“Tying an industry’s hands behind its back, and allowing big tech to run wild in any direction they chose to run in is inappropriate,” insisted Liberty Media chair and early cable pioneer John Malone, slamming tech giants that are “almost monopolies” for the second time this week.
“I think that Charter should be allowed to merge with Comcast or Cox or anybody” to reduce costs and improve quality of the service they provide,” he said at the close of Liberty Media’s NYC investor meeting.
Malone is a big Charter shareholder.
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He lays the inequity largely at the feet of net neutrality, an FCC rule requiring all internet data traffic be treated equally — so internet service providers can’t block, slow down, or speed up content at their discretion. It classifies broadband as an essential service, like a telephone line.
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The intention behind it was good, Malone said today, but it allows “these giants to have distribution platforms at no cost to them, and really favors a shift to streaming technology for the simple reason that it is free compared to making a deal” with a linear distributor. “That gives an edge to the Amazons of the word versus the broadcasters.”
On Tuesday, speaking at the Paley Center in New York, he called big tech companies “almost monopolies. They’re global in scale. They have enormous breadth, [massive] balance sheets, and they have been the principal beneficiaries in recent years of the equity rise,” meaning the surging stock market
The “AI stimulus” boosted their shares even more as, clearly, “the biggest tech companies are in the best position to benefit most from AI. So this concentration of economic value and power, you know, in the hands of relatively few global industries, I think is quite a phenomenon and an enormous challenge for regulators.”
“Obviously, sports investment right now is the best because it works really well across both platforms [streaming and linear] and it is going to be the essential reason why broadcasting lives longer than it otherwise would. But I am afraid that the damage will be done to local as programming becomes national or global and streamed.”
The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan has been aggressively blocking mergers across sectors, having a chilling effect on dealmaking. Many investors and CEOs hope Khan will be ejected by the incoming administration of Donald Trump and a new FTC chief will be more open to M&A.