Free Republic

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The Trump administration’s antitrust enforcers have fired a warning shot to AT&T and other companies hoping to pull off massive mergers. Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, is reportedly expected to take AT&T to court over its proposed $85 billion deal with Time Warner. Earlier this month, in an unusually public spat, it was reported that Department of Justice (DOJ) officials had demanded that AT&T sell off CNN’s parent company, Turner Broadcasting, from Time Warner if it wanted the deal approved. DOJ sources told The Hill and other outlets that AT&T had offered to follow through with divesting from...

AT&T, Time Warner deal closing now 'uncertain' AT&T CFO says timing of Time Warner deal closing 'now uncertain' 4 Hours Ago | 03:27 Time Warner shares declined nearly 7 percent midday Wednesday after AT&T's chief financial officer John Stephens said the timing of its merger deal close with the company is "now uncertain." The Financial Times later reported the Justice Department told AT&T and Time Warner would need to sell CNN, Time Warner's cable news network, as a condition in order for the acquisition to go through, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. CNBC has confirmed the...

In the absence of rigorous antitrust enforcement, the consumer internet has become too concentrated in a few dominant companies, creating easy targets for bad actors. There is a reason Congress did not have to investigate foreign meddling after the 2008 or 2012 elections. Back then the internet was still a diverse, decentralized network...This older form of online community building has largely been supplanted by tools provided by the dominant players... Google used to be the engine that drove the open web... Over time, Google’s philosophy shifted [to] making the internet less open and pluralistic than even a few years ago...Facebook’s...

I just sent this to my Congressman. I encourage others to do likewise. It's time to broach the topic of regulating major league sports in this country. And no, there's nothing unconservative about regulating a monopoly like the NFL. Don't buy the argument that it's un-American to regulate the NFL because is goes against the free market. The NFL is anything BUT a free market, and it never has been. Mr. Desantis I am writing to encourage you to introduce legislation to fix the broken state of major league sports in this country. The NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL are...

(Snip) Unfortunately, the power of these biased corporate media giants may only get more powerful under the pending mega-merger of AT&T and CNN’s parent company, Time Warner. President Trump said last year that this deal would put “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few” and promised to block it; yet there’s been dangerously little attention paid to a corporate marriage that would make two massive global media conglomerates even bigger.  Grassroots conservatives remain hopeful that President Trump remembers his campaign pledge to stop this deal. (Snip) These companies already have tremendous power and influence – and a combination...

On Thursday, the “free speech” social network Gab.ai filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging it had violated federal antitrust laws when it kicked the company’s app out of the Google Play Store.

Twitter rival GAB was served notice by its domain registrar that it has 5 days to transfer its domain or they will seize it. BREAKING: Gab’s domain registrar has given us 5 days to transfer our domain or they will seize it. The free and open web is in danger. pic.twitter.com/Irl6KO5Xmr— Gab (@getongab) September 18, 2017 At the same time GAB is suing Google for anti trust violations.According to David Z. Morris at Fortune magazine, GAB supports Milo Yiannopoulous whom Morris slanders by calling him a white supremacist who was banned from Google for his racially offensive harassment of a...

Until recently, it was easy to define our most widely known corporations. Any third-grader could describe their essence. Exxon sells gas; McDonald’s makes hamburgers; Walmart is a place to buy stuff. This is no longer so. Today’s ascendant monopolies aspire to encompass all of existence. Google derives from googol, a number (1 followed by 100 zeros) that mathematicians use as shorthand for unimaginably large quantities. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow. They now aim to build driverless cars, manufacture phones and conquer death. Amazon, which once called...

The fate of hundreds of distribution jobs in the Upstate could be decided during the next six months. Two of the nation’s largest retail drug store chains — Illinois-based Walgreens Boot Alliance (WBA) and Pennsylvania-based Rite Aid Corp. — announced on Thursday, June 29, they had entered into a $5.175 billion asset purchase agreement. Walgreens operates a nearly 700,000-square-foot distribution center at 101 Alliance Parkway in Anderson County, as well as a 500,000-square-foot distribution facility at 350 Raco Parkway in Jackson County, Ga. Both facilities employ hundreds of workers. Rite Aid has its $90 million, 900,000-square-foot distribution center that it...

