Is Trump's AT&T Merger Roadblock A Return To Sensible Antitrust, Or Just More Cronyism?

from the raised-eyebrow dept

Given that the Trump administration has been tripping over itself to obliterate popular consumer protections (net neutrality, broadband privacy) and most media consolidation rules (largely to benefit Sinclair broadcasting), many analysts assumed that the administration would see absolutely no problem with AT&T's latest $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner. After all, such vertical integration mergers -- while they can cause very serious market harms -- are often more difficult to make a case for than mergers where direct competitors are eliminated.

Supporting that position was the fact that Makan Delrahim, Trump's new antitrust boss at the DOJ, had been on record previously stating that he saw no serious problems with the deal. That's why it was a bit of a surprise last week when reports emerged that Trump's DOJ was considering a lawsuit to block the megamerger, and may not approve the deal unless AT&T either sold off DirecTV (acquired last year) or Turner Broadcasting, owner of channels like Cartoon Network, TBS, and CNN.

Given Trump's disdain for CNN's coverage of his Presidency, many began to immediately speculate that Trump was using the merger for leverage. After all, that's what one administration official told the New York Times was on the table in a story back in July:

"White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card."

So the idea that Trump would use the merger as leverage to take aim at CNN was clearly something that was on the table. But when asked about the decision while on Air Force One last week, Trump insisted that the decision wasn't his, but was made by "a very respected person," presumably Delrahim:

"Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said he “didn’t make that decision — it was made by a man who’s a very respected person, a very, very respected person..."I did make a comment as to what I think,” Trump also acknowledged. Previously, the president has blasted AT&T and Time Warner’s merger plans — and during the 2016 election, he threatened to block the companies from combining under his watch.

"I do feel you should have as many news outlets as you can — especially since so many are fake," Trump continued, according to a pool report. Then, he concluded: “I didn't make a statement, but I did make a statement long before. So we’ll see — that probably ends up being litigation, maybe not, we’ll see how it all plays out."

Granted, forcing AT&T to divest either DirecTV or Turner Broadcasting makes sense from a regulatory perspective. Consumer advocates worry that AT&T's greater size, leverage, and control over broadcast content (particularly HBO) will make it harder for streaming providers to license the content they need to compete. They're also worried that AT&T will leverage this advantage -- in concert with its monopoly in broadband and stranglehold over tower backhaul -- to engage in more of the anti-competitive behavior it's well known for (zero rating, etc.).

But it's hard to square this return to sensible antitrust enforcement with an administration that has been taking a mindless hatchet to media consolidation and consumer protection rules. What kind of thought process involves seeing no problem with gutting media consolidation rules (which devastates smaller news outlets and media diversity), yet suddenly having a strong disdain for the often more-murky negative impact of vertical integration? One possible explanation for the policy asymmetry may reside with Rupert Murdoch, who has apparently been trying to get AT&T to offload CNN to News Corporation for much of the year:

"Rupert Murdoch telephoned AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson twice in the last six months and talked about cable network CNN, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters on Friday. According to one of the sources, the 86-year-old executive chairman of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc offered to buy CNN in both conversations.

And again, if you head back to media reports from January, Murdoch had been pressuring the Trump administration to make life harder on AT&T Time Warner, a News Corp. competitor:

"If Fox News’ politics ultimately solidify as more pro-Trump than they were during the campaign, that might be to the benefit of Murdoch’s business interests. According to a well-placed source, Trump has asked Murdoch to submit names for FCC Chairman. Murdoch, another source said, also wants conditions put on the AT&T-Time Warner merger, and he could lobby Trump to make that happen."

Again, it's entirely within the realm of possibility that an administration that has been protecting monoplists and gutting consolidation protections is having an uncharacterstic flirtation with sensible antitrust enforcement under Delrahim. But it's also entirely possible, especially when looking at the administration's behavior in full context, that Trump's DOJ is giving AT&T a hard time simply to aid a political ally and to quash a critical media outlet.

