How did the previous court decision go through for AT&T? I really don't get what's wrong with that judge (besides may be possible corruption). Comcast now will be using all that as an excuse.
Time Warner is a content owner/producer/broadcast networks/etc. primarily. AT&T is mostly a telecom company.
You can usually get away with extraordinarily large mergers under US anti-trust law, so long as you're not overly concentrating the ownership of a given market. AT&T wouldn't be allowed to buy Verizon or T-Mobile for example.
If Apple wants to buy Fox they'd likely be allowed to. If Apple wanted to buy Google, they'd likely be blocked. Microsoft could buy John Deere or 3M or GM, they couldn't buy Amazon or Facebook (disregarding market caps for a moment).
Apple makes almost all of their money from things that Google doesn't make much money from - if you spun off all of Google's distant second fiddles off, along with Apple's software wanderings, you'd end up with a central core of AdWords and the iPhone. They don't compete.
Adwords unto itself isn't what would cause the problem. The principle delivery mechanism for Adwords is: search and Android.
Stopping something by arguing that an anti-consumer action may be taken by a company at some point in the future, is difficult. The more abstract, multi-step, loose, or distant the premise is, the less likely you're going to sway a judge.
Over consolidation of a specific market is thought of as a sort of obvious, first level concept of risk of consumer harm. The potential that you're describing would be a second or third level concept: do this, then do that, maybe this happens.
Culturally and legally, narrow market consolidation is an established concern. It's widely believed that that has a strong, proven foundation of evidence which links over concentration of market share to negative harm to consumers.
The FCC also has immense power to regulate that market. Frequently judges will leave such discretion to the appropriate Federal agencies, for better or worse. While this FCC and Congress may not do anything about it, the next one might (it's guaranteed the Democrats will pursue net neutrality when they regain a majority position and the Presidency again).
On its own may be not, but together with their de facto ISP monopolization it should be a very major consideration.
> Stopping something by arguing that an anti-consumer action may be taken by a company at some point in the future, is difficult.
It's not an abstract concern, because current day monopolistic ISPs are already doing it (zero rating). So there is no need to theorize, it's happening now.
See https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-att-verizon-zero-rating-direct...
With corrupt FCC now removing any last protections of net neutrality, we absolutely should expect these monopolists to make it even worse than it is now, and such media purchases amplify it many fold. So this judge's decision is bizarre and demonstrates how messed up and toothless current anti-trust regulation is.
Interesting that you say that, because there was a period of time where AT&T nearly merged with T-Mobile. Now T-Mobile and Sprint are merging.
I hope this will be appealed, and this monstrosity prevented. And someone should also split Comcast, i.e. separate their ISP business from the media one.