Apple and Google hit back at ACCC’s proposal for major antitrust reforms
Apple and Google hit back at ACCC’s proposal for major antitrust reforms
The governing body of the US Federal Trade Commission has outlined its plan to take on the Big Ten and the NFL, accusing them of “perorating antitrust in the land of the free” in taking advantage of the antitrust laws of two major conferences: the NFL and the NCAA.
The 11-member ACC Commission had laid out its proposal, which included a proposal to use 15 percent of all federal revenue to increase national television rights, paying for “special interest” access to college game broadcasts.
The proposal, which was approved by the commission after months of work, includes a clause that would grant the Big Ten and the NCAA the right to set their own broadcast deals and prohibit league-affiliated networks from running their programs on video.
The proposal has been floated by three of the Big Ten’s top commissioners, according to sources.
The proposal would also bar the ACC from “national sports programming,” as the league agreed to do in 2011. (The league has also said it would adapt its broadcasts to the commission’s standards.)
The BBC and Sky Sports have agreed to pay $10 million in cash and $3 million in broadcast per year for advertising services to their 60,000 clubs, and will pay $10 million to Channel 4 and $2 million to Channel 6 television sets.
The Big Ten and the NCAA declined to comment.
Based on previous reports, the proposals call for a “fast-track” antitrust process to build as much as 1,000 national sports channels, encompassing channels such as ESPN, ABC and ESPN2.
“These proposals will have a lot of support from the owners of national TV networks and from the owners of player/player conferences,” said Jim Hart, president of the Competitive Cable Networks Association, which represents the Big Ten, NCAA and ACC conferences.
Derrick Green, a lawyer with the consulting firm Ericsson, told Business Insider that the proposed legislation isn’t likely to derail the common-sense proposals approved by the commission.
“It is an unwavering commitment,” Green said of the Big Ten’s approach to antitrust. “These proposals will make it possible for us to deliver a competitive marketplace for gamers who need to easily access the most advanced networks in the world, and who have higher demand and live-stream their games than cable and T-Mobile could do. But there are a lot of glaring discrepancies within these proposals that need to be addressed, including when it comes to the ability to undercut competition in the first place.”
However, Green said, the commissioner’s proposal is in line with the commission’s general direction to consider antitrust-related “regulatory reforms” in the coming years.
The idea of annual “talks” between potential NFL and ACC commissioners is also a priority for media companies, which have been a hot item on the ACC’s agenda since last summer’s publication of the NCAA’s “Dear Colleague letter” urging to join the commission to make its sports content more fair.
Last week, ESPN and ESPN2, each of which paid $6 billion in market capitalization for sports-oriented content last year, joined the ACC to try to cut down on the “competition issue,” arguing that the NFL and ACC are engaging in a “pattern of out-of-control pernicious practices” that has led to new sports offerings that have gone unsold on cable.
But the league’s proposal to
ALL TEXT IN THIS POST IS COMPLETELY FAKE AND AI GENERATED
Read more about how it’s done here.
