spectrum. AT&T is now buying the content part (CNN, HBO etc) of Time-Warner.
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"Regulation" is what's keeping the current monopolies monopolies [wired.com] in the first place.
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This is Time Warner, the media company (owns a few TV stations), NOT Time Warner Cable, the cable company/ISP (now Spectrum). Although not as bad, it's not good either as you know the stations TW owns will disappear or royalties will go up for competing TV and streaming companies.
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Now, our business has the choice of exactly *one* shitty ISP. Fucking wonderful.
What are you talking about? AT&T wants to buy a media company, not another ISP.
It's not that an ISP buying a media company doesn't concern me (especially with net neutrality now dead.) It's just that this doesn't reduce your choice of ISP.
It's really difficult to run a business in the US due to our shocking lack of regulations.
I'm certainly not anti-regulation. It's just not clear to me what regulation you think is missing here.
Now I'll grab some popcorn and watch as the libertarians flame both of us.
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We desperately need ISP's to be regulated like our electrical utilities are. Our options for Internet access are either shitty mega-corporation #1 (AT&T) or shitty mega-corporation #2 (Time-Warner... apparently NOT the same Time-Warner...?).
It's so bad that we have to have dual connections at each of our locations, so when one fails (as they often do), we can still have basic connectivity.
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Single-payer Internet (Score:1)
No, we need electrical utilities deregulated like our ISPs are. The case for their de-facto nationalization, based on the mythical "natural monopoly" concept [mises.org], back then was completely bogus [wordpress.com].
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Why?
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The case for their de-facto nationalization, based on the mythical "natural monopoly" concept [mises.org], back then was completely bogus [wordpress.com].
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Those words do not answer the question. It seems, from the few comments I've read of yours, that you're an illogical moron.
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Because the nationalization made us less free — someone seeking to pursue happiness by creating an electricity-generation plant, is effectively barred from doing it by these fascist regulations [ronpaulinstitute.org]. That should be a good enough reason for anyone with principles.
For those, whose principles aren't so solid, the words: "The case for their de-facto nationalization, based on the mythical "natural monopoly" concept, back then was completely bogus," — provide additional explanation.
We've surrendered a libe
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How about this: Society as a whole greatly benefits from having reliable and affordable electrical service.
I'm sorry if you feel "less free" because of it, but your feelings aren't as important as the rest of society's needs.
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That's an argument for nationalizing everything: food-production, house-cleaning, television and other media, automobiles...
So, you subscribe to the principle of: "The common interest before self-interest"?
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The world isn't as black and white as you make it out to be. Read a lot (not just that Ayn Rand junk). Think a lot. Best of luck!
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You are yet to identify the criteria — everything you said about nationalizing the Internet-service provision also applies to everything else.
Plus, I would still like a clarification on whether you still subscribe to the principle of "The common interest before self-interest". You certainly did subscribe to it 2 hours ago — has that changed?
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Ok, so there is a multitude of criteria. And yet, for some reason, you wouldn't give even one example... Your argument was:
I can replace the words "electrical service" with just about anything: "clothing", "kitchen appliances", "automobiles", "news-media" — and the statement will still be true. So, if you don't want to nationalize TV-stations, you must offer some criteria. Why is it
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Oh, wow, name-calling... An admission of an argument lost...
This is bullshit, of course, but I'm not arguing with you any more.
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You never started to.
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Who was talking about phone companies, you illiterate idiot?
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No offense, but what rock have you been living under where "media companies" haven't become ISPs and often the only alternative ISPs to existing ILECs?
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We are here to discuss AT&T buying Time Warner - the media company that is also 40% of all wired Internet connections in the entire country and serves Internet to 29 states.
Time Warner [wikipedia.org] spun off Time Warner Cable [wikipedia.org] which was snarfed up by Charter Communications [wikipedia.org] in 2016. Time Warner is on the list of US ISPs [wikipedia.org]. I don't mind you being wrong, but there was no reason to be so rude.
