Mr. Aron, Mr. Ellison may have told you that. But that's not what he did. The Ellisons did *not* agree to make 30 films a year. They agreed to make *15* films a year... and distribute the rest. (See III.A.1.d) Last year, they made 18 films. So next year, they can make 3 fewer films than they made last year. They also probably told you they won't jack up the price of movies to your company. Yet while the settlement runs for five years, they've only promised to not increase prices to theaters for three years. (See III.A.6.) This is a bad deal for you, too.

Today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top. As a result, a billionaire media conglomerate closely allied with the president will soon own one of its closest rivals, including some of the nation’s most critical news outlets. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund will co-own those outlets, too. Layoffs will follow. People from L.A. to Atlanta will lose their jobs, small businesses will lose their contracts, your cable bill and movie ticket will be even more expensive. Dissent against money and power will be even harder to find. This did not have to happen. Thanks to an extraordinary outpouring of grassroots anger against the merger, a coalition of 12 state attorneys general sued to block it. They beat Paramount in court, winning a court-ordered pause on the merger, and beat them again at the negotiating table, getting the conglomerate to agree to pause the merger until as late as next June. But the Ellison family does not care about the law. Instead, they loudly threatened to leave California if their merger did not go through immediately. Gavin Newsom caved to that pressure. So did Xavier Becerra. And eventually, so did Attorney General Rob Bonta, agreeing to a weak settlement that will be exceedingly difficult to enforce. People want champions who are not afraid of rich bullies. Newsom, Becerra, and Bonta did not meet that mark. The people who work in the film and TV industry and the small businesses who support it will suffer as a result. And so will everyone who values dissent in our democracy. This is not the end. The coalition that fought to block this illegal merger will fight to break up big media. There is legislation pending in Congress today that would retroactively break up corrupt billionaire mergers. This industry was once marked with strict rules so that a small handful of conglomerates couldn’t own everything. There’s no reason we cannot return to that reality. There’s no reason we can’t build on it. But today is a loss, and that loss will be felt by the people who can least afford it.

A telling development: per Bloomberg, Paramount now says it will “pay” $30 million per film if they fall short of their 30 film *distribution* pledge. Who will they pay? The crews they would have hired? The theater owners with empty seats? No. It will be some fund that a government official has to then distribute. Rent is due on the 1st of the month, not two years from now. And they’re no longer even pledging to *make* 30 films a year. Just to distribute that amount; as Marla points out, this would include re-releases. All of this is of course ambiguous and tbd but this is not good. Like most behavioral remedies, it will be next to impossible to meaningfully enforce, and even then, enforcement will be difficult and after the fact.

Brendan Carr just cleared the way for a nation that was responsible for the murder of an American journalist to hold a key stake in CBS news and 60 Minutes, and if this merger goes through, in CNN and Last Week Tonight. Saudi Arabia First.

1) AI will not eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (so far) the advent of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously. 2) If you worked in a company where you anticipated a 10% chance that your product would kill ten people, let alone all people, the correct response would be horror, ceasing all operations, and likely contacting the police or other criminal authorities. I am obviously no Coxon booster but at least his behavior is in line with his stated beliefs. Any current AI company employees saying "yes, me too, the thing we are building and about to IPO may kill all humans" should, again, not be taken seriously. Their actions betray their actual beliefs. 3) Antitrust law does not prevent AI companies from coordinating to make sure AI does not hurt people. It does not prevent companies working together to make sure it doesn't hack people; the DOJ and FTC made this clear a decade ago when they issued a policy statement saying that the agencies "do not believe that antitrust is – or should be – a roadblock to legitimate cybersecurity information sharing." The same principles apply here. See: 4) Antitrust law does absolutely prevent AI companies from organizing to prevent the entry of cheaper, upstart rivals because the bigger companies are burning cash and failing to achieve sufficient profitability. The panic of individual employees may be sincere if misguided, but the moves by their CEOs to achieve some kind of broad "antitrust waiver" or "exemption" should be meet with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open models.