Ownership

Potential deals between 21st Century Fox and Walt Disney (or Comcast), Viamcom and CBS, and AT&T and Time Warner have producers wondering just who the TV programming honchos will be. New ownership or management could lead to changes in programming strategy, determining which shows get renewed or canceled, where they fall on the schedule, and what kind of resources and marketing budget they get. The uncertainty adds to the other challenges facing the industry including competition for talent and viewers from deep-pocketed streaming services.

Klout, the service which measured online influence and assigned people a zero-to-100 score based on their social media followings, will shut down on May 25. Everyone’s Klout scores will go away, and with them, any remaining chance that businesses will treat us better or worse based on those scores. But the data Klout gathered from people presumably lives on. Lithium Technologies, the social-media marketing company that bought Klout in 2014, implied in its announcement that it has integrated Klout’s software and data into its own products. 

[Commentary] The proposition here is simple: This T-Mobile/Sprint deal will shrink the market for nationwide mobile wireless service from four players to three, giving consumers fewer choices and increasing the likelihood that prices will be higher and service offerings will be less consumer-friendly. Decreased competition in a market that is already consolidated? This deal should be an easy one for the government to reject. Companies seeking to merge typically promise the sun, moon, and the stars to regulators in order to obtain approval, and T-Mobile and Sprint are no different.

21st Century Fox signed a definitive agreement with Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media to acquire seven stations for approximately $910 million. The move is designed to speed federal approval of the $4.6 billion Sinclair-Tribune merger and follows news of spinoffs of 23 other stations from that deal. The transaction will grow Fox Television Stations' coverage to nearly half of all US households, and its market presence to 19 of the top 20 DMAs, including the addition of key markets that align with Fox's sports rights.

[Commentary] Is our government bound by the rule of law or the rule of President Trump? The Department of Justice's Antitrust Division must consider this question. Here's why. There is a two-part, simple legal standard for deciding whether the proposed combination of Sprint and T-Mobile should be allowed. Would it harm competition in such a way that consumers would suffer?

T-Mobile’s John Legere and Sprint’s Marcelo Claure met with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to sell their $26.5 billion deal. Legere and Claure also met with FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr.

T-Mobile appears to be rallying former regulators and legislators to its side, while some congressional Democrats and some public interest groups are formulating their arguments against the deal. Sitting in the middle are the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice, which must sign off on the transaction. It’s unclear how those agencies might act on the deal: Although most observers see the Trump administration as favorable to big businesses, the DoJ filed a lawsuit against AT&T’s attempts to purchase Time Warner.

The Justice Department is urging a federal judge to block AT&T-Time Warner’s proposed merger or require a significant sale of assets, rather than impose “behavioral” conditions on the deal like an agreement to arbitrate disputes with distribution rivals. In its post-trial brief, the government says that US District Judge Richard Leon could allow the merger on the condition that it not include Time Warner-unit Turner networks, or that AT&T sell off DirecTV.

[Commentary] University of California-Berkeley's Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber coined the term “wicked problem” to refer to problems that had reached a level of complexity that made them impossible to define, let alone solve. Every solution to a wicked problem is a one-shot operation: There are no second chances, because any change you make will have affected the whole system. The story of Sinclair’s rise from local TV station to major propaganda machine is a case study in Rittel and Webber’s “one-shot operation” warning. 

The Santa Clara Principles offer guidance to internet platforms on how to provide users with meaningful due process when their posts are taken down or their accounts are suspended, and to help ensure that the enforcement of company content guidelines is fair, unbiased, and respectful of users’ free expression rights. The three principles urge companies to:

• Publish the numbers of posts removed and accounts permanently or temporarily suspended due to violations of their content guidelines;