Over the years, I covered some crazy and huge IT service mergers. We had Yahoo and Verizon. We also had Dell and EMC. However, one merge is about to come out. It’s even bigger than the infamous Comcast-NBC Universal merger. It’s the merge between AT&T and Time Warner.
This merger would be worth $85 billion. I can’t even wrap my head around that. Then look at what AT&T already has: Direct TV. That’s the world’s largest satellite provider. Now they want Time Warner, one of the largest entertainment corporations in the world. This deal is not yet official because they have to wait for the US Dept. of Justice to permit this. Let’s hope they don’t.
So what? Why should you care? Because if you have AT&T, the world’s largest telecommunications company, and the US’s second largest cell phone provider, this affects you. Also, if you have Time Warner Cable, the US’s largest cable company, it affects you. Because AT&T’s customer base is four times the number of Comcast’s. We can thank Direct TV for that. Can you imagine what it will be if Time Warner merges? Then there is the entertainment quality. My concern is if this merger happens, then the corporate bigheads decide what gets on their cable empire. That not only stifles entertainment, but leads to censorship.
However, some may argue, “But we need someone to compete against Comcast/NBC-Universal”. Some in our computer service shop say the same thing. And apparently, so did T-Mobile and Sprint. They talked about merging, but it looks like those talks stopped, for now. Thank goodness! In a twisted way, this would increase competition. But only for the mega conglomerates. There is no way a start-up company or small business can compete against this. Then there are the costs. Do you really think this $85 billion is going to fall from the sky? I expect customer cost will sky rocket. But there’s hardly any competition to turn to. So the customer is trapped. That’s the problem with these mega mergers. Should the merge between AT&T and Time Warner ever happen?