The Parents Television and Media Council (PTC) said the combination of AT&T and Discovery media assets would create a tsunami of family unfriendly programming, but suggests the deal is likely to be approved.

In response to the announced combo, PTC president Tim Winter said that he anticipates a streaming version of the cable bundle the advocacy group has been trying to unwind for years. 

"The result will have consumers being forced to buy streaming network programming they don’t want in order to get the streaming network programming that they do want, and they will be forced to pay more in the process,” Winter said. “Consumers, meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.”

"We fear that the combination of mostly-family-friendly Discovery with increasingly-toxic HBO will put more children and more families at a greater risk of harm,” he said. PTC was no fan of the Time Warner deal that brought HBO into the AT&T fold.

Winter said another issue is that, according to PTC's recent study, the top streaming services don't have robust parental controls. And while he said it is likely that regulators could force some conditions on the combined company, "if Disney can buy the studio, library, and cable assets of Fox, we suspect approval of this acquisition is mostly perfunctory.”

The Biden Administration has pledged robust antitrust oversight, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has pushed for tougher reviews out of the FTC, which she says under the Trump Administration was working with Band-Aids and duct tape.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler isn't talking about the potential for the Federal Communications Commission to be reviewing the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger.

He was asked to weigh in after the FCC's public meeting Thursday (Oct. 27). Commissioners historically don't talk about merger reviews before the agency, but the merger application has yet to be filed.

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Wheeler was not talking about it anyway, pointing out there was no deal before him, though there might be -- though almost certainly he won't comment on it then, either.

"Nothing has been presented to us right now and if something is presented, we will make a decision based on the public interest," he said.

He brushed off as hypotheticals general questions about his view on vertical integration, the efficacy of behavioral versus structural conditions or what an FCC "advisory" role might be in the deal. Wheeler never answers questions he defines as hypothetical.

But he did say that in terms of whether he thought vertical integration was healthy for competition, he said: "I don't think there is any doubt about my stand on 'competition, competition, competition.' "

Asked if the FCC's hands were tied if the AT&T-TW merger did not include any license transfers, Wheeler said: "We ought to see how things develop. I'm not going to stand here and hip shoot one way or another."