“Two U.S. agencies reviewing AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA should reject it because it’s anticompetitive and will hurt consumers and the U.S. tech industry, three antitrust experts said Tuesday,” Grant Gross reports for IDG News Service.
“The deal is ‘about the most brazen merger proposal in history,’ said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a trade group that has pushed for strong antitrust enforcement in the tech industry,” Gross reports. “The merger would shrink the U.S. mobile market from four to three national competitors, with T-Mobile, the “low-cost leader,” swallowed up by AT&T, added Richard Brunell, director of legal advocacy at American Antitrust Institute (AAI), a think tank focused on strong antitrust enforcement. The U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Federal Communications Commission will reject the deal if they follow U.S. antitrust precedence, he said.”
Gross reports, “The deal is ‘presumptively anticompetitive,’ added Allen Grunes, chairman of the Antitrust Committee of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia and member of AAI’s advisory board.”
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