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...Case and Levin wouldn't budge when the FTC demanded the right to regulate the placement of AOL Time Warner content, fearing they would lose control of their own products. It was a make-or-break issue. In their 11th-hour concession, signed off on at 5:30 last Wednesday afternoon, they agreed to report any complaints from competitors who believe they've been denied AOL Time Warner content...
...there's a reason analysts are so bullish, competitors so fearful and regulators so confused, it's that even now very few people understand the future scope or reach of a company as big and diverse as AOL Time Warner. Time Warner is in the traditional media business; AOL is an Internet company. Because the two didn't overlap, antitrust lawyers saw no need for concern. But the more people looked, the more they thought this was not just a marriage of two companies in different arenas. It was potentially game changing...
Eisner is, of course, the guy who led the charge against AOL Time Warner at the FTC. And ironically, his case would not have had nearly as much resonance if Time Warner had not committed what one of its own executives calls "the stupidest business decision of the year." On May 1, after months of wrangling with Disney over a new retransmission contract for Disney's ABC television stations, Time Warner Cable shut the network off its system in New York City, Houston and Los Angeles...
Newspaper editorials decried the move as Orwellian. From Disney and Microsoft to a lowly Internet service provider in Oshkosh, Wis., competitors began turning up the heat. Separately, press accounts of AOL's take-no-prisoners approach to its business partners made the Internet entrepreneurs seem as predatory as the cable guys. By this fall, even the American Civil Liberties Union was claiming that the new company could be dangerous...
Initially, the concern was that Time Warner would give AOL preferential or exclusive access to its cable network. That would disadvantage other Internet service providers, all of whom are looking to cable as the most versatile broadband delivery alternative. Companies like Disney complained that in addition to limiting open access, the new company might restrict interactive TV (ITV) services over TW cable. Then a roster of instant-messaging companies charged that AOL was preventing any competitor's messages from penetrating AOL's proprietary IM architecture. By the fall, when AOL Time Warner had initially estimated they would close the deal...