Word: levins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Steve Case and Jerry Levin are so confident in the future of AOL Time Warner that they just aren't going to let powerful competitors, wary consumers or, especially, the Federal Government stop them. That's why for more than six months 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...
...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...
From the start, Case and Levin not unreasonably insisted that open access was integral to their companies' success. Why would Time Warner, which controls 20% of the nation's cable subscribers, close off competitors' access to its cable resources and risk its own access to the other 80% of the market? But after the Disney debacle, that sort of logic carried no weight...
While Washington weighed the merger's fate, AOL and Time Warner confidently, or arrogantly, carried on one of history's most extensive premerger integration efforts. The same week that the ABC controversy erupted, Levin and Case announced a new corporate structure, with Case as chairman; Levin as CEO; and Parsons and Robert Pittman, a veteran of AOL (and Time Warner), as co-chief operating officers...