Merger applicants AT&T and T-Mobile (together, Applicants) make very clear at the outset of their June 10th Joint Opposition (Opposition) the ethos that guides the companies’ push for this blatantly anticompetitive and unlawful merger. They claim, apparently with a straight face but insufficient modesty, that “[o]ne overarching imperative drives this transaction: giving AT&T and T-Mobile USA customers the network capacity they need to enjoy the full promise of the mobile broadband revolution.” The use of the word “giving” is no accident. AT&T and T-Mobile ask the Commission, in their earlier submissions in this docket and again in the Opposition, simply to give the merged entity more spectrum, subscribers, and market power than all other wireless providers in the United States.

AT&T has customers to serve, you see, and those pesky customers actually want to use the smartphones that AT&T sold to them. Neither proper investment in its network nor fair competition in the free market is a substitute, in AT&T’s reckoning, for the slanted playing fields and government largesse it seeks in this transaction. The entire Opposition basically boils down to the proposition that “what’s good for AT&T is good for the country.” That might sound reasonable if one can ignore the clearly stated preference in this country’s laws and rules for competition over habitual monopolists’ promises to provide service. But even AT&T’s promises are hollow: their attainment is not dependent on this merger, and thus their fulfillment could not offset the harms that the merger would cause to competition and consumers.

For instance, AT&T promises it will provide broadband to 97 percent of the country if – and only if – it gets permission for this merger. The claim is anything but accurate, as AT&T’s public statements and internal communications tell a very different story about its ability and willingness to cover this same percentage of the nation with wireless broadband service. AT&T also promises increased investment in the documents it submits to this Commission, all the while signaling to investors that expenditures actually would decrease post-merger – leading to increased “synergies” and savings that would allow its revenues to continue climbing. AT&T still speculates in the Opposition that the deal would aid the broader economy from the deployment of a redundant LTE network. Yet AT&T dismisses its history of merger-aided job cuts by hiding the truth about overall growth in its total number of customers in the last decade.

Just like its rural deployment promises, AT&T’s claims regarding improved capacity on its already congested networks are either not real, not significant, or not merger-specific. Neither the economic arguments nor the engineering claims it makes about current capacity constraints hold water. The merger’s real benefit to AT&T quite obviously is a reduction in the competition it will face – not the surmounting of any technical constraint nor the realization of any sort of cognizable benefit it cannot obtain absent the merger. AT&T and T-Mobile both have several paths forward to improve their network capacity and coverage, and do not need to merge with one another to share resources with one another or with other competitive providers.

In the end, Applicants have failed to carry their burden of demonstrating that grant of their merger would serve the public interest. They have offered insufficient proof that the transaction and resulting concentration will not harm competition and consumers. Failing to make any credible showing regarding the purported price-reducing incentives from the deal, they must rely on flimsy claims that the merger is necessary for both companies to improve network coverage and capacity in the near term. These claims are patently false, and the Commission must deny the merger if its decision is to be based on the data and the facts before it.

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