Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Responds To DoJ Lawsuit
An anonymous reader writes "Last week the Department of Justice filed an antitrust complaint to stop the merger between AT&T and T-Mobile USA. Now, AT&T has responded, arguing that the merger would benefit consumers by increasing competition and freeing up spectrum. 'That means increased output, higher quality service, fewer dropped calls,and lower prices to consumers than without the merger,' they say. Meanwhile, House Republicans have sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Attorney General Eric Holder asking for an explanation of 'what went into the decision to challenge the merger and whether the agencies considered the impact on jobs and economic growth.' A hearing is scheduled for Sept. 21."
Where's the love, DoJ? Remember back when we were tight, when we were illegally spying on all those Americans? Those were good days, baby. We didn't need no warrants or paperwork back then, did we? Why you got to be like this now? Can't we just keep everything hush-hush, like we used to? Come on, you know you want to say yes--just like we said yes when you wanted to install all that spy gear on our trunk lines. You liked daddy's trunk, didn't you girl?
Show some love for AT&T, baby. Don't let it end this way. Let us tap that ass again, like we tapped everyone's phone for you. Let's get away from these courtrooms and just switch places, girl, with *you* bending over and *us* doing the tapping this time. Don't be a hater, DoJ. Let daddy take you all the way *up there*--above the law, just one more time.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I use AT&T... but the fact they have an exclusive with Apple, and they want T-Mobile.... doesn't remind ANYONE here of another company we tend to love to hate?
Speak about the "freedom" of the free market all you want, but I for one, applaud the governments actions here... Fsck AT&T...
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
How does buying up another telco player encourage competition?
C|N>K
All the cell providers are notorious for ripping people off. Its about time the DoJ did something within their power.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
We always laugh at Verizon for how they erroneously calculated billing, what about AT&T's fuzzy math? 4 competitors - 1 competitor > 3 competitors? tens of thousands of jobs lost due to merger "cost reductions" a few thousand call center jobs? Really? It boggles the mind how stupid they think we all are.
Why do republicans always side with large corporations? The impact the merger will have on jobs is that they will be reduced as AT&T consolidates redundant positions.
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
Last time I checked the cable companies are more anti trust than cell this venture between At&T and T-mobile.
Scumbags !! And I mean that in a nice way !! Go back to India or wherever you are from now !!
How in the hell does acquiring a company like this result in MORE competition?
And lower rates? Just like us Cingular customers got? Yeah, right.
How can they even make such claims - that's damned near perjury.
This couldn't sound more like a sales pitch if you wanted it to be. It's the *exact opposite* of what it would be but that doesn't keep them from stating it. Liars by any definition.
Lessee... fewer competitors increases competition. Wait, I'm sure I got that wrong. Fewer ComPETitors increases COMPETition. Fewer... increases... Competitors... competition... competitors... Sorry I just can't make that work.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Wait, are the Republicans really suggesting that a merger would create jobs? Do they understand how acquisitions work?
Since when does less choice mean lower prices and better selection
Just saying is all!
Wireless competition is fierce: prices have declined steadily, output is expanding, technological innovation is occurring at an extraordinary pace, and new providers with innovative business models have successfully entered and expanded.
What the kind of upside down, crazy world do they live in? Whose cellular bill has ever declined but by act of the customer switching to a more restrictive plane. What businesses have "successfully" entered and expanded in the market? I keep seeing fewer and fewer choices. We're now down to Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T and they're trying to take T-Mobile off the list. When Verizon gobbles up Sprint and AT&T am I to believe that's competitive and a benefit to consumers also?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
House Republicans have sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Attorney General Eric Holder asking for an explanation of 'what went into the decision to challenge the merger and whether the agencies considered the impact on jobs and economic growth.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it AT&T's MO to merge then pretty much nuke the other company and fold it into their own? Wouldn't this eliminate tens of thousands of jobs?
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
Did anyone notice that in the link about House Republicans response there is nothing mentioned about Republicans?
If the merger goes through and AT&T lowers their prices as a result, I will eat my hat.
or else!
You cannot be first.
Busting up the old MaBell a few decades ago?
Just so we can do it again in another decade when theres nobody but at&t?
http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779
Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis
(Photo: Carolyn Tiry / Flickr)
Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.
Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of
AT&T buys TM, gobbles up their bandwidth, and competes better with Verizon, while offering customers like me more bars, instead of having to use Skype to call on my phone via wifi - in my own bedroom.
Should we just wait for T-Mobile to die, then have some bankruptcy auction for the bandwidth? How is that more efficient for markets than just doing it now? Creative destruction, my friend.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I am currently a T-mobile customer and have been happy with them for over 5 years. They have a great selection of plans and phones, good customer service, and their add-ons aren't ridiculously priced. If this merger somehow goes through, I guarantee I will switch to a different carrier on the day it's announced. Again, Fuck You.
giggity
Here's what At&t realy has in their hooch pipe: , "arguing that the merger would denegreat consumers by decreasing competition and locking up spectrum. 'That means decreased output, lower quality service, more dropped calls,and higher prices to consumers than without the merger,'"
The higher prices is key.
Nuke At&t, kill the Board and X-Os and snipe the happless employees as they flee the burning "Wolfs Lair", i.e. Wolfsschanze.
Go Team DoJ! Go Go Go. Kill'm All.
++//++//++
Ummm.... I think it's still worth considering that we wouldn't usually be in the position of having to wrestle with a company achieving this monopoly status if govt. didn't originally CAUSE the problem with their manipulation and regulation of the marketplace. AT&T started out WAY ahead of everyone else in the telecom game because they were granted legal monopoly status for many decades. In a truly free marketplace, I'm not convinced monopolies really happen very often. They're more of a rare anomaly than anything else. Typically, it takes the force of govt. mandates/legislation to guarantee a business is insulated from potential competitors.
It seems to me the problem we've seen in recent years is that Federal govt. isn't really *capable* of breaking up a monopoly in an effective and lasting manner, once they've created it and let it go for a length of time. By the nature of a regulated monopoly, it has MANY close ties to people in governmental positions of power, coupled with enormous wealth that's usually spread out in various places. If there ever comes a day when we collectively decide it's time to end the monopolies for public utility companies, for example? Can you really imagine the power or gas companies just "going away quietly"?
One of the only monopolies I can think of that didn't start out with government protection/sanction would be Microsoft ... yet even there, that's very debatable. IBM essentially held the same status in the computer world before they came along and toppled them. Today, IBM is still a profitable player, but they have to compete on pretty much the same set of rules all the other big technology players play by. And without govt. intervention, Microsoft is doing a great job of imploding from within, as of late. (How's that popularity of those Windows Mobile phones going?)
And yet, the score is only 1.
I ran out of mod points yesterday. Consider this a +1.
It's not DoJ's or FCC's job to consider the "impact on jobs and economic growth." It's their job to enforce antitrust law.
Jobs would be lost with this merger as competing ATT and T Mobile stores nearby would be consolidated to just be the ATT store,same with things like mall kiosks. You don't need 2 stores from the same company on the same street or in the same shopping center, or within several blocks of eachother. I hope the merger is blocked.
Stupid republicans. We need an explanation on why a super conglomerate company is bad; herp derp.
and freeing up spectrum
Then they can give that "freed up spectrum" back to the public sector.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Since Google bought Motorola, Google needs to step up and buy T-mobile
Competition my ass... Hey AT&T.... Where's my $49.99 Unlimited Voice/SMS/Data plan option to compete with T-Mobile's current advertising blitz?
Oh. My bill is still $132.00/month for Unlimited Voice/SMS/Data?
Yeah... That's what I thought.
You're not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you...