That

appears to be not the case. What powers does the president have

to direct the Department of Justice? Well, they work for him. That's

part of the executive branch. So what's interesting is before Trump took office a lot of people are like, I hate this idea but it seems legally okay because they're not competitors so they're merging and consolidating power in the market. That's their vertical merger. And now the same person who said this is probably fine. He said, I don't know how to antitrust the DOJ and he's like, we should block it. And it's unclear why he's changed his mind. Peter Kafka wrote a great article and recode about it. It's out there and I think what is particularly of note and interest to verge cast listeners is this is going to be very distracting for AT&T. AT&T's desire, Verizon's desire is to come cast desire is to capture media companies and then use the media company content to differentiate their products which is a fair desire. It is not to compete on quality of service. So Verizon's desire is to own AOL and Yahoo and whatever and then track all your activities across the entire web and build an advertising business to compete with Google and Facebook. Maybe you like this, maybe you don't. One outcome is they've signed a huge deal with the NFL and now you cannot stream NFL content on any mobile network except Verizon's mobile network which is super annoying. AT&T's desire is to bite time Warner and have Game of Thrones stream for free, HBO stream for free, CNN stream for free on AT&T networks and you have to pay through the mechanism we did a cap to stream on any other network. Comcast bought NBC literally prevented from doing those things. The consistent analysis is it's basically two different companies. They just shared some leadership but they operate completely independently. The conditions will expire. It will be very fast for Comcast to start doing things like preferential streaming of NBC content. I think all that's bad. Because in the middle of that is they are all competing with Amazon and Netflix and they will do bad things to deteriorate those and promote their own services via the mechanism of their networks. I think that's when the net neutrality debate is going to come to its conclusion because nobody wants that. And Netflix is very good at making that argument. The end, that's my merger story for the day. There's another one out there which is much more boring. Which is Broadcom. Broadcom wants to buy Qualcomm. Yeah, Qualcomm is not a part of

it. Yeah, Qualcomm is not a part of it. It's like the immediate reaction to Broadcom among everybody else who was, is it a techner? It's like, who, what? And then among techners it was like, they make crappy modems. I don't understand

that. They

make other stuff. They've got the money to try and buy

Qualcomm. How could they be

more? They're not. They're a little bit smaller but they know Qualcomm

is failing. The only thing that's super interesting about

this is Broadcom literally moved its head quarters to the United States and then next day they're like, we're buying Qualcomm. Oh wow. They moved in, they opened their

doors like, Qualcomm.