There’s every reason to believe that rate hikes would follow AT it bills customers. In other words, to pay down its interest, AT&T will have to hike prices.
It’s likely those cost increases would occur in its consumer-product markets, including broadband, where AT&T faces little to no real competition. It could also raise the rates it charges and restrict the offerings it makes to other cable distributors that carry channels like HBO and CNN, limiting what people can see and generating new costs that would be passed along to pay-TV subscribers everywhere.
This trickle-down of higher prices would be felt not in the boardroom but in the living room, where working families are already struggling to keep up with escalating costs for Internet, wireless services and pay-TV.
Higher prices would put Internet access further out of reach of the more than 30 million adults in this country stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. According to U.S. Census data, this gap is most pronounced in African-American and Hispanic communities. People already suffering from generations of systemic racism are disadvantaged further by lack of access to the educational and work opportunities that are at the fingertips of those with high-speed connections.
For the enormous amount of money AT&T is shelling out to acquire Time Warner, it could run super-fast gigabit-fiber Internet services to every single home in America. That would truly serve as “a catalyst to more competition, more innovation,” to borrow Bewkes’ words.