Despite what Randall Stephenson thinks, the Department of Justice’s suit blocking AT&T from acquiring Time Warner’s assets in an $85 billion merger is a great moment for antitrust in America. It’s late, but it’s welcome.

WIRED Opinion About Susan Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of The Responsive City and Captive Audience.

Stephenson, the AT&T CEO, has no one but himself to blame. He and his minions effectively tanked their own plans to merge their company---the largest major pay-TV provider in the country and the second-largest wireless carrier---with Time Warner’s must-have cable channels and sports rights. AT&T, a company that thinks of government as, at best, a peer, approached the negotiations with an imperious attitude that misread the history of similar deals, and, most egregiously, misread the person who would be making the ultimate call, the skilled new leader of DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim.

Example: Here's Stephenson reacting to the news earlier this month that Justice Department staff members had said that the merger could go through only if the Time Warner Turner Broadcasting unit, which includes CNN, was structurally removed from the deal: "I have never offered to sell CNN and have no intention of doing so." He sounded offended. He said it is "illogical for me to think that this deal doesn't get approved."

Those were extraordinary things to say. AT&T doesn’t own Time Warner, even though Stephenson confidently told the SEC in a public filing that he expected the deal to close by the end of next month. AT&T had more than measured the drapes; Time Warner employees had already moved on. But AT&T needed government approval.

Self-inflicted Wounds

AT&T hurt itself by failing to respect DOJ staff that learned key lessons from the giant merger of Comcast with NBCU in 2011: So-called "vertical" mergers between big content and transmission companies can have pernicious consequences for consumers, even if the merger does not remove a competitor from the field. The staff has gotten the message that, in this heavily concentrated, stagnant, and essentially noncompetitive marketplace, trying to smooth over illegal mergers with conditions and ongoing oversight doesn’t work. That’s why, informed by years of staff experience and frustration with Comcast/NBCU, DOJ’s antitrust head Delrahim has sued to block AT&T from completing its deal.

DOJ has a very strong case. AT&T not only failed to address the department’s concerns, but also unintentionally provided ammo in the form of the company’s strategic statements over the years.

The DOJ uses quotes from AT&T’s and DirecTV’s own internal documents to show that the merged company intended to use Turner’s top-rated, widely distributed content as a sledgehammer both (a) to raise prices for any other competing video distributor, so as (ultimately) to drive those distributors’ customers into AT&T’s arms, and (b) to slow competition from online video.

The plainly drafted complaint filed Monday bears the names of dozens of DOJ staff attorneys. They know what they’re talking about.

Time Warner’s content includes three of the five top basic-cable channels as well as a top news network. HBO is a monster; Turner Sports is a juggernaut, with rights to NBA, Major League Baseball, and March Madness (NCAA Division I men’s basketball) games, as well as the PGA Championship. HBO is the world’s leading pay TV brand. CNN is by any measure a top news channel; it's on track to have its biggest year since 2003. Turner’s top cable networks reach 91 million of the nearly 100 million US households that subscribe to pay TV.

The DOJ classifies sports and news, in particular, as "must-have" content. They're the two things that audiences still have to see in real time.

Remember that AT&T is the largest pay-TV provider in the country, with about 25 million customers, most of them coming from its acquisition of DirecTV in 2015. It's also planning to bring more pay TV to its gigantic wireless customer base. It is completely rational for AT&T to use every sledgehammer in its possession to keep competitors from emerging or thriving. And the DOJ, just rationally, sees that AT&T would thus be raising the prices that consumers pay.