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Time Warner [wikipedia.org] spun off Time Warner Cable [wikipedia.org] which was snarfed up by Charter Communications [wikipedia.org] in 2016. Time Warner is NOT on the list of US ISPs [wikipedia.org].
FTFY, although I'm sure you meant to add what I did. Thanks for the informative post.
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There are a lot of reasons to hate this, mostly dealing with concentrated content/IP ownership. However, IIRC, the ISP service is being (or already was) spun off.
Cancer beats freedom! (Where's the news?) (Score:4, Funny)
This calls for the more complete form of my sig:
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Truthful - Coerced) Choice{~5} != (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)
You have hit on the key term "~5" in your brief comment. Zero or one choice is not a meaningful choice. Two is the starting point of freedom, but most of us actually max out around 5 choices at a time. By the time you get up to 20 or 30 choices, you're helpless and the advertisers or slick salespeople are going to pull your strings, driven by the same kind of insane profit maximization that ATT is worshiping with this EVIL merger.
Short summary: Capitalism is deader than Communism. Socialism is sick and Libertarianism is a sick fantasy. The most successful governments now appear to be Putin's style of Kleptocracy or Xi's style of slightly benevolent Dictatorship. #PresidentTweety wants to combine the worst of those two, though he also likes Kim Jong-un's style. We are so phucked. Corporate cancerism RULZ.
In religious terms: There is no gawd but profit, and ATT wants to be a YUGER prophet!
Solution? Don't hold your breath, but how about a progressive tax on corporate profits linked to market share. In your [DogDude's] situation, now that ATT is the monopolist in your market, they would have to pay the highest tax rate on all of the profits they earn there. The goal would be to encourage them to reproduce by fission, but if they don't, then the taxes will pay for (1) extensive monitoring by honest [LOL] and unbribed [ROFLMAO] government regulators (to make sure they aren't abusing their customers too badly) and for (2) research into ways to break the monopoly. (LTE is actually such a technology, though it is actually being used by the cancers that own it to prevent breaking their monopolies.)
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The most successful governments now appear to be Putin's style of Kleptocracy or Xi's style of slightly benevolent Dictatorship
How do you define successful?
Listing countries by Human Development Index [wikipedia.org] tends to show countries with left leaning social policies and centrist to slightly right economic ones. A mix of socialism and capitalism.
Picking other indices (longevity, happiness etc.) mixes the ranking, but not the conclusion. Extremes of any sort tend to be unstable and not especially successful over the long term.
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Good question. I was writing at the level of real world power plays between nations. For example, I would argue that ZTE was a largely criminal corporate cancer that had even earned bankruptcy, but Xi was able to bend little Trump over his knee and change his pointy little mind.
At the level you are writing, "successful" would point mostly at the Scandinavian counties, but Putin is losing little sleep worrying about them. Though Putin's personal wealth is unknown, the high estimates are around $200 billion,
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Thank you for the reply. It looks like I've misunderstood you when you've used 'successful governments' and appreciate the clarification.
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I certainly won't hold my breath for it, but what is needed is a corporate income tax, not on their profits. Taxing profits still permits using a corporation as a tax shelter. A corporation which cannot be successful while paying income taxes should go away and let someone more efficient take their space in the market.
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I think you are being confused by the complexity of tax laws. It sounds like you are trying to avoid the case of clever deductions where a corporation's losses can be used to evade taxes. I think such cases are almost always created with bribes to politicians, but the underlying rationales are absurd, usually something along the lines of "You have to protect this industry until it can recover" or "There will be too much suffering if you let this company die."
From my perspective, if a company cannot generate
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Still better than much of Seattle where the city council gave monopolies to one cable company(Comcast) and one telco(Qwest), but they didn't require them to offer service. Just sucks that I have dial-up at home and so many other coworkers do too.
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Still better than much of Seattle where the city council gave monopolies to one cable company(Comcast)
There are currently three "cable companies" franchised with the city of Seattle, and in 2015 the city did away with the 'franchise zones' that limited service areas.
