NEW YORK TIMES: …“If you look at the five-and-a-half years of the Obama administration, from Day 1, the message has been that if there’s a problematic transaction, we’ll be prepared to go to court to challenge it,” Mr. Baer, the assistant attorney general for the antitrust division, told me this week. “Having shown the willingness and ability to do that, the result is that companies are thinking long and hard about whether they want to take us on. Both the attorney general and I think that’s important. There’s a real value to having companies considering a strategic merger to think about the role of antitrust enforcement, and in communications, the Federal Communications Commission, to make sure the deals don’t injure consumers.”
Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and co-author of a leading antitrust treatise, “Fundamentals of Antitrust Law,” said, “It’s fair to say that the agencies have become more aggressive than they were during the George W. Bush administration. There’s a broad consensus among antitrust people, practitioners and academics alike, that the second Bush administration was way too lenient. I think it’s clear that day has passed.”
In meetings with the antitrust division and at the F.C.C., Sprint representatives argued that the combined wireless carriers would carry on the same maverick behavior that has galvanized T-Mobile and reinforced the wisdom of the antitrust division’s decision three years ago to block T-Mobile’s proposed merger with AT&T, according to the people with knowledge of the talks. They said Sprint advocates offered little that was concrete to back that up, and failed to persuade either the Justice Department’s lawyers or the F.C.C. that there were any benefits that outweighed the potential harm to consumers. “Four national wireless providers is good for American consumers,” Mr. Wheeler of the F.C.C. said this week… (more)
