US: Gov asks judge to force AT&T to sell Turner or DirecTV

Seven weeks after the trial over the suit the Justice Department (DOJ) brought to stop AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner began, the two sides have made their final pitches to the judge who will decide the fate of the US$85 billion deal.

In a post-trial brief made public Wednesday, May 9, DOJ attorneys told the judge, Richard Leon, that if he approves the deal he should do so only on the condition that AT&T sell off either its satellite television company DirecTV, or Time Warner’s Turner networks, a group that includes CNN, HLN, TBS and TNT.

The Judge had asked both sides to dedicate a portion in their post-trial briefs to proposed remedies, conditions he could impose on the deal to protect consumers from any sort of possible anticompetitive harm. Antitrust remedies can be either structural, like selling off a portion of a company, or behavioral, like promising not to engage in certain actions or agreeing to oversight.

The government’s post-trial brief asks for the exact remedies it was proposing before the trial even started. And in their own post-trial brief, made public last week, attorneys for AT&T and Time Warner told the judge they don’t believe any remedies are necessary at all, which may be a sign they are confident Leon will find in their favor.

AT&T has long rejected the idea of selling either Turner or DirecTV, saying that doing so would completely negate the point of the merger, which the company says is necessary if it is to compete in a fast-changing landscape with competitors like Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google.

Full Content: Reuters

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