Filed Under: antitrust, cnn, doj, donald trump, makan delrahim, merger
Companies: at&t, time warner

Dish Pulls CNN, Doesn't Think Customers Still Paying For It Are Missing Much

from the you-really-don't-want-to-buy-what-I'm-selling dept

As another shining example of the fading value proposition of traditional cable, Dish Network last month pulled all Turner Broadcasting stations (including CNN, Headline News, and Cartoon Network) from their lineup because the two sides couldn't agree on a new retransmission fee contract. As we just got done saying, these feuds are growing more and more annoying as paying consumers not only lose access to content, but get bombarded with marketing missives as both sides try to blame the other guy for being greedy (See Turner's SaveMyShows.com website and Dish's DishStandsForYou.com website).

In Dish's case, customers have lost access to content but they're still paying the same rates. Yet speaking this week on the company's earnings call, Dish CEO Charlie Ergen told customers eager to watch election coverage that not only may they never get CNN back, they really shouldn't miss it because nobody watches cable news these days anyway:

"When we take something down we’re prepared to leave it down forever. Things like CNN are not quite the product that they used to be. You can imagine: CNN down on election night would have been a disaster 15 or 20 years ago. Now there are plenty of other places for people to get news. In fact a lot of people get news not from TV but from their devices."

While that might be true (given that CNN, like most cable news, is now more unintentional cultural satire than news), it's odd to hear a cable exec telling people they don't need to buy what he's selling, especially since the majority of cable channel lineup bundles are increasingly bloated with similarly-inane content. Ergen added that while the company does listen to customers, they're not going to here, since it's nice that Dish will save a buck:

"If we’re not going to be in a relationship with Turner then we would not have to raise our prices next year. And that would be slightly cash positive for us from a cash flow perspective. Yes, we listen to customers. But we would save a big, big, big check from a cash flow perspective. And for those folks who don’t care about news and cartoons, we have other news and cartoon shows."

Again, that's probably not particularly comforting to Dish customers who are getting less content yet paying the same amount of money to Dish.

Some of this is just traditional Charlie Ergen negotiations bluster, given it's hard to sell TV content if you tell all of the people making it to go to hell. Unlike many cable execs, Dish and Ergen do see the cord cutting writing on the wall, and are planning to launch a live Internet video service sometime before the end of the year. However, that service again relies on the good graces of the broadcasters if it's going to survive; the same broadcasters who've been waging legal war against any disruptive technology that could possibly topple the traditional cable cash cow, whether it's Dish's automatic ad-skipping DVR or Aereo. Turner says they were originally on board with the project, but after the last month's feuding says they're reconsidering the green light.

Even if it's a little ham-fisted, Ergen's trying to make the point that the current TV ecosystem and these often bi-annual rate hikes simply aren't sustainable. It's the same point being made by small and mid-sized cable companies that have started to leave the cable business entirely because they can't afford to participate, and it's same point being made by cord-cutters who are tired of paying an arm and a leg for an ocean of crap content.

Filed Under: cable tv, charlie ergen, cnn, retransmission, retransmission fees, tv
Companies: dish, dish network, turner

LAPD Exposes Login To Data Harvesting Software During Interview With CNN

from the as-secure-as-Darth-Helmet's-luggage dept

The Los Angeles Police Department has obtained tons of data over the past several years and that amount of data increases exponentially every year. In addition to its criminal databases, it also collects thousands of license plate time-and-location data points every day and has deployed other forms of surveillance (like Stingray devices), gathering even more data surreptitiously.

Of course, the LAPD feels it can be trusted with all of this data. It claims to have controls in place to prevent unauthorized access to information related to non-criminal Los Angeles citizens. Working with Palantir, the LAPD has instant access to a vast amount of gathered data -- a database so impressive it spent a bit of time bragging about it to a CNN reporter. (via Lowering the Bar)

The CNN video shows LAPD Sergeant Jason O'Brien using Palantir to search for data on a burglary suspect."After searching over a hundred million datapoints, Palantir displayed an impressive web of information," said CNN reporter Rachel Crane. Palantir's interface resembles a web search engine with datasets labeled People, Vehicles, Locations, Crime, Arrests, FIs (Field Interview Reports), Citations, Bulletins, Tips, and Everything (view screenshot). The video also shows Sergeant O'Brien accessing the LAPD's automatic license plate reader database to map the past locations of the burglary suspect, which go back as far as March 2011.

