bells

tshapi said:

bells said:

SpamSandwich said:

This merger should absolutely go forward. It was ridiculous it was opposed in the first place... and I say this as an AT&T stockholder.

The trouble with your argument is the Public owns the frequency they use.  Companies like T-Mobile only have a non-transferable license to use the frequency. So the owner of the frequencies need to provide consent to a merger that transfers usage rights.

The reason SoftBank has attempted this merger for the second time is trump is a corporate friendly administration more so than Obama.  

If you mean Republicans generally are more willing to do anything a company wants no matter what the cost to the public, I agree. 

Although, I will say it would be completely different allowing T-Mobile and Sprint to merge than allowing AT&T to buy T-Mobile. AT&T was wanting to buy T-Mobile to kill competition and increase its market share, T-Mobile and Sprint arguably would be merging to be more competitive with Verizon and T-Mobile. Further, Sprint seems to be slowly dying. 

SpamSandwich said:

tallest skil said:

SpamSandwich said:

This merger should absolutely go forward. It was ridiculous it was opposed in the first place... and I say this as an AT&T stockholder.

Just what we need: fewer companies in a marketplace…

We need less regulation and more competition. As history has shown us time and again, businesses go through cycles of mergers and divestment to remain competitive, but if laws and requirements prevent competition (as was the case when AT&T was a monopoly), then consumers pay the price. There will always be new smaller, more responsive competitors to sluggish and unresponsive behemoths... as long as the behemoths cannot “legally” suppress competition.

This has little to do with regulation. It has to do with ownership rights of the frequencies the at issues companies use. The public owns the airwaves. The companies just have non-transferable rights.

if competition was the goal, killing the proposed ATT merger was one of the best decisions to ever happen to the cellular industry.

SpamSandwich said:

This merger should absolutely go forward. It was ridiculous it was opposed in the first place... and I say this as an AT&T stockholder.

The trouble with your argument is the Public owns the frequency they use.  Companies like T-Mobile only have a non-transferable license to use the frequency. So the owner of the frequencies need to provide consent to a merger that transfers usage rights.

netrox said:

That is incredibly stupid of Apple to refuse to support free open standards.

The trouble is that Google likely infringes on numerous patents, which it is not agreeing to defend and reimburse users of the format. 

So so not really stupid of Apple.

ike17055 said:

The European elites continue to demonstrate that they have no real understanding of free markets and competition. 

Google is a monopoly in Europe. It is classic anti-trust Law that you can't use your monopoly position to gain an unfair advantage in new markets.

Google is doing that by favoring its own businesses in its search rankings. Pretty straightforward anti-trust violation.