The AT&T/Time Warner marger is back in the news, but the news hook is a distraction. According to various reports, President Trump wants the two companies to divest themselves of CNN as a condition of the merger, because he hates CNN.

This is a smokescreen and a sideshow, distracting from the real problem with this merger. The Department of Justice should slap some tough conditions on the, and they shouldn't involve divesting CNN. They should involve divesting DirecTV.

For what it's worth, smart news reports say the DOJ has also asked about this, but the headlines got grabbed by the president's CNN grudge.

Bloomberg columnist Joe Nocera, who I respect, says the AT&TW deal should go through because NBC/Comcast went through. But two wrongs don't make a right, and NBC/Comcast was actually a less threatening deal than ABC/Time Warner.

That's because AT&T's distribution arm is so much more powerful than that of NBC/Comcast. Comcast is the nation's biggest cable provider, but AT&T owns a nationwide 4G LTE wireless network; a nationwide satellite TV service, in DirecTV; and a high-speed internet service in 21 states.

That means AT&T has far more power than Comcast does to pull anti-competitive shenanigans. The most obvious is for AT&T to keep its Time Warner entertainment properties on its own channels; holding back HBO from Dish, for instance.

But it isn't likely to do anything that unsubtle. Rather, you'll get exclusive Game of Thrones behind-the-scenes videos only on AT&T phones and DirecTV, or the Cartoon Network app will go away and become part of DirecTV Now, so you end up having to have that brand on your home screen, and you're more likely to subscribe.

And if new delivery competitors crop up, they'll get squeezed. An independent Time Warner has incentives to make a deal with every possible streaming service. An AT&T-owned one has incentives to freeze out anyone who competes with DirecTV Now. Maybe, once again, they won't freeze them out entirely; maybe they'll just charge enough more for content that those services have to charge more than DirecTV Now does. That's how this works.

Sorry, That's Just Too Big

"Behavioral" conditions, like those placed on NBC/Comcast, aren't good enough because they expire. NBC/Comcast is about to become unshackled, Bloomberg reported earlier this year, enabling the company to exert leverage over competing TV distributors and charge them higher rates.

There's an obvious solution here: if AT&T wants Time Warner so badly, it needs to drop DirecTV, returning DirecTV to being a competitive content delivery system. That would put AT&TW about on par with NBC/Comcast in terms of power (Comcast has more cable subscribers, but it doesn't have a wireless network.) That's still too powerful, but it doesn't create a new hideous level of gigantism.

AT&T might not be willing to live with that condition. In an interview on CNBC, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said the whole point of this merger was that "Internet companies" (read: Google and Facebook) control online advertising with such an iron grip, that AT&T can only compete by combining content and delivery.

But letting things get bad isn't a license to make them worse. Yes, the government allowed NBC and Comcast to merge, creating a mini version of the behemoth that AT&Time Warner would become. And yes, Google and Facebook are, right now, worse. The terrifying grip that those two companies have on the entire online media ecosystem is what's causing titans of industry like Stephenson to give vaguely panicked interviews to CNBC.

But what if the answer there isn't growing AT&T, but breaking Google? Antitrust law seems to have no idea how to deal with the internet giants, but if we don't want our entertainment, news, connectivity, and personal data all controlled by a tiny handful of oligarchs, that's the question more people need to be asking.