James B. Stewart Quotes
While there continue to be critics of the Comcast-NBC merger, it's hard to argue that competition in news and entertainment has diminished as a result, given the rise of Netflix and Amazon and the explosion in entertainment options that followed the merger.
Stewart, James B. "AT&T-Time Warner Case Is a Classic Battle of Antitrust Theories." The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 23 Nov. 2017.
While this statement seems totally absurd to us today, at the time most politicians and judges believed it. Only the left wingers and the populists opposed the doctrine as well as most business owners who knew the truth but of course most preferred the have their own monopoly. One of the reasons the large American corporations did not want Jewish and Chinese immigrants is that those cultures supported highly competitive businesses and might give consumers a better deal or worse, their culture would argue for less monopoly and more competition. For more than half a century AT&T was given a monopoly over almost all telephone service in the United States. Finally the Federal Courts saw through the company propaganda, and ordered AT&T broken up. The “Baby Bells” have persuaded most state legislatures and regulatory bodies of this same argument, and almost every community of the United States has a monopoly on local wired local telephone service. The same is true about water and electricity and a great deal of American transportation. Every major company strives for as much of a monopolistic position the government will allow; some are overt like the electrical companies. Others are more subtle and use copyright and patents to be sure that there is no price or service competition. Fortunately, the high tech industry is to technologically competitive that prices have been have been going down constantly not like telephone and Internet connectivity, entertainment, education, and professional services.
James Bennett Stewart (born c. 1952) is an American lawyer, journalist, and author.
