Hey, AT&T. Help us out. Why is buying Time Warner a good idea? Fifteen US Senators are asking AT&T to provide them with an outline of how they plan to benefit the public with the $85.4bn acquisition of Time Warner. Democrats Al Franken (MN), Elizabeth Warren (MA), and Patrick Leahy (VT), as well as Independent Bernie Sanders (VT), signed on to the letter [PDF] calling for AT&T boss …
The point of the merger is to benefit the shareholders, which it will massively do.
Warren, Sanders and the rest are well aware of this, as are the other participants.
I can confidently predict the AT&T executives (and Time Warner ones too) will make whatever promises they're asked to.
Then they will go ahead and do whatever they were going to in the first place.
You're right, I did forget, so here's what they spent for the 2016 election cycle.
Crickey, no wonder there's so many millionaires in Congress.
@ matchbx
"Instead of two guys at the top of each company earning 50 gazillion dollars a year, you'll have one guy at the top of one company earning 100 200 gazillion dollars a year." (FIFY)
The board deferred this decision to the remuneration committee who agreed with the new guy at the top that this increase was necessary because the organisation is now larger, more complex, cross-market demographic integration, stretch KPIs, retaining key talent, ensuring they're incentivised and properly remunerated... (Management bollocks continues for 94 weeks until accelerated Executive stock plan and Golden Parachute have vested)
I suppose that everyone has an idea of who AT&T is. It seems that no one knows who Time Warner is.
Time Warner used to be a competitor of AT&T with its Time Warner Cable. TWC -- often colloquially referred to as "Time Warner" -- was sold off a few years ago, recently bought by Charter and is now Spectrum, which continues to be a competitor with AT&T, most notably in Internet, cable telephony, and cable television, which are now promoted at exactly the same "introductory" rates as AT&T's. How surprising.
Anyhow, Time Warner is now only a content company. It has nothing to do with "coverage," urban, rural, or otherwise. It is a large company, but it is NOT a competitor of AT&T. So the questions cited in the article -- "how coverage and reliability would improve – particularly in rural areas – and how the combined company would ensure that consumers have a choice in service providers and plans." -- are fairly stupid. Can the proposed bigger huger corporation be a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. But this merger is not antitrust material, especially if AOL Time Warner itself used to sell services and content at the same time and that was okay.
By the way, AOL was spun back off in 2009. And a proposal for 21st Century Fox in 2014 to buy Time Warner was cancelled due to worries about antitrust penalties. Content versus content: apples and apples I can understand.
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