Hold onto your hats, folks, because the media landscape may be in for some big changes. THR has reported that the merger between AT&T and Time Warner has just been approved by federal judge Richard Leon — a deal that’s been in the making for about two years at this point. After countless roadblocks, it looks like this $85 billion deal is set to go through.

So what does this mean for the industry at-large? Well, for starters, it shows a real merger between mammoth content creators and mammoth content distributors, who control things like our data plans. Lord knows what kind of ramifications that could have down the line.

“This decision from Judge Leon will have broad ramifications for the tech, telecommunications and media sector for decades to come.” Daniel Ives, chief strategy officer at GBH Insights, told Business Insider. “This deal will accelerate content and streaming initiatives between Time Warner properties and AT&T and be a major shot across the bow to other cable and wireless players with all these assets under one hood.”

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Sounds potentially-ominous, but what else does this affect? We can’t forget that Time Warner owns the DC Comics properties, and a few months back, it was speculated that if this deal failed, Time Warner would be split up into multiple parts and sold off separately, and this would leave those big properties’ fates up in the air. Clearly, that’s no longer a thing.

Finally, this would also seem to imply that Fox could potentially end up with either Disney or Comcast, depending on who made the larger bid. When last we heard, Comcast was set to make a $60 billion all-cash bid that would knock Disney out of the running to acquire most of 21st Century Fox, and now that this has gone through, there seems to be very little in the way of them making this happen. All of a sudden, Disney is sounding like the little guy, isn’t it? How did we get here?

What do you think of all this? Was this a good call by the judge or not? Let us know your opinions down below!

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SOURCE: THR, Business Insider