Word: ftc
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...they directed their top executives to endure hundreds of hours of interrogation in Room No. 385 of the Federal Trade Commission building in Washington, and why they showered thousands of proprietary documents on their inquisitors. And it's exactly why they faxed, on the eve of last week's FTC vote, the final written concession that led to unanimous approval of the $112 billion marriage between Case's America Online and Levin's Time Warner...
Nobody knows. And that put the FTC in the ungainly position of regulating the future. The FTC's solution was to ensure that the pipes, just like federal highways, were open to everyone, making "open access" to the two companies' cable and Internet services the price of approval. Case and Levin agreed to allow at least three other Internet service providers access to Time Warner cable lines and decreed that AOL would continue to invest in slower, phone-based DSL service...
...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...
...very thought occurred to Microsoft, a company whose domination of the software business made it one of the world's most valuable entities--and the target of a federal antitrust suit. Yet even the Micro-monopolists went running to the FTC to complain. "I never had a problem with the merger," Disney chairman Michael Eisner insisted to TIME this fall. "I have a problem with the fact that there might be a single entity that decides what intellectual property goes into the house...
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...