Given incontrovertible evidence of higher prices and reduced competition, Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim should have blocked this merger. Despite the fact that the promises of the combined companies are speculative, unenforceable and not merger-specific, he chose instead to bow to political pressure from FCC Chairman Pai and White House advisors to allow the wireless industry to further consolidate from 4 to 3, with the hazy hope that a handful of divestitures and behavioral conditions could one day result in a viable fourth national mobile wireless carrier. The state AGs who sued to block the merger shouldn’t be fooled by this weak attempt to maintain competition in the mobile wireless market.

It’s mind-boggling that two of the most vociferous critics of behavioral conditions for media and telecommunications mergers, AAG Delrahim and Chairman Pai, would suddenly so heartily embrace them here, and that a Republican Justice Department would suddenly engage in the exactly the kind of centralized industrial policy engineering it so despises in order to create this so-called fourth competitor. A new mobile wireless entrant that starts with zero postpaid subscribers and that must rely on its much bigger rival, the new T-Mobile, just to operate is not a competitor. It’s a mobile Frankenstein. 

Gigi Sohn is a Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy and a Benton Foundation Senior Fellow & Public Advocate. She was Counselor to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler from November 2013-December 2016 and testified against the T-Mobile Sprint merger before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law in March 2019.  Gigi can be reached for comment at the above email or at 202-253-0876.