There is no requirement for a franchise for an ISP. The "web" shows that there are at least 6 residential ISPs and 14 business class, with at least 7 of the latter offering gigabit network speeds.
What monopoly are you referring to?
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In point of fact, regulations are probably responsible for the lack of competition in your area.
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Re: Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:2)
Re: Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:2)
Yes. This. Regulation can be beneficial OR detrimental. Or often enough, a little of both.
Re: Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:2)
No one wants that. Unintended consequences.
As the saying goes (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: As the saying goes (Score:2)
"proof is what our justice system currently works on."
That, and big suitcases full of cash.
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Re: As the saying goes (Score:2)
The judicial system is corrupt from top to bottom. If you expect us to believe they did anything other than accept a big old bribe, the burden of proof is on you.
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And of course, it's not just ISP's. The US also desperately needs some reg
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Now, our business has the choice of exactly *one* shitty ISP. Fucking wonderful.
Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are now two different companies. The Cable subsidiary was sold off to Charter Communications in 2016 and now goes by Spectrum in most markets. AT&T is buying the former parent company Time Warner for its media properties.
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cha-ching! (Score:2)
Something tells me a federal judge is going to be buying a new Tesla this week!
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This deal will be great for all of us!
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ISPs, bah.. they're all crappy. The real problem is ...what if you're a Comcast customer and you turn to HBO for John Oliver and there's a message saying, "Comcast is sorry we can't air this channel anymore..."
And now the only way to watch HBO is via DirectTV, or pay for it directly via Fire, etc...
I predict that pirating will become more commonplace as more of the pipes own more of the content. Already there's talk that Netflix and Google should start building out their own networks.
Can we just declare the
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That's so adorable, you got your hands on a rare copy of Baby's First Sound Bite.
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did you? i mean china does censor pretty much everything so not sure what YOU actually read.
Re: Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:3)
Smith's Wealth of Nations is not about capitalism or "free markets". The famous "invisible hand" quote is not particularly important in the overall scheme of the book.
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http://www.mondopolitico.com/l... [mondopolitico.com]
Re:Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
if you dont like a free market, move to cuba or canaDUH
The term "free market" is ambiguous. It can mean "free of regulation" or it can mean "free of barriers to competition". In practice, these two things are often opposites, especially with businesses that are natural monopolies or that have strong network effects.
Re:Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:2)
You are correct of course, that a "free market" where oligarchs have unbridled economic power rarely produces widespread opportunity and prosperity, which I assume is what you mean by a "fair market". But I think it is a mistake to tie that valid analysis into a stultifying left/right framework.
The overwhelming majority of self-identified liberals and conservatives both favor "fair market" policies intended to promote common prosperity. Only tiny minority interest groups like Libertarians and Intersectional
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And since the "free" market has failed to ever produce one fair market, us liberals are right.
It's ok. You can say it.
I never said "you" (including myself, being a pretty mainstream left-of-center/Social Democrat) weren't.
Re: Are you fucking kidding me? (Score:2)
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Oh great. Way to put a buzzkill on a great, profanity-laden rant.
More monopolies (Score:2)
Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Just have AT&T divest its wireless and broadband services as a condition of the merger.
There are no conditions (Score:4, Informative)
now fox will be sold to Comcast or Disney (Score:2)
now fox will be sold to Comcast or Disney
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I'm so glad I've rediscovered books. Modern entertainment just keeps getting worse and worse. Everything is easily predictable and often follows the one of a few emotional curves (forget what writers call them: attention grabber -> back story -> issue -> upcoming hero -> hero falters -> you can do it speech -> hero winning -> plot twist -> hero losing -> hero wins). Books and older series are better. Sometimes even the good guys lose.
