DIRECTV and the SUNDAY TICKET isn't a monoply. If anyone wants it, they just have to go buy DIRECTV.
Is SIRIUS a monoply because they are the ONLY place to get NFL Radio??? Or Howard Stern??? There are a million examples!!!!!!!
Congress should just fix the important issues. Like getting armor to our troops in IRAQ, building up the city of New Orleans, and building something on the site of the WTC................and not worry about the NFL SUNDAY TICKET!!!!!!!
Well, I won't disagree that Congress probably has more important things to do. Sadly, our elected representatives have a long and glorious tradition of wasting time and taxpayer money on things of less than tremendous importance. However, your definition of a monopoly is completely incorrect in both the common sense of the term and most definitely in the legal sense.
Commonly, we refer to a monopoly as one seller selling a given product. DirecTV is the only place where you can buy Sunday Ticket. Period. They're a monopoly in that sense.
In the legal sense of the word, as the courts have defined it, DTV is also a monopoly. Congress has generally legislated against anything that tends to be "anticompetitive". Well, if DTV is the only place you can buy the NFL Sunday Ticket, where's the competition? This isn't helped by the fact that the NFL strictly draws their television viewing boundaries. Ergo, if you don't buy the NFL Sunday Ticket, you will get the game the NFL sees fit to show you after it's carved up the USA into 32 distinct markets. This is a textbook example of anticompetitive behavior, particularly where there's some 30 or 40% of the NFL viewing audience (I forget the exact number) that absolutely cannot get DTV for one reason or another. I assure you that less brazen forms of anticompetitive behavior have been found to be violations of the Clayton Act and Sherman Act, the two most relevant pieces of antitrust (aka monopoly) law.
The NFL, if it chooses to litigate the matter rather than settle things (as they surely one day will have to decide), will counter that the relevant market here isn't NFL football, but is much broader. They'll say that the market in question is professional sports, and therefore, that they're only controlling a very small piece of the professional sports market, and that consumers have tons of other choices for their sporting entertainment, be it basketball, NASCAR, baseball, etc.
This is why Sirius isn't a monopoly. Most people would agree that if you can't listen to Howard Stern, there are plenty of other low-IQ, bathroom humor-filled radio shows to listen to. The relevant market is "All Idiot DJs", not just "Howard Stern".
That's what many of these cases come down to: what's the relevant market? The NFL will seek to make it as broad as possible in an attempt to make their own share of the market seem small by comparison. I suspect the NFL will lose this argument, and Roger Goodell, pragmatist that he is, probably knows it. That's why I think you'll see the NFL work out a deal with DTV and the other satellite and cable providers whereby the Sunday Ticket is marketed to other systems, with DTV receiving a refund of a fair chunk of the $6 billion they paid (or whatever it was) for the exclusive rights.
