
T-Mobile Merger Approval Violated Every One of the DOJ's 'Antitrust Principles' - KaiserSanchez
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200903/11333545242/t-mobile-merger-approval-violated-every-last-one-dojs-updated-antitrust-principles.shtml
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toast0
The timeline is that the merger approval happened and sometime after that, the
new principles were published.

If we assume positive intent, someone at DOJ was tired of approvals like the
T-Mobile deal, and was able to (somehow) build concensus to an announcement of
new principles. These newly announced principles are quite a bit different
than the old ones, so we shouldn't be surprised that old deals don't align,
that's kind of the point.

It's also not too surprising that an old deal finalized a few months before
the new principles finalized. Everything is on a long pipeline, and it gets
done when it's done, changing principles in the middle is hard --- especially
when the new ones are unpublished and you had already done significant work
under the old ones.

~~~
baryphonic
Not to mention, imagine the legal headache for the DOJ to stop a merger on as-
yet unpublished principles. "Arbitrary & capricious" and various violations of
rules like the Administrative Procedures Act would be thrown out in court.
It's a little sketchy as is that the DOJ can change its criteria without any
decision in Congress, but at least this is closer to following the contours of
the law as is rather than arbitrary decision-making.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think in this case, the decision was to either allow the merger and create a
three way competition with AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint/T-Mobile, or watch as
AT&T and Verizon slowly pushed out Sprint and T-Mobile. Sprint was mostly dead
by this time. T-Mobile got a jump start due to innovation in the consumer
space, but that was dying out. Instead, by allowing the merger, we have a
viable third company to compete with AT&T and Verizon.

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ars
Techdirt is acting like Sprint was going to remain as a viable company "if
only they didn't merge".

But the reality was either they merged, or Sprint would shut down. There was
no scenario where Sprint stayed in businesses acting as competition.

On top of the that T-Mobile had a really hard time competing with Verizon and
AT&T because of lack of spectrum, so preventing them from getting Sprint's
spectrum would actually make them _less_ competitive.

I think the author may have forgotten that Verizon and AT&T are competitors to
T-Mobile and instead only paid attention to Sprint.

> "Not only did the DOJ ignore all objective data showing the deal would
> clearly be terrible for customers, the market, and employees"

What data is this? Because out here in the real world the deal has been
amazing for T-Mobile customers and the market. Perhaps not employees, but
that's not really a reason to stop it.

~~~
athms
>But the reality was either they merged, or Sprint would shut down. There was
no scenario where Sprint stayed in businesses acting as competition.

That is because SoftBank didn't know what to do with Sprint and refused to
invest money into the business. When SoftBank bought Sprint, the company was
profitable and T-Mobile was unprofitable. Deutsche Telekom had been trying to
offload T-Mobile for years but wanted more than it was worth. Slowly the
tables turned and T-Mobile became profitable while Sprint started losing
money.

Masayoshi Son is the Eddie Lampert of Japan. Son used to be worth about $100
billion, but his bad investments via SoftBank over the last twenty years cut
$80 billion off his wealth.

~~~
csharptwdec19
Sprint made a lot of stumbles -before- Softbank. Honestly when the Acquisition
happened I thought softbank was insane for doing so. IOW Sprint didn't know
what to do with sprint either, I'm just glad TMO got some spectrum out of it
at the end.

But, even before that, Sprint was realizing the pain of their missteps.
Probably the biggest of which was WIMAX, the smaller was taking too long to
get rid of IDEN.

Sprint didn't know what to do with Sprint in 2013. Even before the Acquisition
they were foregoing parts of their normal maintenance and instead 'living'
with problems.

The one major saving grace in all of it? The biggest reason it was still good
for TMO? Sprint had a LOT of sub-1000Mhz spectrum whereas TMO had none.

And, to TMO's credit... They played the game very well. Their roaming deal
from AT&T before the sprint merger completed allowed them to temporarily gloss
over lot of their coverage issues until they were able to start using that
spectrum for LTE (Also that nice piece of 700mhz they got from VZQ).

Source: Sprint user from 2009-2013, switched to TMO, Used to deal with
maintenance of Sprint Infrastructure in a large municipality as a contractor.

