The reality of the whole thing is that At&t is trying to buy back it’s monopoly, just in a different sector of the communications market which they still own a very large percentage of. The arguments made by Sprint on the issue of At&t and Verizon owning most of the back haul which is necessary for wireless broadband wherever it is available is very valid.

The thing which really gets me is America is supposed to be the largest free capitalist market and economy on the face of the planet, and individuals particularly in America believe this to be true, when in all actuality it is becoming if it is not already not decided by competition, but by whoever has the pockets deep enough to pay the government for there own monopoly.

It is basically only legal in America to hold a monopoly if you buy said monopoly from the government first, and pay single payments when ever it comes up for a vote, and or a particular politician feels like you should pay him some more individually.

Second of all, it’s pretty amazing what companies do when stupid mergers like this get rejected. Dish and DirecTV tried to merge because they were going to be unable to offer HD and especially never able to offer HD locals. The government reject their specious worries about some future that hadn’t really arrived and, behold, Dish and DirecTV offer plenty of HD and HD locals. DirecTV in particular has like 80-90% of the population covered in that regard. How did they pull this off? They innovated in the “unusable” Ka band to compete. Would they have innovated as much had they been allowed to merge? Would the combined company have as much market share as the total of the two does today? Would consumer choice be as strong? We know the answers.

There’s a funny thing about the “they will go bankrupt” argument which is that there is only response from regulators: “Let them”. First of all, it proves whether the claim was true and it typically isn’t. Second of all, it causes the acquiree to go down fighting — and T-Mobile sure seems like a fighter to me. Third of all, it will let a true market set a price for these assets and perhaps let something new come along that no one could have foreseen.

Finally, AT&T’s best argument for this merger has been some insane claim that only with it can they cover the country with LTE. Yet Verizon is covering the country with LTE and has less spectrum than AT&T does now. This thing reminds me of the regulator failings with the satellite radio merger. If you want to merge the unmerge-able, provide an unequivocal consumer benefit. For AT&T, they’d promise to keep rates the same for 5 years and raise the data caps from 2GB to 5GB over that time. (For Sirius/XM, it should’ve been a 25% rate cut, locked in for 5 years. Instead we got 3 years of no hike and the instant that sunset-ed, the hike has been announced. For no new services.)

I have friends in high places backing this merger and for the life of me, I can’t imagine why they are. There is simply no chance this will foster innovation or improve the speed with which broadband is deployed. It’s an attempt to gain control of a scarce resource and remove competition from the marketplace. This should’ve been rejected without a serious investigation. Sadly, it’s going to end up getting approved.