Why the Trump Administration Is Suing to Block the AT&T–Time Warner Merger

The Justice Department announced on Monday that it will sue to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, pitting the Trump administration against a media business that has turned to mergers to compete with the rise of tech giants like Facebook and Netflix. The $108 billion deal, which would be one of the largest mergers in American history, had been in the works for more than a year.

Both Democrats and Republicans of these so-called “vertical mergers” between companies operating at different levels of a particular industry. Time Warner, which owns HBO, TNT, and TBS, is mostly in the pure content business, while AT&T, which sells phone and internet access and owns DirecTV, is largely in the media-distribution business. Mergers between such media and distribution companies have rarely faced much scrutiny. For example, the Obama administration approved a similar merger between Comcast and NBCUniversal in 2011.