Rob Bonta settled a multi-state lawsuit against Paramount Skydance on Monday, allowing its $111-billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery to move forward? That’s the question everyone is trying to figure out, as the 32-page agreement is parsed, with pundits pouring over minutiae of cable streaming and tax credits.
I’ll leave that to the business experts, but I’m here to give you a big picture of politics, power and possibilities — and one short but unsatisfying answer about whether this deal is good for the Golden State: Yes and no. I’ll start with this: Did California win is the wrong question. There was always something bigger at play here that was lost behind the fear of further decimation to an industry so central and crucial to the state.
The question the lawsuit asked is, “Do we live in an America where government institutions are so broken that power makes its own rules?” The settlement might not give the entertainment industry all it hoped for but it was “a fight worth fighting,” said George Hay, a professor at Cornell Law School and a former attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, because it sought to answer that question in favor of consumers, and showed that states like California can and will step up to fill a dangerous void. Under the Trump administration, the U.S.
Department of Justice hasn’t so much abdicated its responsibility to enforce antitrust laws — it has embraced an oligarchic ethos that seems happy to feed the American economy into the mouths of behemoths, allowing companies such as Paramount free reign to gobble up whatever lies in their paths like an old-school Pac-Man. Our president personally invests in industries he’s supposed to regulate (I’m looking at you, Silicon Valley). Corporations dump money into elections that average people can never hope to match.
The free press is under increasing attack with multiple outlets banned from the White House — including CNN, which Paramount hopes to own along with CBS and whose editorial independence is at least addressed in this settlement, albeit weakly. States, even powerful states such as New York and California, don’t have the muscle or money of the federal apparatus, and were never meant to play the role of national enforcer on issues such as these. The fact that Bonta and the 11 other states involved in the antitrust litigation pulled together not just a credible, but effective team is a victory for all American consumers, and a message to other Pac-Man companies out there that even if federal regulation is on life support, there are still rules.
The states “showed that they could quickly and effectively put together a formidable litigation team, and achieve significant initial success. That that changes the role of the states for a long time into the future,” said William Kovacic. He’s a law professor at George Washington University and a former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, so like Hay, he knows a bit about antitrust enforcement.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
