Friend of Knowledge Problem Geoff Manne had a thorough opinion piece in Wired yesterday on the FCC’s Title II Internet designation. Well worth reading. From the “be careful what you wish for” department: Title II (which, recall, is the basis for the catch-all) applies to all “telecommunications services”—not just ISPs. Now, every time an internet …
As the consequences of the FCC vote to classify the Internet as a Title II service start to sink in, here are a couple of good commentaries you may not have seen. Jeffrey Tucker’s political economy analysis of the Title II vote as a power grab is one of the best overall analyses of the …
Lynne Kiesling Adam Thierer of the Mercatus Center on corporate welfare, and why he doesn’t like the phrase “crony capitalism”: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYOlQDqfXY] Here’s Adam arguing against a proposal to nationalize Facebook “to protect user rights”.
Lynne Kiesling If you’re a Direct TV subscriber, you know that they are embroiled in a contract dispute with Viacom over subscriber fees, which means you haven’t been able to watch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or SpongeBob SquarePants for the past week or so. But is cable/satellite TV becoming an “if it died would …
Lynne Kiesling In case you were in doubt concerning my argument of a couple of weeks ago and back in March that the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is largely driven by our flawed spectrum policy, Gordon Crovitz weighed in with his version of the same argument in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week: The great threat …
Lynne Kiesling The DOJ challenge to the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is bringing AT&T to our attention in ways that it hasn’t been in a while, including this great Ars Technica blog post providing a concise guide to the history of AT&T. Matthew Lasar argues that AT&T conquered the 20th century through patents, strategic acquisition, and embracing …
Michael Giberson George Priest, professor of economics and law at Yale, clearly outlines the main errors of the Obama administration’s decision to oppose the AT&T/T-Mobile merger and cites relevant evidence backing the view: It is very difficult at an abstract level to know what the effects of a merger or acquisition will be on competition …
Another Good Response to the Obama Administration’s Mistaken Antitrust Policy Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday’s announcement that the US DOJ would challenge the merger of AT&T’s wireless business with T-Mobile’s was surprising, and their approach to the merger seems to be more conventional and rooted in old HHI-market share and price effect metrics. Their analysis suggests that due to the substantial overlap in the existing separate AT&T …
Quality, Broadband, and Spectrum: What the Doj’s At&t/T-Mobile Lawsuit Misses Read More »
Michael Giberson Jonathan Knee argues that Netflix is succeeding the way big media companies always have succeeded, in a time where such opportunities are less frequent than before. From The Atlantic: The economic structure of the media business is not fundamentally different from that of business in general. The most-prevalent sources of industrial strength are …
Lynne Kiesling Jim Surowiecki has a New Yorker column on cable bundling that does a good job of explaining some of the reasons why bundling benefits all interested parties in the transaction — the cable provider, the content provider, and the consumer. His analysis provides several examples of comparing a policy with the most likely …
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