Justice Department sues to block AT&T takeover of T-Mobile

[Nigerius Rex]

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fiw-att-justice-20110901,0,3288247.story

The Justice Department is seeking to block AT&T Inc.'s $39-billion plan to buy T-Mobile USA Inc., claiming that combining the two wireless giants could stymie competition and innovation.

The agency filed a civil antitrust lawsuit Wednesday morning in federal court in Washington that would prevent AT&T, which has the second most subscribers in the country, from acquiring fourth-largest T-Mobile.

You can see the official document in the link.

The problem I have is that you can see from the document above, that the arguments for blocking the merger are entirely generic and lack any insight into the technology involved, or the industry itself and seem to be just a response to Tmobile and ATT being large companies. Cell phone technology, like computers, has been rapidly outgrowing the infrastructure any of the major providers. So much that recently as you probably know they all instituted expensive and ridiculous data allotments and bandwidth throttling into every single one of their plans. The DOJ I believe, thinks that taking two struggling networks with nearly the same pricing plans and rules on data use and merging them is going to lead to some horrible lack of competition when in reality what we have been seeing is a network infrastructure that is sluggish to change with the needs of exploding voice and data use.

[PraXis]

I don't see the issue with them merging... Verizon and Sprint are better.. and when Sprint bought Virgin Mobile and Boost...wasn't the end of the world.. then you also have Cricket, Tracphone, Net0, 02, MetroPCS, etc...

[lordxizor]

The one difference about T-Mobile that would likely go away with the merger is that they're cheaper than any of the other nationwide carriers. Taking away the one carrier that managed to have lower prices seems like a step in the wrong direction to me competition-wise.

[William Wallace]

This ought not to be a big surprise," the nonprofit law firm Media Access Project said in a statement. "This is arguably the most anti-competitive move in recent American economic history. It is heartening that the Department of Justice has withstood withering political pressure from AT&T to do the right thing for the American public.

I'm tempted to send a copy of this book to Media Access Project. And AT&T bitch slapped every whiny cry of "monopoly!" with this:

The U.S. wireless industry is one of the most fiercely competitive markets in the world and will remain so after this deal. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where a large majority of consumers can choose from five or more wireless providers in their local market. For example, in 18 of the top 20 U.S. local markets, there are five or more providers. Local market competition is escalating among larger carriers, low-cost carriers and several regional wireless players with nationwide service plans. This intense competition is only increasing with the build-out of new 4G networks and the emergence of new market entrants.

[El Barto]

Personally,  it seems pretty anti-competitive to me, but I don't have much interest in arguing that here.  My only concern is that there should be a two year waiting period to allow people's contracts to expire.  I was only two months into my hitch when this was announced.  Thankfully,  it'll probably take longer than the remainder of my contract, but I think that should be given.  We shouldn't be forced into continuing under contract with a company that we didn't want to do business with in the first place. 

[orcus116]

Damn, this is probably going to get my company a ton of work.

[Chino]

Personally,  it seems pretty anti-competitive to me, but I don't have much interest in arguing that here.  My only concern is that there should be a two year waiting period to allow people's contracts to expire.  I was only two months into my hitch when this was announced.  Thankfully,  it'll probably take longer than the remainder of my contract, but I think that should be given.  We shouldn't be forced into continuing under contract with a company that we didn't want to do business with in the first place. 

I could be wrong here, but I could have sworn a law was passed a while back stating that if any alterations were made to your contract during the duration of your plan, you had a 30 day grace period to opt out without a fee.