Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarzenstraber, your host. On today's show, we're excited and honored to be joined by FCC Commissioner Ejit Pye. Commissioner, thank you for joining the show.

Evan, great to be back with you and Baron. And despite my protest, Baron also decided for joining the show. Evan, great to be back with you and

Baron. And despite my protest, Barron also decided to join the show. So, Baron, thank you for coming.

Thank you for not being able to say no to me. Yeah, that whole, that whole boss employee relationship,

such a drag. So on today's show, we're going to be discussing the charter time Warner merger, which

has been approved, but not without a series of owner's conditions. And, Commissioner,

you actually voted against the merger, but not for the reason that people might think. Why did

you vote against this merger? A good question. So typically, an agency scrutinizing a transaction will determine whether or not it's in the public interest. And if they determine at face value that it's not, they will try to issue narrowly tailored conditions to ameliorate whatever many competitive harm they think might result. In this case, however, the agency pretty clearly thought over a course of 100 pages that the deal itself

was against the public interest, but nonetheless, they decided to load it up with merger extraneous

conditions that I thought it went way too far. And in fact, the negative externalities of these

conditions, namely the fact that they want to impose them upon the entire industry, suggested to me that

this was a deal that should be stricken altogether, and that's part of the reason why I voted

against it.

So that's interesting because theoretically the companies are okay with these conditions in theory.

I mean, they've agreed to them.

They could have scuttled the merger if they thought that they were too bad.

So let's go through these conditions and tell you... could have scuttled the merger if they thought that they were too bad. So why do you,

let's go through these conditions and tell us why you think they're actually going to be

harmful for consumers, even though the merger is not anti-competitive. And in particular, for our

listeners, explain what you mean by merger extraneous. So typically, what the government is supposed to do, and they certainly do this

at the antitrust division at the Justice Department, where I used to work on telecom mergers and

acquisitions and at the Federal Trade Commission, is to attach conditions that are related to the

...