Introduction
For this Internet Exploration, I wanted to investigate what
information is available online about the proposed merger between
AT&T and Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI). This is a current news
story (from this month) which could have a big effect on the Internet.
Audience
Anyone who wants to keep informed about new developments related
to the Internet and telecommunications in general might be interested
in this review. For the proposed merger, stockholders in both
companies and related/competing companies would be particularly
interested, as well as customers (especially TCI, since you can always
switch long distance companies, but might not be able to switch cable
companies).
Investigation
This story was in the news within the past few weeks. It really
started in June 1998, but there were recent developments that brought
it to the headlines. I did a search for AT&T merger TCI on
Yahoo! and was surprised to find a
category just for the merger:
Full Coverage -- Business -- ATT - TCI Merger. This includes
links to about 10 stories about the merger, about half from Reuters.
The story was summed up nicely by an article from Newsweek (here):
"AT&T, the nation's biggest long-distance company, wants to use TCI's cable wires to bypass local phone companies (and the fees they charge) and offer customers telephone and Internet services directly."
In other words, given the choice between doing what the FCC mandated to compete in local markets (that is, to open up their long distance company to competition from local telcos) and just buying the biggest cable provider in the country to bypass the local telcos, AT&T is choosing the latter!
AT&T's Web page included a link to a news release about a vote by shareholders about the merger. I had to wait for their news ticker to circle around to get to it (they have one of those fancy Javascript news tickers). The press release, here, just talks about the stock split and other shareholder-related information. There's not much context.
TCI's Web page, www.tci.com didn't seem to have any information at all about the merger.
Since there wasn't much analysis about how the merger would effect real people from the Yahoo! page (as opposed to stockholders and businesses), I tried www.zdnn.com, which is a site I noticed on TV the other night. A query for AT&T TCI yielded no hits, but ATT TCI (without the ampersand) brought back lots of stuff. Alas, nothing from January. A search at the Wired site, www.wired.com again yielded nothing recent.
After this exploration, even though I didn't look in every place possible (and only used Yahoo! as a main search engine), it seemed that there is not very much information about how the AT&T merger with TCI might really effect the home consumer. Maybe this is because it's uncertain, or maybe it's because I didn't find it. On the other hand, it could be that the merger could be very bad for consumers but good for big business, so the businesses that run the news don't want to talk about it much.