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That would have nothing to do with net neutrality. T-Mobile has already been doing something similar for years. Not charging a consumer for a specific merchandise (in this case packets received) is no more about net neutrality then buy 1 get 1 free at a grocery store. When it because a issue with net neutrality is AT&T starts giving priority to Direct TV traffic vs Netflix thus making it difficult or impossible to watch Netflix on there network while making it really easy to watch there product. N
att used to block facetime on some plans so isp tv (Score:2)
att used to block facetime on some plans so isp that also have tv can try to block some services unless you say buy an entertainment service can comes with tv or you buy say $100/mo+ internet plan. Say internet $70 + $50 unlimited (need to unlock entertainment service when you don't take an TV plan)
Hell Comcast can do that in some markets it's only comcast or slow dsl as your internet choices.
What? You are surprised? (Score:1)
Americans are so willing to give up everything for convenience that they have completely forgotten who they used to be. Only 3 major players even control the news media in the US anymore. What do you expect? Most of our money goes to military endeavors anymore. Everything you type or say is recorded somewhere. Our "government" is nothing but people put into power by large corporations. Do you really think anyone is representing you anymore? We all (almost all) have failed to see what is coming. I cr
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Show up to your primaries (Score:5, Insightful)
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you'll be paying $200/mo for high speed internet in a few years
That's only for Premium Internet though, the full package. I'm sure you'll be able to get a basic package pretty cheaply, giving access to all of the approved websites and services with only a fair and equitable number of injected ads.
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You neglect to mention the suit against this merger was presented by a Republican president's DOJ, who continued to bring the lawsuit originally brought by the preceding Democrat's DOJ, rather than dropping it, to paraphrase a better worded post above.
It isn't about party, (both had opposition to it), it's about money.
And really, I think the judge's statement that insufficient evidence was presented to prevent the merger is laughable. No evidence should be needed to present a case that argues that a merger
Letâ(TM)s make its simple (Score:1)
Any merger worth over x billion must inherently be anti-competitive.
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Any merger worth over x billion must inherently be anti-competitive.
I tried to post something similar a few hours ago. As we obviously can't be trusted to decide what is and is not a monopoly maybe we should just start taxing companies on market cap. An extra 10% per year per $100 billion would probably work nicely. So if you're an $800 billion dollar company like amazon or google then either start selling off chunks of your business or expect to pay 10% on the second 100 billion, 20% on the third $100 billion, etc.... Then we don't have to try to decide if and how to b
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Interesting idea in spirit, but silly in practice -- market capitalization has very little to do with actual financial performance or revenue. Even taxing revenue or forcing sell off based on revenue is a more practical approach than what you propose.
Revenue and profits vary greatly by industry. Market cap or assets is pretty straightforward. Do we really need/want trillion dollar companies? Certain industries like chip manufacturers and mining are massive operations that require significant capital and economy of scale but economy of scale has diminishing returns. At some point the negatives of massive corporations outweighs any benefit of economy of scale. Would amazon really be that much different if it was only a $100 billion dollar company in
What exactly went wrong? (Score:2)
What was the motivation of the judge? Why did he feel there was no antitrust violation? Is this a failure of the judiciary or a failure of the DoJ to build a decent case?
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"But you're essentially a sharecropper now!"
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In 1978 when the Islamists began attacking the republic of afghanistan because the government was introducing reforms aimed at improving the life of women, increasing education and ironically, removing usury, the Soviet union intervened to protect what most western people would think are better morals.
No comrade, that's not what happened. USSR invaded Afghanistan because they wanted to turn it into yet another soviet state as they had already been doing since WWII ended. The Afghanis didn't take kindly to that, and killed your fellow comrades, which actually made a decent contribution to what ultimately became end stage communism. You know that camo jacket and AK47 Osama was always sporting in his videos? He took them from a dead Russian general.
weak and fearful so they began arming the Mujahideen and provided them with support
Actually we didn't. This is the biggest myth among democrat
Re: Trump surrenders to North Korea (Score:1)
Oh I'm no communist. I'm too wealthy for that. Its not revisionist nonsense. The us installed the Taliban. The us installed Sadam Hussein. And many more evil dictators. The list of US war crimes and human rights attrocities outweighs what the Soviet union ever did. Maybe try step back from the propaganda for a moment.