Brendan Carr Pretends To Care About Competition, Helps Larry Ellison Undermine Netflix Warner Brothers Merger

Our shitty autocrats are nothing if not predictable.

As we just got done noting, the Trump administration and their right wing extremist billionaire friend have joined forces to wage war on Netflix’s attempted acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry wants Warner Brothers (and CNN) as part of his obvious effort to build a new autocrat-friendly propaganda empire, and Trump has continually signaled his attempt to help him derail the Netflix deal.

Enter FCC boss Brendan Carr, who, right on cue, started popping up in the press to suddenly pretend he cares about competition. Carr did an interview with Bloomberg last week in which he proclaimed that Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Brothers would be terribly uncompetitive:

“What you’ve seen Netflix do as a general matter, in terms of their organic growth, is fantastic,” the FCC chair said. “There are legitimate competition concerns that I’ve seen raised about their acquisition here and just the sheer amount of scale and consolidation you can see in the streaming market.”

Carr goes on to state he sees no competition issues with Larry Ellison, one of the wealthiest men on the planet and a key Trump donor and ally, hoovering up the entirety of new and old media.

So, a few things.

One, Carr’s FCC has absolutely zero authority over this transaction because it doesn’t involve any of the companies he actually regulates or the transfer of any broadcast licenses. Two, Carr has an absolutely abysmal record on competition issues, having rubber stamped no limit of harmful consolidation in telecom and, more recently, local broadcast media.

It would take a journalist covering Carr’s comments all of fifteen minutes to find a long, long list of examples where Carr rubber stamped a terrible merger and ignored literally all labor, competition, and market harms. He’s genuinely the last person anybody should be asking for their thoughts on market competition, but you’re going to be seeing a lot of him in the months to come.

It’s also worth noting that of the available paths forward from this point, a Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers is probably the best of a bunch of bad options. Ideally you’d block all new consolidation in media, but that’s not happening with Trump’s disemboweled and captured regulators. As such, a Netflix acquisition is a better option than letting Larry Ellison create a right wing agitprop empire on the back of CNN, TikTok, and CBS.

Quick refresher: Warner Brothers rejected Ellison’s higher $108 billion offer for Netflix, citing Saudi money involvement and dodgy financial math as something that might make approval more difficult. When that failed, Ellison attempted a hostile takeover attempt with the help of the president’s son in law and the Saudis. When that didn’t work, Ellison tried to sue Warner Brothers.

When that didn’t work, Ellison and friends shifted their attention to trying to smear the “woke” Netflix deal in the media. Enter Carr, who is a useful idiot Trump and Ellison can use to prop the DOJ’s inevitable scuttling of the Netflix deal as a matter of serious policy in the defense of the public interest, before offloading Warner Brothers (and CNN, and HBO) to one of Trump’s top right wing billionaire donors.

Trumpism has long tried to pretend that it cares about populist antitrust reform and reining in corporate power, but it’s always been a lie propped up by a broad variety of useful idiots; some of whom are purported experts on the subject (see: Matt Stoller), and many of which are major corporate media institutions whose journalism has been eroded by the relentless pursuit of consolidation.

Neither Variety, nor Bloomberg, for example, can be bothered to mention Carr’s decade-long history of rubber stamping harmful consolidation across media and telecom. Kind of important if you’re going to profile a major government figure’s thoughts on competition, yes?

I’d be prepared for a fake Trump DOJ antitrust inquiry in the coming months, designed to transfer ownership of Warner Brothers to Larry Ellison and Skydance/CBS. Propped up, in turn, by the usual assortment of bad faith bullshitters pretending this is a public interest effort. Should that fail, Trump’s investing in Netflix and Warner Brothers so he’s certain to come out on top either way.

In all outcome the public, markets, and labor likely lose due to consolidation. But some of the paths are less harmful to the public interest, and democracy itself, than others.

Filed Under: antitrust, brendan carr, competition, donald trump, fcc, larry ellison

Companies: cnn, netflix, paramount, warner brothers