Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
AT&T Completes Acquisition of Time Warner
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
What ever happened to strong competition being the backbone of capitalism? Seems like America is losing its values more with each passing day.
Nobody really thinks this consolidation of companies is good for the consumer, do they? More money for stockholders and executives, while redundant people will now get fired and prices for consumers go up. I hate this crap
As a DirecTV contract subscriber, I certainly hopes THIS move will fix all the issues everyone has been having for years with the on-demand and restart programming from beginning glitches and bugs/failures. Please make it fixed ATT/DTV!!!!!
Honestly, the market will determine how these businesses operate with the death of Net Neutrality. If one company starts throttling stuff or limiting stuff to only certain subscriptions, you can bet there will be a company whose slogan is "WE DON'T DO THAT, COME TO US", and smart consumers will vote with their money as to which corporation's actions are legit and acceptable.
I'm not seeing this as any more of a problem than Apple acquiring Beats.
If AT&T and Verizon were merging, that would be a massive problem - you'd have one company controlling 80% of the US cellular market. AT&T and T-Mobile would probably be an issue too - one company controlling ~60% of the US cellular market.
AT&T and Time Warner though? Who cares? Broadband is already grossly uncompetitive due to regional monopolies. No impact on cellular. And AT&T wasn't in the content production game before, so there's been no reduction in the number of companies in that field.
AT&T and Time Warner are pretty orthogonal - they weren't direct competitors in anything. Apple and Beats merging was a bigger issue - they both competed in the headphone market, theoretically. Except not really, since Apple's headphones were almost entirely just sold in the box with a phone, so they weren't really in that game.
If AT&T and Verizon were merging, that would be a massive problem - you'd have one company controlling 80% of the US cellular market. AT&T and T-Mobile would probably be an issue too - one company controlling ~60% of the US cellular market.
AT&T and Time Warner though? Who cares? Broadband is already grossly uncompetitive due to regional monopolies. No impact on cellular. And AT&T wasn't in the content production game before, so there's been no reduction in the number of companies in that field.
AT&T and Time Warner are pretty orthogonal - they weren't direct competitors in anything. Apple and Beats merging was a bigger issue - they both competed in the headphone market, theoretically. Except not really, since Apple's headphones were almost entirely just sold in the box with a phone, so they weren't really in that game.
AT&T won't restrict Time Warner content to AT&T subscribers. It's the other way around. AT&T will restrict, say, Disney content in favor of it's Time Warner content.
[doublepost=1529070831][/doublepost]
That's the naive opinion of how open-markets work.
What will happen in reality is that there will be 3-4 large players, and once one starts throttling another's content, the other will retaliate. It will be back and forth, and they'll spread lies about one another. Eventually, a big player losing the game will try to pick up sales and eventually say, 'We don't do that', then will quickly be bought up by one of the top-3 players.
Time Warner sold their internet business to Spectrum, correct? Since AT&T manages to ruin everything they touch (DirecTV being the latest victim), I would hate Spectrum (who is currently the "T-Mobile" of providers in our area...sort of the un-carrier providing tremendous value and service) to become more AT&T garbage.
I would say the same of your opinion. Take a look at how free markets work (and have worked) here in the USA for even the past century. It'll be fine, assuming people are NOT okay with throttling. Voting with wallets is the only thing keeping big corporations in business.
And that's where anti-monopoly laws step in and prevent that company from being bought. Those two companies are direct competitors. AT&T and Time Warner are not.
It's people who think like you do who really don't understand business. Business lives to satisfy us. Sounds ridiculous? How do you think they get our money, through osmosis? We voluntarily give it to them. In order to make that happen, they have to give us incentive. In simpler terms, they have to give us something we want, and we'll fork over the cash. If they didn't care about their customer base, they wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar corporation.
I get tired of hearing this foolish anti-business rhetoric, to be perfectly honest. A business is an abstract concept. It doesn't exist as a monolith, but rather as a collective of thousands of workers all working towards the same goal. If you're anti-business, you're against the thousands of employees who work at that business. They ARE the business.
Not likely. It was stated over and over that the reason ATT TW would go through was specifically because it was not two competitors merging, as was Comcast Universal before it. sprint/T-Mobile are just that and will be ruled against due to anti-competitiveness of the merger.
Don’t forget of all the debt time warner already has
[doublepost=1529081039][/doublepost]
Is people like you who don’t understand business. Atnt was the first corporation to implement data caps of 2gb on their mobile phone service. Verizon followed right after. Atnt is money first customers last
Nope. It's clear that it didn't bother people enough for them to drop their service, which is really all that matters. We're still getting a great service from AT&T. If you want to be negative, you can always find something to fault them for.
As I said. They care about their customers staying on-board. Some have switched to T-Mobile, and if AT&T got bad enough, more would.
"According to my favorite biased media outlet, net neutrality is something good that I want." is, I believe, the sum total of most people's understanding. Fill in the blanks with whatever!
Last edited by a moderator:
AT&T and Time Warner users can expect a rate increase in a year or two. I’m fine with that. I’m moving to T-Mobile when the iPhone X is paid off.
Yes, that would be brand suicide as others pointed out; however, I am pretty sure that AT&T will give priority access to its own services and Time Warner services over things like Netflix, etc. and as a result they will try to force cord cutters to move back to cable.
[doublepost=1529106949][/doublepost]
I give it six months, at most.
I'd say your blissfully ignorant. Businesses exist for profit. That's it.
Their goal is to wipeout the competition, and force you to pay for their service by way of becoming a monopoly. There's nothing voluntary about being forced to pay a company because they are your only option.
Employees work for the business. They have no say in anything. The business can largely have its way with them.
You get tired of hearing it because you don't bother to understand this abstract concept. Your idealistic head-in-the-clouds concept of business is not how business works.
I don’t think you understand this merger. Neither AT&T nor Time Warner have anything to do with cable. AT&T owns Directv but that’s about it. AT&T also offers Directv Now which allows customers to access 120+ channels without cable or satellite. TimeWarner only currently offers direct streaming media subscriptions from HBO and DC, among others. If anything they’re both driving customers away from cable. How are you inferring otherwise?
All carries raise rates, or limit services, or quality of services. Why exactly will this merger cause rates to rise outside of normal market forces?
But lack of net neutrality would have been an issue with AT&Ts business with or without the merger. The merger doesn’t really change anything.
Yes yes, you parrot the common-man's viewpoint quite well. Businesses may exist for profit, but what is profit? Profit is us giving them our money, that's all. They can't force you to do that, since you are a living breathing human being, who is capable of making your own choices, I think. As long as that's true, they can't force you to hand over your money. In fact, that would be called robbery, and be illegal.
Also, there are laws against monopolies, as there have been for a very long time. If such a thing ever happened, they'd be broken up, as has happened in the past numerous times.
This is precisely why corporations wield too much power in America. Here is a prime example. This should have never been allowed... yet it IS being allowed. With net neutrality killed off by telecom lobbyists and cronies planted inside government agencies (the FCC, for example) by the large media companies, it’s all but guaranteed the state of the internet will go nowhere but downhill from here.
Again... greed and nepotism rule the day in America. Surprise, surprise.
Again... greed and nepotism rule the day in America. Surprise, surprise.
Like the movie Idiocracy, soon everything will be brought to you by Walmart, Amazon, or Apple.
At least it's not Karl's Jr.