(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.)
I’m worried I might be writing too much about antitrust. (Reminder: I use antitrust as shorthand for all “competition/monopolization/consolidation/antitrust” stories and news.) Between articles about Netflix buying Warner Bros., then Paramount buying Warner Bros. Discovery, and Apple’s deficit-financed spending, not to mention countless smaller mentions in my strategy articles, that’s a lot on one topic.
I don’t want to ever write too much about the same thing. A few Substacks I read just seem to hash and re-hash the same topics (mostly AI these days) and I don’t want to fall into that rut. I want to cover a variety of topics. To be fair to myself, I intersperse articles on antitrust with everything from Beast Games flopping, the great news about the WGA deal with studios, how we overuse “everyone” in headlines, advice on how to use AI well, the “Purdue Pharma”-level threats facing Hollywood, and the countless streaming ratings deep dives I do.
Well, looking at the last three or so weeks of news, I don’t have a choice this week: I have to write about antitrust! Consolidation news and un-consolidation news seems to be everywhere.
So that’s the topic for today’s “Most Important Story of the Week”, looking at a series of M&A stories, headlined by the Ticketmaster-Live Nation guilty verdict. All that, plus the potential end of LIV Golf, the latest on Warner Bros-Paramount pushback, Netflix’s stock buybacks, and a whole lot more.
Let’s dive right in.
Most Important Story of the Week – Merger Pushback Evolves in 2026
The M&A roller coaster continues zooming wildly up and down. (Like Brent Crude oil since the start of the Iran war, am I right?) Some months, the pro-antitrust side racks up huge victories against now-no-longer-alleged monopolists; then, some months, there are more, bigger mergers than ever before, sometimes paired with rank, obvious political corruption.
Especially last fall, as Netflix tried to buy Warner Bros. and the judge in the first Google antitrust case essentially let Google off with a punishment of “time served, keep all the ill-gotten gains”, the idea we’d see a boom in antitrust enforcement looked grim. Meanwhile, M&A has been booming in 2025 and 2026. Yet four big news stories have shown a big rebound in antitrust enforcement:
- Live Nation/Ticketmaster lost their antitrust trial.
- A judge blocked the Nexstar-Tegna merger.
- The California Attorney General sued Amazon for price fixing, and has since released documents making their case and sought a “summary judgment”.
- Lastly, the FCC is investigating the NFL for not putting enough games on broadcast television.
Overall, I think the impact of this shift could matter as much as deregulation changed the entertainment landscape in the 1990s and 2000s. As I first wrote in the previous Trump administration:
And then I said it had arrived.
Antitrust is still the new deregulation, but it’s changed in one major way: it’s decentralized to all of the states.
The New, Decentralized FTC
The latest evolution of antitrust is that—even when it looked like the new Trump administration had decided to not just not oppose mergers, but to actively endorse them (especially if they’re financially incentivized to do so)—the states have stepped in to oppose mergers:
- State enforcers joined the Ticketmaster-Live Nation monopoly trial, and kept it going after the Trump administration settled the case.
- State AGs sued to stop the Nexstar/Tegna merger. Again, federal enforcers agreed to a huge exception to current regulations on local television station ownership to allow the merger to pass.
- A State AG (California Attorney General Rob Bonta) is behind the Amazon lawsuit.
- State AGs may try to stop the Warner Bros./Paramount-Skydance merger.
Antitrust can now come from anywhere. Even private litigants (meaning companies or customers harmed by monopolization) can use the results from some of these trials to try their own cases. In other words, antitrust no longer has a single point of failure (the current administration). This makes challenges to deals more likely, and approval won’t just come from one presidential administration.
The current administration may have killed the federal FTC, but it created a bunch of mini-FTCs that can come from anywhere. With revised antitrust statutes and some more funding, this could be a powerful force for competition.
The Strategic Implications
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