A court granted AT&T the right to acquire Time Warner, which makes sense because the Trump Administration’s blocking of that deal was political, rather than a true issue of antitrust. But when combined with the death of Net Neutrality, which ended Monday, Danny Crichton at TechCrunch had a sobering observation. In a piece arguing the merits of Alphabet and Netflix becoming ISPs (I’d throw Apple on that list), he noted that the world of video is effectively closed to startups. It’s a good read, and here’s a snippet:
One sad note though is how much the world of video is increasingly closed to startups. When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just beginning.
Check It Out: A World in Which $158 Billion Netflix May Be Too Small to Get Access to You