How Does this Dual Jurisdiction Play Out in the Context of Merger and Acquisition Review?
As noted above, with passage of the 1996 Act, the pace of telecommunications mergers and acquisitions has increased substantially. Although the 1996 Act itself made only a single change in the overlapping authority of the FCC and the DOJthe elimination of the FCCs rarely-if-ever-used ability to immunize common carrier mergers from antitrust challenge [52] the increase in mergers and acquisitions generated by the 1996 Act has increased the focus on the different statutory and political aspects to the authority of the FCC and the DOJ. A review of the DOJ and FCC treatment of these transactions, however, suggests a patchwork of decisions in which no clear pattern can be discerned. Sometimes the DOJ and the FCC take complimentary approaches toward merger review. For example, in the Fall of 1996, both the DOJ and the FCC acted on the proposed merger of the Bell Operating Company local exchange carrier (LEC) USWest and a large cable provider, Continental Cablevision (Continental). [53] The t
