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.
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.