With all this information come strict controls, or so the LAPD would like you to believe.

Captain Romero told CNN that the LAPD "cannot just go searching for you or anyone else without a reason because we have a lot of data for people who have done nothing."

And yet, during this same CNN taping, the LAPD shows just how careless it is about protecting data. Written on a whiteboard for anyone to see is the login and password to its CAMS (Computer Analysis Mapping System) training system.


While this may be training access only and wholly separated from the actual system and its hundreds of millions of datapoints, it's still not a good idea to leave logins and passwords publicly displayed. Sure, whoever wrote it probably thought no one but cops undergoing training would ever see it (along with the filepath to the CAMS data), but the person or persons OKing the interview should have made a sweep of anything the camera might see. It's simply lousy operational security and it's the sort of thing you never want to see an entity with access to "hundreds of millions of datapoints" do.

Even if additional steps are needed to complete an internet based attack, information on the whiteboard certainly peals [sic] back one layer of security blocking the way to private data. Above all else, the LAPD keeping a password—any password—on an office whiteboard in plain sight is deeply troubling. Haphazardly allowing CNN to film the password for a national news broadcast is more troubling still... [T]he whiteboard depicted in the CNN video casts doubt upon the LAPD's ability to keep its data private.

Freedom du Jour points out that the LAPD's negligent attitude towards security has been encountered before. Documents acquired by the EFF and ACLU showed that officers were given the following name and password to log into their ALPR terminals.

Name: LAPD
Password: [blank]

Two years later, the LAPD decided the system might need a password.

Name: LAPD
Password: LAPD

These are the people who claim they can ensure hundreds of millions of datapoints won't be accessed without authorization, thanks to policies and strong statements given to credulous CNN reporters. But this shows that the LAPD's security measures border on nonexistent and its interest in protecting the data of Los Angeles citizens is minimal.

Filed Under: cnn, lapd, los angeles police department, passwords, privacy, security

It's Not About Whether Amateur Internet Journalism Is Good Or Bad, But That It Happens And Will Continue To Happen

from the look-forward,-not-back dept

There's been a lot of hand-wringing among the types of people who hand-wring about these things, that there was a flurry of activity on Reddit and Twitter late last night / early this morning believing that one of the suspects in the Boston Bombings was Sunil Tripathi, a Brown student who went missing last month (and, for what it's worth, when people thought it was him, folks from 4Chan started complaining that they had done the real sleuthing, and were pissed off that Reddit got the credit -- but, now that it turned out to be wrong, 4Chan seems happy to let Reddit take the heat). Alexis Madrigal has the basics of the story, which has allowed the usual crew of folks who hate the concept of "citizen journalism" or whatever it's called today to whine about how awful "Reddit" journalism is. Defender of legacy newspapers, Ryan Chittum, seemed particularly gleeful in calling out that Reddit "fails again," and saying that the mainstream media did it right.

Except, that's ridiculous. Mathew Ingram points out that people attacking Reddit for this are missing the point, which is true by a wide, wide margin. First of all, as he notes, mainstream news folks also got parts of the story wrong. As we noted yesterday, the mainstream TV folks got a hell of a lot wrong. Hell, the NY Post even put the wrong two guys on the cover and falsely claimed that the feds were seeking them.

But the bigger problem is this idea that it's "Reddit" or, as some people have argued) "the internet" against the legacy media. That's not true at all. Everyone made mistakes during the rapidly changing story, but only on Reddit did you actually see the details of the process. The legacy news organizations present things as if coming from a place of authority, while Reddit is like an open newsroom where anyone can jump in. The conversation about Tripathi, for example, was about whether or not Suspect #2 was him -- it wasn't based on a declaration that it absolutely was him. Furthermore, when you look at the reason why the story actually spread, it was after some more known "press" names retweeted the initial tweet from Greg Hughes, which claimed (incorrectly) that Tripathi's name went out on the police scanner (ironically, he posted that about a minute after posting "This is the Internet's test of 'be right, not first' with the reporting of this story").

