In a couple of months, AT&T and the Justice Department may have their day in court over the Dallas-based telecom giant's plan to acquire Time Warner. The entertainment ambitions of AT&T will be on the line. Time Warner, with its valuable TV and movie offerings, would be a crown jewel for AT&T, which has seen firsthand how much its customers crave content with the explosion of video streaming on its network.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson (left) and Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes testified in 2016 before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner. (Evan Vucci / The Associated Press)

The government filed an antitrust lawsuit in November to block the merger, a deal valued at $108.7 billion, including debt.

The trial is scheduled to begin March 19. AT&T and the Justice Department could still come to a settlement before then, but they've pushed ahead with teams of attorneys and lists of witnesses.

We spoke to antitrust experts, law professors and consumer advocates to explore some of the broader arguments for and against the merger. And we looked at the arguments AT&T and Justice Department officials have already made in public statements and court documents.

FIVE ARGUMENTS FOR THE MERGER

History says so.

AT&T and Time Warner are not direct competitors. AT&T distributes TV and movie content. Time Warner's networks, like HBO and CNN, create it. This type of merger is called a vertical merger. Over the past several decades, vertical mergers — including the similar media merger of NBCUniversal and Comcast — have gotten the government's seal of approval. Based on that history, the deal should go through.

Get ready for Game of Thrones on your iPhone.

AT&T executives say the merger would be a victory for customers who'd see new products and lower prices. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has even hinted at ideas like turning HBO hit Game of Thrones into shorter, more smartphone-friendly episodes. He pointed to DirecTV Now, an online streaming service that's a cheaper alternative to cable, as an example of the innovative products that can come out of a merger. (The streaming service launched a year after AT&T bought DirecTV in 2015.) The innovation would also be in advertising. AT&T plans to turn viewership data from Time Warner into sophisticated targeted ads.

Someone needs to defang the FANGs.

Tech billionaire Mark Cuban testified in favor of the merger, saying that the real threats to competition are companies like Facebook, Apple and Google. Those companies, some of the top-performing on the market, have been dubbed the FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google). They control algorithms and can change what content people see. Cuban says AT&T would be better positioned to take on the tech behemoths, which increasingly dominate digital advertising and entertainment.

Content is now king.

The ground is shifting in the media world — and that can make legacy companies like AT&T and Time Warner look like dinosaurs. Customers are cutting the cord and instead choosing online video and streaming services born in the internet age like Netflix and Dish's Sling TV. Even companies like Amazon are creating original, Golden Globe-winning content. And teens and 20-somethings have even more content creators vying for their time, such as YouTube and Snap. In some ways, legacy companies are the weakest competitors, said Larry Downes, a researcher at Georgetown University who studies the intersection of technology and public policy. He says proposed mergers like AT&T-Time Warner and Disney-21st Century Fox are a way for older companies to keep up — or in some cases, catch up.

Makan Delrahim is the new head of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice. He's in the spotlight because of the high-profile AT&T lawsuit. (Stephen Voss / The New York Times)

Politics and business should not mix.

"Political sideshows" have mucked up the antitrust review of AT&T-Time Warner, says John Mayo, a professor of economics, business and public policy at Georgetown. President Donald Trump has frequently tweeted and delivered speeches criticizing CNN and opposing the AT&T-Time Warner deal. Before his appointment, the Justice Department's antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, said in a TV interview that he didn't see any problems with the AT&T-Time Warner merger — a position he reversed once appointed by Trump. A victory in court for AT&T could cause companies to breathe a sigh of relief, if they fear the Trump administration would use the Justice Department or regulators to punish its political foes.

FIVE ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE MERGER

Another bigfoot on the block.

On the presidential campaign trail, the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger brought together two unlikely allies: then-candidates Trump and Bernie Sanders. They argued that combining AT&T and Time Warner would give the new company too much power. Some consumer advocacy groups have agreed, saying that concentration of control, especially in the media industry, could silence voices or limit diversity. It would also allow AT&T to collect a lot of data about consumer preferences and behavior.

AT&T could strong-arm the competition.

The merger would put AT&T in a unique position as the largest pay-TV provider in the country and the owner of a lot of "must-see" TV, from HBO's Game of Thrones to the NCAA March Madness games. AT&T would also sell that programming to competitors like Comcast. With its new ownership of content, it would have an incentive to raise the price of programming for rivals, with few repercussions, says John Bergmayer, senior counsel of Washington, D.C.-based consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. Rivals could pay more for the same content, just because AT&T would now own it.

So get ready to pay more.

If AT&T's competitors are under pressure to carry their customers' favorite shows, even if pricier, expect them to pass on the cost to you. Or since AT&T wouldn't have to pay for content like its competitors do, it could offer steep discounts to drive them out of business, then raise prices later. This argument will likely underpin the Justice Department's case.

And say goodbye to the little guy.

An explosion of traditional TV alternatives has eroded the dominance of cable and satellite providers like AT&T and Comcast. That's given customers more choices of how to watch and what to watch. But Delrahim says that more competitive landscape is still in its early days. Combining AT&T and Time Warner could tip the balance and box out the next Netflix. AT&T could also make it harder for customers to discover emerging TV shows or networks that aren't under the Time Warner umbrella. For example, after the merger of NBCUniversal and Comcast, Bloomberg's financial news TV channel was stuck in the nosebleeds of the cable lineup, where viewers were less likely to find it. Bloomberg had to fight for two years before the Federal Communications Commission ruled in its favor.

It's time to put teeth in antitrust policy again.

Delrahim, the Justice Department's antitrust chief, already signaled that he thinks differently about mergers. For example, he said he's skeptical of behavioral remedies, conditions the government can set to blunt concerns about a merger. Those conditions require the government to monitor the company's behavior. He's said that he prefers structural remedies, such as forcing companies to sell off problematic assets. He may usher in a new antitrust philosophy that scrutinizes big deals more closely, said Eleanor Fox, a professor at New York University who specializes in antitrust law. She said antitrust policies in recent years "haven't been very fierce, so there's a question of whether they should be more aggressive."