John Malone Says Big Tech Is “Running Wild”

deadline.com:

“Tying an industry’s hands behind its back, and allowing big tech to run wild in any direction they chose to run in is inappropriate,” insisted Liberty Media chair and early cable pioneer John Malone, slamming tech giants that are “almost monopolies” for the second time this week. “I think that Charter should be allowed to merge with Comcast or Cox or anybody” to reduce costs and improve quality of the service they provide,” he said at the close of Liberty Media’s NYC investor meeting.

Malone is a big Charter shareholder. He lays the inequity largely at the feet of net neutrality, an FCC rule requiring all internet data traffic be treated equally — so internet service providers can’t block, slow down, or speed up content at their discretion.

It classifies broadband as an essential service, like a telephone line. The intention behind it was good, Malone said today, but it allows “these giants to have distribution platforms at no cost to them, and really favors a shift to streaming technology for the simple reason that it is free compared to making a deal” with a linear distributor. “That gives an edge to the Amazons of the word versus the broadcasters.” On Tuesday, speaking at the Paley Center in New York, he called big tech companies “almost monopolies.

They’re global in scale. They have enormous breadth, [massive] balance sheets, and they have been the principal beneficiaries in recent years of the equity rise,” meaning the surging stock market The “AI stimulus” boosted their shares even more as, clearly, “the biggest tech companies are in the best position to benefit most from AI.