how did this get an aproval? Dosen't this fly in the face of Anti-trust? Won't the newly merged company hold a monopoly on the satalite radio industry, or do they look at it as a small portion of the entire radio industry?
In the satelite radio industry this is considered a monopoly, but in the greater entertainment industry the satelite radio industry does not comprise even one full percent. There's still traditional AM/FM radio and other devices to compete with satelite radio, therefore its unlikely that this will be ruled as a monopoly.
With that said, the government turns a blind eye to certain monopolies it feels are beneficial to the consumer or that have nice, large political contributions. Legislation seems to have finally realized that phone companies work in economies of scale and ultimately the end consumer benefits, at least in the traditional land line sense, when there are larger phone companies. AT&T will never be what it once was but legislation did not block the large baby bells from re-merging, the other year, and essentially undoing what the anti-trust case broke up in the first place.
This is directed towards Nick. You have to remember that a monopoly isn't simply about whether a company holds patents or proprietary technology. Those are only two barriers to entry. There's other barriers to entry; economies of scale, product differentiation, start up capital requirements, switching costs, access to distribution channels, government policy, expected retaliation, cost disadvantages (proprietary technology, patents).
Those are all a part of the Porters Five Forces model and comprise just one section of model, there's other sections with subsections like; diversity of rivalry, buying power of suppliers, buying power of sellers, threat of substitution.
There's so many things blocking a start up company's entry to the satelite radio market, i.e., Sirius/XM would retaliate fiercely, has much proprietary technology (after all, those are the only really companies to use this technology successfully), huge capital requirements, switching costs for contracted customers, high brand loyalty, etc., etc.
Consider this, the Europe Union sued the hell out of Microsoft for being a monopoly and won its case overseas. We tend to have lax laws in some areas, but surely Microsoft was a monopoly in the United States for quite awhile and was never really prosecuted fully; they just received warnings and slaps on the wrist.