Former FCC chairman speaks out against AT&T, Time Warner merger

A former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is speaking out against AT&T’s planned purchase of Time Warner.

{mosads}“Allowing a communications behemoth like AT&T to swallow the Time Warner media empire should be unthinkable,” argued Michael Copps, who served as FCC commissioner from 2001 to 2011 and as its chairman in 2009. “The sorry history of mega mergers shows they run roughshod over the public interest.”

“Further entrenching monopoly harms innovation and drives up prices for consumers,” Copps concluded in a statement on Monday.

“The answer is clear: regulators must say no,”

AT&T announced over the weekend that it had reached a deal to purchase Time Warner for $85 billion.

If approved by federal regulators, the acquisition would go down as one of the largest in the history of the telecom-media domain.

AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson told CNN’s “New Day” Monday that offering rich content is a win-win for both the company and its customers.

“The ability to take, really, premium quality content to our customers in the mobile environment is huge for us. It’s huge for our customers,” said Stephenson. “And as we made the scan and looked for premium content to bring to our customers, this is the premium content, we think, on the planet right now.

“And so, the ability to do something special like this with Time Warner is just a very natural extension for us.”

Time Warner Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes, meanwhile, said a content marriage with AT&T’s distribution capacity will only serve to better inform the public.

“This company invented the magazine. It invented satellite-delivered supported TV at HBO. It invented 24-hour news at CNN,” Bewkes told CNN’s Christine Romans. “And so, we’re very proud of the mission of informing people, of telling authentic stories. And this will help us to do even more investment, even more variety, and keep evolving the distribution system.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has indicated he would attempt to block the deal if elected president because “it gives too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, through a spokesman, said the deal demands “close scrutiny.”