The Department of Justice has announced that it will not seek an appeal on the ruling in the AT&T and Time Warner case that was made earlier this week. That may come as a surprise to many, but that means that AT&T is able to go through with the merger, and even expects to close the deal by Friday (as in tomorrow). Judge Richard Leon on Tuesday, announced that Time Warner could merge with AT&T for $85.4 billion. This merger was actually announced nearly 20 months ago, making this a very long and drawn out process, but the government wanted to block this vertical merger – and it was something that Trump vowed to do before even being elected.
AT&T’s merger with Time Warner would allow AT&T to not only offer TV service to customers but also control the content on that TV service. As Time Warner does own a fair amount of media properties, including HBO and CNN. The Justice Department had urged AT&T to sell off either DIRECTV or Turner Broadcasting to get this deal to go through, as it was worried that with AT&T controlling both businesses, it could raise licensing fees to its competitors – Comcast, Charter, Verizon, etc – and stifle competition. But the judge decided that was not the case, and sided with AT&T – who argued that it needed Time Warner in order to compete with the new media giants of Netflix, Facebook and Google.
With the ruling now final, and the Justice Department not looking to appeal the decision, AT&T is planning to wrap up the deal pretty quickly. According to papers filed with the SEC, it could be done as soon as tomorrow. Now that doesn’t mean that the merger is complete however, as it’ll take some time to merge everything over into one company, but it does mean that AT&T is now a pretty large media company – although still a smaller market cap than what Netflix has right now.