Rohan Goswami

I think it's a sexy headline.

I think it's what people like to talk about.

But the real meetings were happening behind the scenes and around the actual hearing, right?

These guys were here for a day.

They were not just spending an hour or two

in a stuffy Senate office building, being grilled by these guys.

You can bet that they knew this was the price of admission they had to pay to get the one-on-one meetings, to get in the rooms with staffers, to get in the rooms, I would presume, although I don't have sourcing on this, but they'd be stupid not to, to get in the room with antitrust officials and to lay out kind of what they said in their opening remarks, right?

Which, again, they're not competing with other...

streamers or other conventional legacy media platforms, they consider their competition TikTok.

To a certain degree, Instagram.

YouTube, not necessarily TV, but we probably say YouTube Shorts and YouTube itself.

Not conventional streamers, not conventional studios.

That's where things get a little weird here, too.

So beneath the wokeism and all the headlines, there was a lot of substance around that as well.

You know, I think there's real concern.

Mike Lee went on the record to express concerns about this.

It's not really clear where those are coming from, although he did make an excellent point.

This was before the hearing, which I thought was a fair point that the mere existence of this merger, right, actually has its own anti-competitive effect.

You know, just by going through this process and even trying to do this, it scares off the competition, which, by the way, is Paramount's point.

It's not easy to say that it was divided along party lines.