Freedom Line Blog

In today’s hyper-competitive and ever-changing telecommunications sector, private enterprises must remain empowered to fluidly navigate and combine for greater market scale without gratuitous government regulatory interference.  How private companies choose to navigate today’s competitive environment isn’t particularly any of our business or concern, but the recent merger proposal between Charter Communications and Cox Communications does merit attention as it relates to something that the federal bureaucrats should not do:  intrusively overregulate.

It bears emphasis because for four years we at CFIF highlighted the egregious excess of the Biden Administration when it came to needlessly micromanaging private companies’ decisions on such matters.  The new Trump Administration has returned a more market-based economic approach that emphasizes lower taxes and less regulation, and the payoffs have already been obvious.

Let’s hope that current regulators – whether at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Department of Justice (DOJ) or Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – recognize the peril of the last administration’s discredited hyper-regulatory opposition to mergers of all sorts, and that they instead let the free market work itself out without needless bureaucratic interference.  As was the case in the first Trump Administration, the winners of that less-regulatory approach will be American consumers, our economy and private innovation.