BREAKING: EU antitrust regulators fine Alphabet's Google $2.7 billion for anti-competitive practices at comparison-shopping service

Mark Zuckerberg had a choice to make this week. The Facebook CEO could either go to Washington to meet with President Donald Trump, along with nearly every other marquee CEO from the tech industry, or skip it and prepare for a Chicago rally for people who'd created social-support groups on Facebook.

“Amazon just bought Whole Foods,” my friend texted me seconds after the announcement of the proposed acquisition. “It’s over. The world.” This unease is widespread, and has raised new calls for breaking up Jeff Bezos’s impending monopoly by force. Surely the company, which now generates 30% of all online and offline retail sales growth in the United States, and already controls 40% of internet cloud services, has reached too far. The 3% hike in Amazon’s share price since the announcement—which would alone more than pay for the acquisition—may attest less to the deal’s appropriateness than to investors’ growing fear that...

“Amazon just bought Whole Foods,” my friend texted me seconds after the announcement of the proposed acquisition. “It’s over. The world.” This unease is widespread, and has raised new calls for breaking up Jeff Bezos’s impending monopoly by force. Surely the company, which now generates 30% of all online and offline retail sales growth in the United States, and already controls 40% of internet cloud services, has reached too far. The 3% hike in Amazon’s share price since the announcement—which would alone more than pay for the acquisition—may attest less to the deal’s appropriateness than to investors’ growing fear that...

How much face time will your news story get on Facebook? How many eyes will ogle it on Google? Too often, this is apparently determined not by whether the story is “fake” news or newsworthy, but by whether it’s politically correct. And it’s time to break up the Internet’s left-wing, information-conduit oligopoly. If “knowledge is power” and “The pen is mightier than the sword,” entities controlling what pens you see are powerful indeed. C that Facebook and Google “account for 75% of all the referrals major news and entertainment sites now receive,” according to a Politico report in July. ADVERTISEMENT...

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to mark-up H.R. 372, the so-called Competitive Health Insurance Act of 2017 introduced by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), to make crony GOP donors’ regulatory dream a reality. The Gosar bill would throw conservative principles to the wayside by amending the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945 to bring health insurance companies under federal antitrust oversight…

Selwyn Duke December 27,2016 How much face time will your news story get on Facebook? How many eyes will ogle it on Google? Too often, this is apparently determined not by whether the story is “fake” news or newsworthy, but by whether it’s politically correct. And it’s time to break up the Internet’s left-wing, information-conduit oligopoly. If “knowledge is power” and “The pen is mightier than the sword,” entities controlling what pens you see are powerful indeed. C that Facebook and Google “account for 75% of all the referrals major news and entertainment sites now receive,” according to a Politico...

Donald Trump said Amazon and Jeff Bezos have a ‘huge antitrust problem.’ Now they may. The president-elect is certainly one to hold grudges. by Jason Del Rey@DelRey Nov 9, 2016, 12:10pm EST Let’s state the obvious: Donald Trump and Amazon CEO, and Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos do not see eye to eye. And that becomes a more concerning prospect for Bezos and Amazon now that Trump is president-elect. In May, after learning of the large team of Washington Post reporters looking into his past, Trump told conservative TV commentator Sean Hannity that Bezos was using the paper to damage...

Volkswagen, Daimler, and Bosch are suspected of colluding on steel prices, leading to raids on their offices by the federal competition watchdog, it was reported on Tuesday. […] Six companies were raided during the search, which was conducted by 50 antitrust agents with the support of local police and state prosecutors, the Schwäbische Zeitung reports. (Spokesperson for the Bundeskartellamt Kay) Weidner said no charges have been filed, adding that the searches do not mean that antitrust laws were violated. …

There was a fair bit of coverage on Monday of the news that the Donald Trump campaign had removed the press credentials from the Washington Post because the campaign was upset with the Washington Post's coverage of the campaign. While it got a lot of attention, it was quickly pointed out that Trump has revoked or barred at least six other news outlets from receiving press passes, including Politico, the Huffington Post, the National Review, Buzzfeed and the Daily Beast. This issue is being discussed in lots of media circles. But what interested me much more was buried deeper in...