The $56 billion deal between Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable is set to face the same level of scrutiny and regulatory obstacles that ultimately sank Comcast Corp.'s bid to acquire Time Warner earlier this year.
If the deal does get finalized, the merged companies would control a massive swath the cable and internet markets, marking a significant step towards industry consolidation. Charter's biggest shareholder, John Malone, has been advocating consolidation for a long time, according to Reuters.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler stated that the FCC will be evaluating whether or not the deal will be beneficial for American consumers in the long run.
"The Commission will look to see how American consumers will benefit if the deal were to be approved," he said.
"An absence of harm is not sufficient," he added.
Seemingly anticipating the scrutiny, the deal is about to face with the FCC; Charter and TWC have laid out their cases for regulatory approval in a conference call, stating that customers would benefit from the merger with fast broadband services for online video and gaming, according to Computerworld.
Some experts, however, believe that the Charter-TWC merger will be different enough from the attempted takeover by Comcast, according to Reuters. Hence, there is a good chance that the Charter-TWC deal will win regulatory approval with certain conditions.
Adonis Hoffman, former chief of staff to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, agrees with this assertion.
"This is a qualitatively different deal," he said.
"The regulatory hurdles will be lower on this transaction primarily because you don't have the same public interest concerns that you had with Comcast, in additional to a smaller total footprint across the nation," he added.
Time Warner Chief Executive Rob Marcus believes that concerns about the merger meeting the same opposition as the Comcast attempt are overblown. If successful, the merged companies will still be smaller in size than Comcast.
"It's a smaller company so some of the concerns that were raised about potential abuses of a larger company don't pertain here," he said.
"It is also the case that we don't have any of the other complications that arose out of Comcast being a vertically integrated media company with a broadcast network, a movie studio, a national cable network," he added.
