[mortdeus]

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&T absorb Time Warner than Comcast.

[ajmurmann]

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.

[jaredklewis]

> 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.

Not producing content doesn't magically make an ISP a neutral provider and I don't see how vertical integration (owning the pipe and some of what's going through it) gives ISPs more leverage than they already have.

For example, take an ISP that is just the pipe with no content production arm. That ISP could charge premiums to content providers to be put in a "fast lane" and then slow down the content of everyone else. This would be to the advantage of big players at the expense of small competitors, just like you say, and doesn't involve vertical integration in any way. AT&T doesn't need Time Warner to do this.

What's catastrophic is that we don't have net neutrality. There are plenty of good arguments against this merger, but preventing vertical integration doesn't get us any closer to net neutrality.

[skywhopper]

Not having a direct interest doesn’t guarantee they are neutral, true. That’s what net neutrality rules are for. But giving them interest in the content guarantees they _arent_ neutral, and will always have conflicting interests, regardless of regulation.

[jaredklewis]

If there was regulation, it doesn’t matter if they have a conflict of interest, because it would be illegal to prefer their own traffic.

If there is no regulation, AT&T has the exact same incentive to abuse their market position to make more money whether or not they own Time Warner. Whether they own Time Warner or not, they can make more money by being a non-neutral provider. Will they suddenly have a greater interest in money after they acquire Time Warner?

[simplify]

Yes, because there will be more money to make?

[tracker1]

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

[rayiner]

The same is true for Google and Apple, who make hardware, the operating system running on the hardware, the software running on the operating system, and the app store on which the software is sold. They compete directly with the software makers on their platform. (And the market concentration in the mobile OS space is even higher than with ISPs. There is basically no choice left but iOS and Android.) Yet, the results in the mobile space have not been "catastrophic."

[jedberg]

AT&T owns DirecTV and has a strong incentive to make it very expensive to stream things that aren't from DirectTV and very cheap to stream things that are.