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The Department of Justice’s attempt to reverse the AT&T/Time Warner merger received some help yesterday from an unexpected source: the Federal Communications Commission.
The FCC previously allowed AT&T to buy Time Warner without having to undergo a lengthy public-interest review, despite pushback from Democrats in the Senate and FCC. The DOJ fought the merger alone, ultimately losing a court ruling that allowed AT&T to complete the acquisition.
But the DOJ appealed that court ruling last month, and yesterday the FCC gave the DOJ’s case a small boost. The FCC isn’t actually supporting the DOJ’s case, but the commission’s filing points out an error made by the US District Court for the District of Columbia. In US District Judge Richard Leon’s ruling against the DOJ, he said that he was “hesitant to assign any significant evidentiary value” to previous statements that AT&T and the AT&T-owned DirecTV made to the FCC. AT&T’s own statements to the FCC, made in the years prior to the AT&T/Time Warner merger, supported the DOJ’s case that a merged entity could raise the price of programming. Those AT&T statements were made as part of the FCC’s 2010 review of the Comcast/NBCUniversal merger and in other FCC proceedings.
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