Key government witness clashes with AT&T lawyer in Time Warner case
The government's economist clashed with AT&T's lawyer over projected price increases to TV service.
The AT&T-Time Warner merger could end up costing consumers less money than what some earlier estimates suggested, the government's star witness said in federal court Tuesday as he clashed repeatedly with company lawyers over key figures in his economic analysis of the deal.
Instead of paying a minimum of 27 cents more per month on their bills as a result of the deal, TV subscribers could conceivably pay a smaller premium of at least 13 cents a month more - a downward revision in the projections of Carl Shapiro, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. Toward the other end of the range, the government has said consumers could collectively pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year, or 45 cents more per month on each of their bills.