AT&T to Court: Don't Split the Baby
Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&TDAVID BECKER/BLOOMBERG NEWS
AT&T Inc. filed post-trial documents late Thursday that urged the court to totally reject the government's lawsuit against it and avoid including any partial fixes in its decision.
The documents, among the last to cross federal judge Richard Leon's desk before he is scheduled to rule in the antitrust case next month, summed up AT&T's arguments as it seeks approval for a roughly $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner Inc. announced more than a year ago.
Justice Department lawyers this week said the court should block the deal or at least impose divestitures as "alternative remedies" to prevent the merged company from hurting competition. The companies said shedding big units like Time Warner's Turner or AT&T's DirecTV satellite unit was a deal-breaker.
-On Thursday, the defense warned Judge Leon against considering any "remedial" instructions, including modifications to an arbitration agreement that AT&T offered to rival video distributors to keep Time Warner from using its programming as a weapon in TV carriage talks. The companies offered the arbitration arrangement to hundreds of cable and satellite-TV companies, though only 20 had signed onto it as of last month.
-If the court tweaks those offers, "the government will try to exploit such a provision to challenge the Court’s underlying ruling," the companies wrote in their post-trial brief.
-Much as it did during the trial, the defense devoted much of its closing briefs to picking apart government economist Carl Shapiro's mathematical model, which estimated how an AT&T-Time Warner combination would affect pay-TV prices. The companies called it "patently flawed" and attacked what it described as an "alarming lack of objectivity" from the University of California, Berkeley professor's
-The companies also said they never dropped their "selective enforcement defense" a strategy that would have alleged Trump administration's bias against Time Warner's CNN improperly influenced the Department of Justice's decision to sue. "Trial evidence confirmed the government’s differential treatment of comparable vertical mergers," the companies wrote. "But absent discovery, it was impractical for defendants to press the issue further at trial."
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