The courts may be OK with it but I am not. Both companies are huge, revenues in tens and hundreds of billions a year. Both are plenty large enough to prosper on their own. Both are so big that they won't get any economies of scale by merging.
Both companies are in the same line of work, namely providing cable TV. Merge them and they will find it easier to hike my cable fees. Just by example Time Warner managed to chisel my cable bill up to $62 this month from $35 a few years ago. They just hike my cable bill a few dollars here and a few dollars there. And Time Warner (now calling itself "Spectrum") is the only game in town up here. It's pay what ever they ask or do without broadband and Fox News Channel.
The Wall St Journal was all in favor of the merger. They did a lot of fancy explaining that this was a vertical merger, and that both companies were really in different businesses. This I do not believe. They are both TV cable companies.
If the anti trust people were doing their jobs, we would not need "too big to fail" protection in things like Dodd-Frank. If it's too big to fail, then it ought to be broken up as a monopoly.
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