Commentary: A 'fight worth fighting': Paramount settlement is less than desired, more than nothing

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Set us as preferred Did California come out a winner when Atty.Gen.

Rob Bonta settled a multi-state lawsuit against Paramount Skydance on Monday, allowing its $111-billion purchase of Warner Bros.Discovery to move forward? That’s the question everyone is trying to figure out, as the 32-page agreement is parsed, with pundits pouring over minutiae of cable streaming and tax credits.

I’ll leave that to the business experts, but I’m here to give you a big picture of politics, power and possibilities — and one short but unsatisfying answer about whether this deal is good for the Golden State: Yes and no.I’ll start with this: Did California win is the wrong question.

There was always something bigger at play here that was lost behind the fear of further decimation to an industry so central and crucial to the state.The question the lawsuit asked is, “Do we live in an America where government institutions are so broken that power makes its own rules?”The settlement might not give the entertainment industry all it hoped for but it was “a fight worth fighting,” said George Hay, a professor at Cornell Law School and a former attorney with the U.S.

Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, because it sought to answer that question in favor of consumers, and showed that states like California can and will step up to fill a dangerous void.David Ellison is threatening to pull Paramount out of Hollywood if the state continues its lawsuit against his merger.

Is that a real threat?Under the Trump administration, the U.S.Department of Justice hasn’t so much abdicated its responsibility to enforce antitrust laws — it has embraced an oligarchic ethos that seems happy to feed the American economy into the mouths of behemoths, allowing companies such as Paramount free reign to gobble up whatever lies in their paths lik...