By Scott Wallsten
Published in The Hill on May 28, 2015
After Charter and Time Warner Cable announced their intention to merge, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler released a statement noting that “an absence of harm is not sufficient” to approve a merger. But it should be. Why would the government block a merger it believes isn’t bad?
Perhaps Wheeler felt the need to backpedal after reportedly calling Charter and Time Warner Cable CEOs last week to assure them that he’s not opposed to all mergers. Even so, his statement again raises the question of how the FCC evaluates mergers.
The Technology Policy Institute
The Technology Policy Institute is a non-profit research and educational organization that focuses on the economics of innovation, technological change, and related regulation in the United States and around the world. More information is available at https://techpolicyinstitute.org/.
Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and also a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University’s public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI – Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
