Caroline Hyde

Well, the policymakers are really being egged on by Congress and not just by Elizabeth Warren.

We're seeing Republicans, including California's Darrell Issa, get into the act.

And he is flagging his concerns on the consumer side.

And really, it would fall to the Justice Department to conduct this review.

Our expectation is that the agency's antitrust division will give this transaction the wire brush treatment.

It will not go through the review process very easily.

The biggest concern, Ed, really is around the streaming question.

Of course, Warner Brothers has its storied movie studios and deep library of film and other productions.

But it also owns HBO Max, which is the fourth largest streaming service in the world to Netflix's number one.

So when you combine those, that would give Netflix following this deal 30 percent control over the global streaming market, 450 million users worldwide.

And that would attract a lot of attention from regulatory authorities, not only here in Washington,

but in the European Union as well.

One of the things that our analysts here at Bloomberg, Jennifer Wray, said is that perhaps Netflix, to make this deal more palatable, could let go of HBO Max.

But Netflix has already tried to inoculate against that, saying that, look, 75 percent of our users also subscribe to HBO Max.

So there may not be that sort of conflict when it comes to competition, as some are raising, they say.

Yeah, and maybe they can bundle it and make it cheaper as part of the argument for the consumer.

We could go so many directions, Mike, and we could look to California and the impact on the industry and on jobs, and I'm sure that's something Gavin Newsom's looking at.

But where you sit, many are wondering about the counter-argument likely to come from Paramount Skydance and, of course, the close ties with David Ellison, his father Larry Ellison, and the administration.

What are you reading there?

Look, Karen, I'm glad you asked about this because the politics these days are inescapable.