I'm surprised to see AT&T acting so aggressively with its Time Warner purchase so soon. The government argued that the merger would harm consumers and competition. I expected AT&T to wait a year or two before starting to milk extra profits - especially since the DoJ has appealed its loss.

After the merger, AT&T removed HBO from its lower-priced wireless plan, raised wireless prices, raised DirecTV NOW prices, and now this. Frankly, I would have expected a year or two of AT&T saying, "see, nothing bad happened! If anything, we're giving consumers more!" Then a couple years later, "because of inflation, costs, whatever, we're raising prices...it wasn't because of the merger at all!"

It just seems like AT&T decided to forego plausible deniability. And the merger is being appealed to the DC Circuit court. Literally the DoJ argued that AT&T would have, "both the incentive and the ability to raise its rivals' costs and stifle growth of innovative, next-generation entrants that offer attractive alternatives to AT&T/DirecTV's legacy pay-TV model—all to the detriment of American consumers," and that AT&T would have more power in negotiations with competitors. Now they're proving that.

I'm just surprised that AT&T couldn't wait 18 months. 18 months later, the merger wouldn't be on people's minds as much and they could argue that the market had shifted (production costs, more competition from YouTube, whatever). Doing these things so soon makes a really clear cause and effect. Waiting gives you deniability.