But here's the real issue: people can fret about all of this, but it doesn't change one thing: this is going to happen and continue to happen. People are naturally curious and they're going to talk to people when there's a news story going on and they'll try to figure things out. That happens all the time in newsrooms already before stuff goes on the air or is officially published. It's just that the public doesn't see the process. On Reddit, or anywhere else that the public can converse, it does happen in public. The problem is to assume the two things are the same. Furthermore, it's even more insane to blame "Reddit" or "the internet" as if those are singular entities that anyone has control over. They're not. As Karl Bode noted, they're just massive crowds of people.

An even better point was made by Charles Luzar, who noted that "the crowd doesn't implicitly profess its empirical correctness like the media does," but rather admits quite openly that it's a process in action. Further, he notes that even if the crowd presents false information before finding factual information, that's still "effective crowdsourcing" and, if anything, provides a greater role to the media to be effective curators of the actual facts.

In the end, it seems likely that this incident will actually help a lot the next time there's a big breaking news story, because (hopefully) it will give people more reason to be at least somewhat skeptical of stories coming out, but it's not going to change the fact that groups on various platforms are going to talk about things, and often try to do a little sleuthing themselves. Sometimes they'll get it right, and sometimes they won't -- just the same as many others. It seems like a much better focus looking forward is in providing more training and tools to help the world be better at it.

Filed Under: amateurs, blame, boston bombing, cnn, corrections, crowdsourcing, errors, journalsim
Companies: reddit, twitter

Everyone Assumes Copyright Only Applies When They Like It

from the silliness-all-around dept

Having written about copyright issues for so long, we've started to notice some trends. For instance, many people try to twist copyright law to the point where it only applies when it helps them, and suddenly doesn't apply when it helps them not to have it apply. In fact, this is so common that many people falsely assume that the same is true of us -- claiming that we'd be pissed if people copied our content (it's the usual retort to those who are unsure of copyright's benefits). Of course, for us, it's not true. If people want to copy our content for fun or for profit, they're free to do so. Yet, it is true that we often see people who should know better freak out when it's "their content" being used. These scenarios never make anyone look good.

You may recall the group NOM, an advocacy group fighting against gay marriage, that we talked about on this site a few weeks ago because of a bogus takedown notice it sent to YouTube on content that it almost certainly did not own the copyright on. NOM also seemed to have no sense of fair use.

How quickly things change.

NOM had no problem then taking 3 seconds of a clip from the blogger known as Perez Hilton and putting it in an advertisement. Perez Hilton the played the role of the copyright bully, sending a highly questionable takedown notice, claiming the 3 seconds was copyright infringement. Except, as pretty much anyone would tell you, the use was almost certainly fair use, and if anyone should know that, it's Perez Hilton. Yet, it was rather amusing to see NOM, just weeks earlier a staunch questionable takedown notice issuer, suddenly finding themselves on the flipside, defending fair use against a DMCA takedown.

And, how quickly things change again. Because just as Hilton is claiming that using 3 seconds of his own video is copyright infringement and not fair use, Ben Sheffner notes that Hilton has posted a 10 minute video of CNN footage, including his own Perez TV overlay and his own pre-roll ad at the beginning, along with a single sentence beneath the video.

Personally, I think both uses should be perfectly fine (the law, as it currently stands, is more likely to accept NOM's use, but not Hilton's), it's still illustrative of the way many people view copyright. It's an issue to protect you, but it's a hindrance when it gets in your way. Of course, we see this quite often with politicians. It's why Nicolas Sarkozy, who is pushing for incredibly strict new laws relating to copyright in France was found to have ignored copyright law when it suited him. We saw the same thing last year when a Canadian politician who was pushing for the Canadian DMCA was caught infringing on copyright himself.

While some claim it's just hypocrisy, I think it actually represents one of the fundamental flaws of copyright itself (or, really, any monopoly system). Monopolies aren't being used to create incentives to create. They're used to stifle others and to "protect." These days, almost everyone uses them and views them as tools of protection rather than an incentive to create. When you get so far away from the entire purpose of copyright law, you have a system ripe for widespread abuse.

Filed Under: cnn, copyright, fair use, nom, perez hilton, video