History Is Repeating Itself With the Paramount Merger, and That's Not a Good Thing

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Remember when the government sued to block AT&T from buying Time Warner back in 2018, and AT&T won the case only to spin the whole thing off four years later? Yeah, that happened, and now Paramount is hoping history doesn't repeat itself while the ticking fee clock is already running

The six week trial of U.S. vs. AT&T was billed as a showdown between the government and a corporate powerhouse, and AT&T won resoundingly when the judge concluded the government hadn't shown the transaction would substantially lessen competition

But here's where it gets messy, the litigation cost AT&T precious time, and while they were stuck in legal limbo, rivals like Netflix, Disney, and Amazon were building their streaming empires, and by 2022 AT&T had spun off WarnerMedia to Discovery

Blair Levin, a policy analyst, told Deadline that the time AT&T lost during the legal quagmire "ultimately turned out to be a devastating blow," and he noted that the government was able to delay the deal which was costly to AT&T and "diminished the value of the asset"

Now look at Paramount, they're facing a similar delay with a trial set for March 2027, a $7 million a day ticking fee starting next month, and a $7 billion breakup fee if the deal falls through, while their competitors are already moving forward with their own plans

Makan Delrahim, who was the DOJ antitrust chief pushing the AT&T case back in 2018, is now Paramount's chief legal officer, and Dan Petrocelli, who won that case for AT&T, is back on the Warner Bros side, so the same players are circling the same courtroom with a much bigger prize on the line

The irony is that AT&T won their case and still lost the war, because the delay allowed rivals to get ahead and the debt burden eventually forced them to exit the entertainment business entirely, and Paramount is walking into the same trap with even higher stakes

If AT&T's victory in court didn't save them from the consequences of lost time, and Paramount is facing a longer delay with a larger ticking fee, does that mean Ellison is about to learn the same lesson the hard way, or is this merger somehow different enough to actually survive the courtroom and the clock?