Comcast's Time Warner Cable (TWC) megamerger deal is in doubts after the Federal Communications Commission said it would send the matter to an administrative law judge for a hearing.
That is an indirect indication to kill the deal because no company would ever want to follow the 'very long' and time consuming hearing process.
The Department of Justice was also skeptical about the deal. The DOJ also made it clear that it was not going to entertain the promise that it would consider the deal if the company (Comcast) agreed to change its behavior.
The DOJ's antitrust division would want the biggest U.S. cable company sell the assets to avoid market monopoly. It may also file a lawsuit to block a deal that may hurt the consumers.
This view is different from the U.S. antitrust division's stand in a 2011 accord that permitted Comcast to follow some behavioral remedies in order to buy NBC Universal, according to Charlotte Observer.
Generally, DOJ and FCC officials work in tandem on reviewing such transactions, and they have never contradicted each other in the past. They are governed by different laws and officials, however. The FCC's proposal to send the Comcast-TWC merger for a hearing is, therefore, a good sign that the DOJ is also warming up for blocking the deal, reported re/code.
"As with all of our DOJ discussions in the past and going forward, we do not believe it is appropriate to share the content of those meetings publicly, and we, therefore, have no comment," a DOJ spokeswoman said on Wednesday about the meetings with Comcast officials.
A FCC team of lawyers was examining the megamerger deal for more over a year and it was already pretty clear that for some reasons, the Comcast-TWC deal was in trouble.