Ownership

Federal Trade Commissioner Rohit Chopra set the stage for the agency’s look at tech platforms by focusing on how digital marketplaces harvest data, and how operators set the rules for buying and selling in the marketplaces.

AT&T chief executive officer Randall Stephenson floated the idea of selling CNN when he met with Justice Department antitrust chief Marakan Delrahim in Nov 2017 in an attempt to head off a government lawsuit challenging the company's proposed takeover of Time Warner, according to a deposition.

Sinclair is the largest owner of television stations in the United States, with a hundred and ninety-two stations in eighty-nine markets. It reaches thirty-nine percent of American viewers. It’s unclear whether Sinclair is attempting to influence the politics of its viewers or simply appealing to positions that viewers may already have—or both.

The Justice Department has minced no words in its reply to AT&T's defense of its purchase of Time Warner, telling a federal court that the company's brief was "little more than a revisionist 58-page summary of the district court’s opinion." Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim said AT&T's brief "never resolves the district court’s erroneous rejection of the economics of bargaining and the principle of corporate-wide profit maximization, which are the basis of our appeal.” DOJ sasy the court's main error was "that the merger will not increase AT&T’s bargaining leverage."

A Q&A with Sen Mark Warner (D-VA). 

Google’s plan to lower the risk of another privacy gaffe is likely to disrupt business for scores of app developers that build services using the wealth of data generated by the world’s most popular email service. The Alphabet unit said it is reining in the data it makes available to outside developers of Gmail apps as part of a broader effort to secure the privacy of its users.

We’re all falling for Alexa, unless we’re falling for Google Assistant, or Siri, or some other genie in a smart speaker. Privacy concerns have not stopped the march of these devices into our homes, however. Amazon, Google, and other tech corporations have grand ambitions. They want to colonize everyday space. The company that succeeds in cornering the smart-speaker market will lock appliance manufacturers, app designers, and consumers into its ecosystem of devices and services, just as Microsoft tethered the personal-computer industry to its operating system in the 1990s. 

The application of antitrust policy, through which the government seeks to shape the general rules of competition, has always been contentious. But for roughly 40 years there has been a consensus that its ultimate goal should be the welfare of consumers, broadly defined to mean maximizing overall economic growth.