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AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

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Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#221

Post by njarboe »

rayiner wrote: post #219

Cognitive dissonance is interesting. For example, tech folks generally love Japan and Hong Kong's railroads. But those systems work so well because of the exact sort of vertical integration techies get apoplectic about when it comes to the Internet: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-inf... . JR and MTR not only are private companies that own and operate the railroads, they own a ton of the land…

Lots of trolly transportation systems were built in the US with the same model. Build a line out to the cheep farmland you own near a city/town, charge low fairs (not nearly enough to cover your capital costs and running costs), but now you can sell lots for housing at 10x or 20x the price you bought the land for. Once all the lots are sold, having the trolly pay for itself is difficult, especially after people can buy cars(hello model T) and not pay your monopoly trolly ride price. Almost all those trolly lines were shut down.

Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#222

Post by rayiner »

njarboe wrote: post #221
rayiner wrote: post #219

Cognitive dissonance is interesting. For example, tech folks generally love Japan and Hong Kong's railroads. But those systems work so well because of the exact sort of vertical integration techies get apoplectic about when it comes to the Internet: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-inf... . JR and MTR not only are private companies that own and operate the railroads, they own a ton of the land…

Lots of trolly transportation systems were built in the US with the same model. Build a line out to the cheep farmland you own near a city/town, charge low fairs (not nearly enough to cover your capital costs and running costs), but now you can sell lots for housing at 10x or 20x the price you bought the land for. Once all the lots are sold, having the trolly pay for itself is difficult, especially after people can b…

That's more an issue of trollies becoming obsolete--government-run trolly lines or purely private ones that did not own the surrounding land also did not survive.

Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#223

Post by LateRuin »

s2g wrote: post #162
EpicEng wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters when ~50% of the comments are talking about net neutrality and Time Warner Cable hasn't existed for more than two years.

This is a major net neutrality issue. AT&T can now say all of time warner's content is free for mobile devices. Major blow to their competitors.

Sounds pro-consumer to me. Whats the big deal? It will just force the other providers to up their game and offer their own freebies.

Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#224

Post by 103e »

vokep wrote: post #135
SrslyJosh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you think the training data for AI judges would come from?

evaluations of historical judgements made and what the consequences were. How to define good/bad consequences becomes the problem then, but thats the nature of it.

It's AI judges, all the way down.

Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#225

Post by tracker1 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #206
mortdeus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should point out that this doesn't really change the broadband ISP landscape. Time Warner Cable is not apart of Time Warner anymore. All this does is give AT&T a better chance at entering the "original content" space and to take advantage of the fact that streaming providers like Youtube TV and Netflix would need to now pay AT&T for their content. Honestly I don't think this is all that bad of a move. I'd rather AT…

It's catastrophic. Companies should be allowed to either own the pipe or what flows through the pipe. Any attempts to own both need to be stopped and punished. The pipes must remain neutral so that small competitors can come up and disrupt and slay the big players once they get moribund.

This is how I feel about Sony being both a media company, and a technology company. (BluRay, etc).

Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#226

Post by kristopolous »

rayiner wrote: post #79
JAFTEM wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also have bad internet in LA. I grew up in North Dakota though, and back there my family is getting 1 gigabit internet for $100/mo from Midcontinent. Absolutely bizarre and ridiculous that North Dakota, a state that has far less developed infrastructure than either coast, has better internet than Los Angeles.

Is it? I’ve got two fiber lines into my house in a Maryland county where most people are on septic and well. Unsurprisingly, Big California cities have Big California impediments to broadband deployment.

The biggest impediment is corrupt corporate capital not investing in their infrastructure. Some have taken government subsidies and threw elaborate parties and went on luxury cruises while not building anything. There's court cases about it, such as https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc-h...

The companies take that money and do things like buy multi-billion dollar companies with it instead.

The market in this sense is free from competition, free to block municipal broadband (illegal in 20 states), free from the consequences of providing terrible service, free from the risk of losing customers, and free from the social obligations of providing a civic service.

It's classic profiteering, capital extraction, dodging responsibility, and engineering the marketplace that leads to California's and the US's subpar system.

And it stays that way because hoards of people either apologize for it or just refuse to see what it is regardless of the evidence, because they have a larger commitment to their ideas of how things are supposed to be then there reality of how things actually are.

Until people break their mythical love affair with the idea that there is no sustained abuse or corruption in a manufactured free market, we will forever be shackled by reading to address its glaring and obvious issues.

Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#227

Post by chopin »

ReverseCold wrote: post #185
amelius wrote: post #121

Can't we have a system where the bigger the merger, the more compelling the arguments for it should be? Like a $10M merger should have 1 strong argument in favor of the consumer, a $100M merger should have 2 strong arguments, and a $100B merger should have 5 strong arguments in favor of the consumer (and I'm being forgiving by using a logarithmic scale here).

Hot take: An $X m merger should never go through. (I haven't thought about the downsides, but I can't see anything obvious?)

It could be split up into several mergers below $X.

Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#228

Post by isolli »

rayiner wrote: post #219

Cognitive dissonance is interesting. For example, tech folks generally love Japan and Hong Kong's railroads. But those systems work so well because of the exact sort of vertical integration techies get apoplectic about when it comes to the Internet: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-inf... . JR and MTR not only are private companies that own and operate the railroads, they own a ton of the land…

I think the analogy does not hold. The reason these railroads are so well developed is because they lead to land the operator owns. If I apply the analogy, ISPs will develop infrastructure only if it leads to content they own. In other words, they have a strong incentive to throttle access to others' content, which is not an option available to railroad operators.

Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#229

Post by icebraining »

LateRuin wrote: post #223
s2g wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a major net neutrality issue. AT&T can now say all of time warner's content is free for mobile devices. Major blow to their competitors.

Sounds pro-consumer to me. Whats the big deal? It will just force the other providers to up their game and offer their own freebies.

Great if you like the provider's content. Quite bad if you like any content not owned by one of the few Internet providers, who can't offer such freebies.

Re: AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

#230

Post by noobermin »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #211
trynumber9 wrote: post #22

The DOJ had tried to stop the deal[1] but it appears that the court ruled it could carry on [2]. Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim said in a statement the DOJ was "disappointed with the Court's decision today. We continue to believe that the pay-TV market will be less competitive and less innovative as a result of the proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner. We will closely review the Court's opinion and…

Glad to hear the executive branch did something in favor of the people instead of corporations.

Do you not know about the context? The admin threatened to block the deal because Trump didn't like CNN's coverage of himself. Neither side is all that great here. Even if the DOJ lawyers wanted to pursue it for the right reasons, Trump and by extension Sessions let it go through because of his animosity towards CNN.
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