The publishing industry is growing increasingly concentrated as publishing house giants continue to merge. This hurts both authors and readers, in more ways than one. In a concentrated industry, prices are higher for readers, and payments are lower for authors as the publishing middleman takes a heftier cut. The book industry has been moving to […]

Today, the Senate passed the “Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act.”

Today, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary’s Antitrust Subcommittee, introduced the “Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act” to make it easier for the government to stop anticompetitive mergers and conduct.

When Public Knowledge came out against the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger in 2017, we were worried that the merger would create both the incentive for the combined company to withhold, or charge more for its own content to rival distributors, and to discriminate against competing content on its own distribution services. The merger went through […]

This blog post is part of a series on communications policies Public Knowledge recommends in response to the pandemic. You can read more of our proposals here and view the full series here. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken so much from so many, so we’ve got to find bits of joy where we can. For me, quarantined with […]

I’m very concerned about yesterday’s decision in U.S. v. Sabre, the antitrust case examining the merger of Sabre and Farelogix, two airline ticket software companies. Aside from the consolidation of the airline ticket software industry, the decision includes a really troubling interpretation of the already problematic American Express decision from 2018, potentially making it more […]

This blog post is part of a series on communications policies Public Knowledge recommends in response to the pandemic. You can read more of our proposals here and view the full series here. In the pilot of HBO’s recently-ended show, Silicon Valley, fictional mega-platform Hooli offers protagonist Richard Hendricks the deal of a lifetime: $10 million for his […]

A decade ago, the Department of Justice approved the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation — combining the biggest concert promoter, a major venue operator and artist manager, and the largest ticket provider under one roof. The anticompetitive implications of this deal were enormous. The combined company would be able to use its relationships with […]

This week was the T-Mobile/Sprint merger trial’s second week, and it focused on the Department of Justice’s proposed remedy: having the combined TMO/Sprint spin off a number of assets to DISH and provide DISH with a bunch of other spectrum and network access rights to enable DISH to enter the market as a competing fourth […]

In 2011, Public Knowledge fought hard against the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, until it was finally called off just nine months after its announcement. The merger, which would have led to higher prices and fewer choices for consumers, faced tremendous opposition. Today, we see many of the same industry talking points for the T-Mobile/Sprint proposed merger: false claims about deployment of next-generation networks, market concentration, pricing, and rural broadband access. So we were glad to see that the Yale School of Management added a section on the AT&T/T-Mobile proposed merger as a case study to its Antitrust Enforcement Data project. The project, featuring a wide range of data, serves as a resource for information and economic analyses on antitrust enforcement.