With AT&T and Time Warner, Battle Lines Form for an Epic Antitrust Case<br />But in the past few years, as the internet has disrupted traditional media companies<br />and prompted some high-profile mergers, there has been a growing sense “that antitrust enforcement has been too lenient,” said Maurice Stucke, an antitrust professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law and a co-author of the article “Antitrust and the Marketplace of Ideas.”<br />Referring to Louis D. Brandeis, the former Supreme Court justice, he said, “There’s a populist, Brandeisian movement that’s rising.”<br />President Trump tapped into that sentiment during the campaign when he described the proposed AT&T-Time Warner combination as “a deal we will not approve in my administration<br />because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”<br />That’s a view shared by many progressive media critics, including an influential group of young antitrust professors<br />who have been calling for stricter review of vertical mergers, especially in media and entertainment.<br />The Justice Department’s merger guidelines don’t rule out divestitures in vertical merger cases, but suggest<br />that “tailored conduct remedies” can protect consumers “while still allowing the efficiencies that may come from the merger to be realized.”<br />A study by the Federal Trade Commission found that concerns about every vertical merger examined by the commission from 2006 to 2012 were resolved through “conduct remedies” rather than divestitures, and<br />that all these remedies had been successful at protecting competition.<br />That’s because the combination of AT&T and Time Warner is what’s known as a “vertical” merger, meaning<br />that the two companies don’t compete to any significant degree in their primary lines of business, which are telecommunications (AT&T) and entertainment (Time Warner).
