What a fucking joke. First this corrupt deal passes and now we get to pay for the entirely correct attempt to stop it. Nationalize the newly merged company as a warning to others, I say.
[edit] And what does the judge’s finances look like? He buy anything nice recently?
Fucking rampant corruption everywhere. Do they not realize we are about to fail totally if it keeps going like that ? I mean I make what used do be a descent salary but I’m about to go homeless and lose my car if I can’t find a brake (Of course I can’t some asshole decided to bust my Tire, hurr SUV BAD, why don’t you do it to privet jets instead?)… Sorry had to rant.
Shamefully I did not follow this story. Can someone give me the run down on how this merger was permitted?
On the surface it seemed like a pretty easy anticompetitive case. But I am not even close to being a lawyer.
Can someone give me the run down on how this merger was permitted
$$$
They’ve infiltrated every level of government. The CRTC exists to only rubber stamp whatever it is that Robellus wants to do, they just have the appearance of pretending to try and encourage competition. They’ve also been infiltrated.
Our federal and provincial governments need a complete cleaning, top to bottom. Canadians need actual consumer protections, not capitalist bootlicking.
The argument was that Shaw and Rogers generally don’t compete in the same markets. Rogers wanted Shaw to expand their presence in the west. Shaw wanted the deal because they are actually a horribly managed company and didn’t want to spend the money needed to upgrade their ancient copper lines or roll out 5G towers. They are a shell of the company they were 10+ years ago.
The one area they did compete was in wireless, and they were forced to sell off Freedom Mobile.
Honestly as a Freedom customer this deal has been fantastic. Quebecor has done more in the past 6 months to expand their service than Shaw has done in the previous 2 years. Prices have dropped, they eliminated the nationwide data cap, rolled out 5G, and the overall quality of the service has improved substantially.
So on the surface it sucks because we lost a major player in the tv/home internet space, but they were rapidly fading into obscurity anyway. I would have seen Quebecor buy them in their entirety and merge them with Videotron, but as it stands not much of value was lost.
I have a love-hate relationship with Canadaland, but will fully acknowledge that their series on monopolies in Canada was excellent: https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/introducing-the-new-season-monopoly/
the run down on how this merger was permitted
Harper appointed justice Paul Crampton
It wasn’t really though. Shaw and Rogers didn’t compete in cable anyways. Sure cell service they ‘competed’ but that had to be sold off.
You know we’re all screwed when even the government body in place to prevent anticompetitive deals can’t actually achieve that legally.
The Canadian Competition Tribunal, brought to you by Shawgers™.
When corporate interests have more power than the government … it’s called a plutocracy … not a democracy
I thought it was just called “Canada”. Remember the Hudsons Bay Company? Canada is a blanket retailer with elections.
Harper: a government cannot bind the hands of a future government
Also Harper: except by appointing the right judge to the competition tribunal
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Aug 29 (Reuters) - Canada’s merger court asked the competition bureau to pay about C$13 million ($9.58 million) to Rogers Communications (RCIb.TO) and Shaw Communications for the lengthy court battle after its failed attempt to block the telecom firms’ C$20-billion merger.
The Competition Tribunal, Canada’s merger court, in a ruling dated Aug. 28 said the Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell’s approach to block the deal was “unreasonable”.
The companies maintained that Boswell “adopted an unnecessarily contentious approach throughout the litigation, which significantly increased the costs that they were required to incur,” the tribunal said.
The Rogers-Shaw merger had faced intense opposition from Canada’s antitrust regulator whose efforts to block it were rejected by the Competition Tribunal and a Canadian court.
The bureau’s biggest concern was the deal would lessen competition in a country where wireless bills are already among the highest in the world.
In March, Canada approved Rogers’ buyout of Shaw Communications after securing binding commitments to pay financial penalties if it failed to create new jobs and invest to expand its network.
The original article contains 179 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 3%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Please go look for the financial penalties. They are a joke compared to the money being thrown around. Antitrust is a joke. Everybody and their dog knew this shouldn’t be allowed, and knew that it would be regardless.
This whole thing is very alarming.
Why shouldn’t it have been allowed? I don’t personally care. But Shaw sucked and if it brings the offers the east gets out west all the better for the users. The one less competertior is bull shit because they already had an agreement to not compete with each other. Besides cell service I being in the west could never get Rogers service so I had one choice of cable provider Shaw now I have Rogers what have Iost as a consumer? The choice of one cable provider all that has happened is the name changed.
Things should be moving in the other direction. The entire point of antitrust is to prevent things from getting to where they already are. None of the telecoms should be growing in power or consolidating at this point, and there was no good reason to allow it. There is already a disgusting overreach of power, and antitrust should be actively making changes to increase competition and set guardrails. Rogers should also not be gaining after they downed important services over the entire country for a whole day.
Notably, the restrictions and promises made to allow the deal were an absolute joke, and the citizens come out last here. There was no reason to allow the insulting deal that was allowed.
This 26 billion dollar deal is supposed to come with billions of dollars in required efforts. The punishment for failure is a fine that is… A fraction of what those efforts cost. 1/26 of what was spent on the deal paid over ten years.
The amount of money given to these companies is already absurd.
And now we are paying Rogers ten million for necessary due diligence? The power dynamic is beyond broken.
I’ve had service from both Rogers and Shaw. By and have Rogers was muuuuuuuch worse, so I can’t really see things getting better for those in the west with this deal
Thank you telecom overlords for not taking even more of our money. Such altruism.
On the bright side at least they actually did their job and actually tried to stop the merger 🤷♂️
