United States v. AT&T (2019)
Open-knowledge reference entry
United States v. AT&T, 916 F.3d 1029 (2019), was a ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which prevented the U.S. government from blocking a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, thus creating the WarnerMedia conglomerate. The court found that regulators were unable to prove harm to consumers per the requirements of United States antitrust law.
Background
AT&T first announced plans to acquire Time Warner in October 2016. The acquisition would give AT&T significant holdings in the media content industry for the first time, and would allow the company to compete more fully with its primary telecommunications rival, Comcast, which had recently acquired NBCUniversal under a similar strategy. The proposal attracted criticism because AT&T could potentially use its expanded influence over both media content and delivery networks to prioritize its own content or discriminate against that of its competitors.
In February 2017, Time Warner shareholders voted to approve the takeover by AT&T, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai refrained from having that agency review the merger, so a full governmental review was conducted by the Department of Justice. President Donald Trump voiced his opposition to the merger, believing that it would grant more influence to news organizations like CNN that had criticized him, though Trump Administration officials vowed to review the deal without prejudice.
In November 2017, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the acquisition. Makan Delrahim, assistant Attorney General of the agency's Antitrust Division, stated that the deal would "greatly harm American consumers".
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This entry incorporates text from “United States v. AT&T (2019)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.