Week ahead in tech: Trump’s antitrust pick heads before Senate

Lawmakers are returning to Washington on Tuesday, after a two-week recess, and are in for a busy week.

While the week will be dominated by efforts to pass a government spending bill to prevent a shutdown at midnight on Friday, April 28, tech issues will also be in the spotlight.

President Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, is heading before a Senate panel. The Senate Judiciary Committee will hear from Delrahim on Wednesday.

If confirmed by the upper chamber, he will oversee the agency’s review of major mergers. At the top of his priorities will be the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger.

{mosads}Trump blasted the $85 billion deal when he was on the campaign trail and pledged to stop it, saying that such mergers “destroy democracy.”

“As an example of the power structure I’m fighting, AT&T is buying Time Warner and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” he said during a rally in October.

But the president has shown that he is open to changing his mind on the proposal. In January, just days before he was inaugurated, Trump told Axios that he hadn’t “seen any of the facts” on the deal despite his earlier comments.

And Ajit Pai, who Trump appointed to lead the Federal Communications Commission, has allowed the two companies to bypass his agency’s merger review process, to the concern of Democrats.

That leaves the Justice Department as the sole obstacle for the merger, and Delrahim, currently a deputy counsel in the White House, has indicated that he doesn’t see the deal as controversial.

“Just the sheer size of it and the fact that it’s media, I think will get a lot of attention,” he told Canadian news channel BNN in an October interview. “However, I don’t see this as a major antitrust problem.”

Watch to see if Delrahim is grilled by Democrats about those comments during his Wednesday hearing.

The fight over net neutrality is also heating up. Pai has been making the rounds in the tech and telecom worlds to detail his proposal to roll back the 2015 rules that require internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally.

His plan reportedly would undo the agency’s reclassification of internet providers as common carriers, which would remove them from the FCC’s jurisdiction and return them to the Federal Trade Commission’s oversight.

Following an FCC meeting on Thursday, during which Pai pushed through rules deregulating the business data services market, he told reporters that he had been visiting with tech companies in Silicon Valley to solicit their input on the issue.

On Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on space and science, chaired by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), will hold a hearing titled, “Reopening the American Frontier: Reducing Regulatory Barriers and Expanding American Free Enterprise in Space.” Cruz wants to look at weighs to ease regulations and get more private companies in space.

The House Space, Science and Technology Committee will also hold a hearing on Wednesday morning to examine the search for life on other planets.