Saying that the nation’s antitrust practices are “fundamentally broken,” the WGA West is calling on policymakers to adopt “systemic changes” to antitrust laws and enforcement in order t…
is calling on policymakers to adopt “systemic changes” to antitrust laws and enforcement in order to prioritize “the maintenance of competitive market structures for consumers, competitors and new entrants,” while protecting workers’ wages and jobs.
“Over and over, these companies promised lower prices and more choice for customers,” the review says. “However, once regulators cleared the mergers, consumers saw price hikes at AT&T-DirecTV, less diversity of content at Disney-Fox, and fewer streaming choices at AT&T-Time Warner. Less than three years after merger approval, AT&T announced plans to spin off WarnerMedia to reality TV giant Discovery in May 2021, heralding the next wave of media consolidation.
“This report shows that the existing system of merger review is broken,” said WGA West president Meredith Stiehm, noting that the guild has raised the alarm when our employers and the companies that distribute our work justify swallowing each other with promises we know they can’t keep. These mergers have made writers and workers in our industry, as well as consumers, worse off.”
“Extreme concentration levels have been documented in markets ranging from meat packing to medical devices and banking to broadband. The buildup of market power has eroded innovation and performance. Rates of entrepreneurship and business startups have declined across industries, wages are stagnant, and workers change jobs at lower rates, business investment has declined, and productivity growth has slowed, yet U.S.
The review calls for the scrapping of the so-called “consumer welfare standard” popularized in the 1970s, which “narrowly focused U.S. antitrust enforcement on short-term consumer price increases in defining illegal mergers or behaviors.
• Conduct regular merger retrospectives and market investigations. Such investigations must allow for corrective measures up to and including structural separations and unwinding mergers proven anticompetitive after the fact.
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