Expect more acquisitions of content providers by telecom companies, Sen....
Expect more acquisitions of content providers by telecom companies, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., predicted in a speech Thursday night to the American Bar Association’s antitrust section. The Comcast-NBCUniversal transaction “was just the tip of the spear,” he said. “It won’t…
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be long before Verizon or AT&T starts thinking about buying ABC or DirecTV, creating fewer and bigger media conglomerates with more and more control over the delivery of content.” That will mean higher prices for consumers and less content, he said. Small companies may be afraid to stand up against big company mergers, Franken said. “You know, during the NBC/Comcast debate, I heard from smaller companies that opposed the merger but were afraid to do so publicly because they worried about the retribution they might face from Comcast,” he said. “I heard the same thing during AT&T/T-Mobile, and I'm hearing it again now from companies concerned about Verizon’s deals with the big cable companies. What better proof could there be that too much consolidation in the market is going unchecked?” Google and Facebook also came under fire by Franken. “The more dominant these companies become over the sectors in which they operate, the less incentive they have to respect your privacy,” he said. “Google and Facebook are, essentially, tremendously innovative and profitable advertising companies. … These companies’ profitability depends in large part on their ability to target ads to you, which in turn depends in large part on what they know about you. And so when companies become so dominant that they can violate their users’ privacy without worrying about market pressure, all that’s left is the incentive to get more and more information about you."