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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Panita who wrote (7617)	4/10/1999 6:47:00 AM
From: Robert Scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

The Antitrust division and the FCC have addressed this and said no problem for now. Doubt Congress would step in and do anything at this early stage. This is all manuvering for a victory down the road, if any. There is no requirement that cable services or internet access must be open - this would require a change in the law - politically don't know whether it makes sense or not.

To: Panita who wrote (7617)	4/10/1999 11:20:00 PM
From: FR1	Respond to of 29970

If that happens the Senate hearings will push it a bit lower. This is really kind of old news. When AOL started screaming, T told the feds that the T/TCI merger was dead if the feds wanted to interfere and set rates. T's argument is that AOL and others do not want to pay for the pipeline. AOL, T argues, wants to make T pay for the pipeline and then have the government come in and force them to give it away. Furthermore, T said, they are happy to give AOL a ride on the pipe but AOL has to negotiate terms like any business. AOL realizes that there is so much bad blood with T over this (they almost torpedoed the merger) that they have nothing to lose rounding up a posse, screaming real loud in congress, and try to get the feds set rates. Steve is all over the radio with interviews, etc. The feds do not want to spend the billions of dollars it costs to build the pipeline but they do want it built so they allowed the merger with no strings. Congress would have to ignore all the testimony and say the FCC is nuts for AOL to win. Not likely. This points up another thing discussed on this thread some time ago. One of the big reasons TCI screwed up the cable upgrade and became a takeover target is that the feds restricted how much money the cable business can charge. Add to this the fact that the satellites were biting into TCI's customer base. Now TCI was facing cashflow crunch because there was not enough revenue to do the upgrades and they had to decide whether to try to respond to the satellites by adding more channels or do the digital upgrade for ATHM. An impossible battle to win - especially if a committee in Washington is deciding what you can charge. The feds have heard this story. Let's hope they stay out. Personally, I own both AOL and ATHM but I think AOL make a strategic mistake. Perhaps AOL could have talked T into a working arrangement but instead they got greedy and decided to go for broke by trying to assault T in congress. T killed them by telling the feds "no strings or no pipe - you can build it yourself." Dumb move by Steve. Now he's gonna have to pay in gold.