Makes me think the ‘right’ thinks of itself as always being the right position in everything they can affect. Look where that’s gotten us.

What 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

As far as the AOL-Time Warner merger goes, I think the more instructive lesson comes from TW’s decision to spin off TW Cable long after the merger. If you take AOL out of the picture, the combination of TW’s content assets and TW Cable ultimately failed to make sense from a business perspective.

Your knowledge of the AOL-Time Warner merger is obviously very superficial. I worked for Time Warner for several years. The merger failed because:

1) the integration plan was poorly thought through and did not adequately reflect the vast differences in culture between the two companies and

2) The accounting scandals at AOL and the dotcom crash sent the stock plummeting. Many rank-and-file TW employees throughout the divisions had a large portion of their savings in Time Warner stock and lost a lot of money. What this meant is that CNN employees for example did not return AOL employees’ phone calls and thus none of the advertised “synergies” came to pass.

From a strategy perspective, the walled garden was insignificant. AOL’s strategic problem was that it had a slowly, steadily declining yet highly profitable ISP business that continued to generate very healthy cash flows. This cash flow (and AOL’s margins) remained strong enough to prevent AOL from making the changes it needed to transition to another business model.

Complacency and inertia almost always win at the end of the day.

Comcast-NBCU is COMPLETELY different and far more threatening. Unfortunately Comcast also practically owns Congress, having “invested” very heavily in both parties.

Not sure what the incompetent clowns in DC have done in the past 100 years to win our trust or show that they have our best interest at heart…. but you do raise some valid concerns that point out the importance of having a competitive marketplace.

There is however a lot of evidence to suggest that it is the epidemic collusion between DC and corporations that in the end leads to market failures and a lack of competition.