DOJ says AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner will lead to far higher TV costs for consumers – Info Mac

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This, the DOJ says, will ultimately lead to consumers paying far more for pay-television services, with distributors inherently passing on the higher costs to their customers (via CNET):

“American consumers will pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year more for pay-television service, as distributors pass on their higher costs.”

“The outcome of this appeal will shape the future of the media and telecommunications industries for years to come by setting the standard for determining whether industry participants will be permitted to merge into vertically integrated firms that control valuable programming content as well as the means of distributing that content to consumers,” the brief said.

The initial decision that allowed the merger to go through was faced on “faulty logic and a deeply flawed assessment of the government’s evidence,” the DOJ wrote according to The Washington Post:

“It is fundamental to the economics of bargaining that a party derives leverage from having the ability to walk away, even if it never actually does so,” the Justice Department wrote.

The initial deal was approved at $85 billion, but now that it is in limbo and facing push back from regulators, it’s unclear what the future will bring.

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