Ownership

Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim shot down the idea that new antitrust laws are necessary to address large tech companies, telling an audience of industry leaders that existing rules are ”perfectly equipped, at least for now.” Critics argue that tech companies have amassed significant market power through their vast networks of users and pools of data, but that their dominance is overlooked because their services are free or inexpensive. Delrahim contends, however, that price isn’t the only way government officials can measure how firms affect consumers.

This blog post addresses how the business side of journalism needs to evolve to maintain sustainable news production necessary for a healthy democracy. I discuss the basic business models for supporting journalism that have endured throughout the last few centuries of technological change, how these may be successfully adapted to the 21st Century, and what policies would facilitate the transition to these new models.

The United Kingdom is targeting the likes of Alphabet and Facebook by introducing a digital services tax that aims to raise about $500 million a year for the government. UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond unveiled the measure in his Autumn Budget. He said it was designed to hit the largest internet businesses, not start-ups. It would affect profitable companies with annual revenues that exceed about $640 million, he said.

Telecommunication companies AT&T and Verizon are both pursuing a strategy that marries content and distribution. But they are taking two different approaches and, so far, seeing radically different results. Verizon admitted that its media arm, Oath — which consists of AOL, HuffPost, Yahoo and other digital brands — is struggling to drive revenue.

Amid growing concern over the power of such behemoths as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other tech giants, in recent months there’s been a bipartisan push for better enforcement of antitrust rules–with even President Trump saying in August that their size and influence could constitute a “very antitrust situation.” The Federal Trade Commission has launched its most wide-ranging study of corporate concentration in America in more than 20 years with a series of hearings being held around the country.

In a brief filed in court, AT&T argues that the Department of Justice used bad numbers to come to the wrong conclusion about AT&T-Time Warner merger and a lower court was right to reject that conclusion and allow the deal. AT&T pointed out in its brief to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit that, "in the crucible of litigation, DOJ's claims were exposed to be both narrow and fragile," and ultimately fell apart. "Relying primarily on a theoretical model that purports to simulate the bargaining dynamics between programmers and pay-TV distributors, DOJ sought to prove that t

Although newer technologies have captured the public’s imagination and purse, the Federal Communications Commission continues to regard free over-the-air broadcasting as the lifeline for millions of Americans. Certainly, the deliberate exclusion of people of color from ownership of the airwaves would be profoundly anti-competitive. What could be a more inefficient deployment of resources than having the entrepreneurial, managerial, and creative wealth of one-third of the country unable to find expression in the nation’s most influential industries?

Major changes are afoot in Hollywood, spurred by a pattern of rapid corporate media consolidation. While these mergers have received critical attention, the conversation has largely ignored something else big: the implications that this media maneuvering may have for diversity in media representation. More specifically, given Hollywood’s historically barbed relationship with onscreen diversity, it makes sense to ask: How might issues of diversity play out in—and affect—the merger review process, if at all? Could it actually make things worse?

Joe Arpaio, the former AZ sheriff who finished a distant third in 2018 in a Republican Senate primary, filed a libel suit against the New York Times and a member of its editorial board, arguing that they had undercut his chances for another run.