“I was very wrong. I did not think that this deal would close, certainly not this year or until the trial started.”
Evan Shapiro, co-host, The Media Odyssey Podcast
Paramount settled with the state attorneys general on 21 September, a judge approved it on 30 September before the ticking fee of $7 million a day could even be triggered.
Anyone who has sat through a carriage negotiation knows the last days before a deadline are where the leverage is. Evan and I compare notes on what the states did with theirs. I come at this wearing my usual European hat: why jobs come last on that list of mandates negotiated by the AGs? We also talk about Pluto TV, which feels like the odd one out next to HBO Max and Paramount+, but presents a huge opportunity for both to finally offer a free front porch.
We then couldn’t avoid getting into the fear marketing campaign triggered by Jacob Coxon when he left Anthropic, Meta's Muse, and where Europe sits in the AI race, with Mistral's €3 billion round and Nvidia's roughly $13 billion purchase of Hugging Face.
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That’s it for today but before you go:
IMO, a regulator’s primary job should be pretty simple: apply the law and the regulatory framework as intended.
Once regulators start making decisions about jobs, theatrical output, newsroom independence or whether assets should remain separate, beyond what that framework actually requires, I think we are on much less healthy ground.
Those can all be legitimate policy concerns. But if they matter, put them in the rules. Don’t improvise them case by case as conditions for approving a merger.
And wherever you sit politically, recent FCC cases in the US should be a warning. The issue is not only how regulatory power is used, but where that power ends. If a regulator can stretch its mandate and use individual approvals to influence editorial or commercial decisions, we should all be concerned about the precedent.