Friday’s Justice Department announcement approving the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile further consolidates an already concentrated wireless telephone industry, reducing the four major players to three. The deal calls for the divestment of nine million customers to Dish, which would gain access to the merged company’s cellular network for seven years and a mandate to build a 5G operation. The deal thus replaces a smaller but fairly robust fourth competitor in Sprint with a startup that has no history in wireless. If competition was so necessary that the Justice Department had to scramble to try to construct it, it could have just kept Sprint in place by blocking the merger.

A coalition of fourteen state attorneys general have filed suit against the merger, and will go to trial in October. But a separate and less publicized deal between the other two telecom behemoths, AT&T and Verizon, each with more that 100 million subscribers of their own, threatens to concentrate the sector even further, while combining data in potentially dangerous ways.

More at The American Prospect.