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AT&T Issues Scathing Response To FCC Report
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T has issued a scathing letter in response to the FCC's decision to release a staff report on its findings surrounding AT&T's planned $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA. 'We expected that the AT&T-T-Mobile transaction would receive careful, considered, and fair analysis,' Jim Cicconi, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President of External & Legislative Affairs, said. 'Unfortunately, the preliminary FCC Staff Analysis offers none of that.'"
I'm pretty sure that AT&T's response is simply a toddler's temper tantrum with a midlife crisis and an expensive suit.
AT&T is not the United Nations. And even if they were, a firmly worded letter is getting them nowhere here.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
at this point, i wonder if AT&T has actually bought its own story, or if they have to practice keeping a straight face in the mirror every morning.
AT&T buying T-Mobile is a bad thing for consumers. The original cell phone plan was that there would be two providers, the local Ma Bell and a start-up. AT&T as SBC bought up the East Coast start-ups, Verizon bought the West Coast ones, and T-Mobile and Sprint came to the party as national big-city carriers on at the time open space adjustments.
AT&T of the 1980s was busted up as a monopoly. If AT&T is allowed to have T-Mobile, what's stopping Verizon and Sprint from joining up? Less competitors always leads to higher prices. Anybody remember what cellphones cost in the early 1990s?
For Sprint's short and sweet response, compared to ATT's long-winded vague casting of aspersions against the FCC staff.
Imagine if Apple bought T-Mobile, then refused to sell their phones through any other service provider?
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Top-Campaign-Contributor-Since-1990-110351
I guess giving quite a bit to Obama didn't help them out... makes sense to change sides.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Ohhhh, poor AT&T. Your regulator has some teeth and is preserving the bit of competition that still exists in wireless? We all feel so very very bad for you.
Since things didn't go their way, did anyone really expect a different response from AT&T? Can you imagine this?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They should break that company up again, it seems the first time wasn't enough to curb their arrogance.
I'd love to see just one video of "Obama's screaming Bolsheviks." Can you provide one? Please include a historic screaming Bolshevik video for comparison. I bet the Russians are just darling in those little furry hats.
That's kinda what they did when they went AT&T exclusive at the start.. there's a whole big argument to be made regarding what would've happened with iOS vs. Android had Verizon not been left out of the iPhone sales fest early on and decided to retaliate with pushing and marketing the Droid the way they did.
AT&T can use that money to upgrade and expand their broadband circuits. I'm in south Texas and AT&T openly admits that our lines are over subscribed. Every Tech sent to check low signal strength has confessed to over subscription. Well use that money to improve the service they are collecting for and not providing!!
ATT: "We didn't get our request rubber stamped like we expected it to be after we spent all that money to get the current crop of legislators and executives elected. We spend money on campaign contributions for a reason people! The FCC's review of our proposed acquisition of T-Mobile totally neglects to take these facts into account, and instead harps on things like abusive monopoly paractices and leaked memos from our executives. Obviously the FCC is not doing its job as a captured regulator, and we are voicing our displeasure publicly so as not to oust our purchased politicians. We fully expect them take action against this FCC ruling, and further insist that they take the DoJ to task on the pending antitrust case, if they want any more of our money; we understand that elections are just around the corner. Just a reminder guys. We don't get what we want, you don't get what you want."
Sprint: "We applaud the FCC for finally doing what it was really supposed to do, and appreciate its dedication to fact finding and for ensuring a balanced economic foundation for the telecom industry. We strong urge everyone to read the FCC's report."
On the other hand, it's possible that Android would never have been able to make it to market without Apple first muscling their way into the game the way they did. One of the benefits they got by going exclusive was that they were allowed a lot more control over their hardware and what could be installed on it than any other phone manufacturer was. You could make an argument that the smartphone market wouldn't be as big as it was without Apple showing what was possible.
Hard to tell. It's all guesswork at this point.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
AT&T hates business, since business means competition.
Gone!
The FCC's directive is not to ensure the value of your stock. The FCC asked AT&T why the merger was good for consumers and AT&T wasn't able to provide a reasonable one. You know why? Because there wasn't one. So the FCC decided that they could not support the merger.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's good the government did not approve this merger. Here's why:
First, behind all these statements will be legalese that I describe after each one of them.
AT&T should know that public commitments are not legally binding.
How many are these? You will not be surprised that there could be a handful of them in the USA. Even then, you could find that these so called call center employees are not directly employed. Many times, companies will outsource services to the extent that there are pay disparities for employees doing the same job.
Over what period of time may I ask? AT&T could later argue that they meant returning these jobs "over a period of two or three decades!" Imagine that.
What they do not tell you is that the offered position will be at a significantly lower pay, or that these positions will not be permanent, or that they will have conditions attached to them such that employees will fire themselves.
Who does AT&T think they are fooling?
Notice that every rebuttal made by AT&T is simply a statement by AT&T that they PROMISE not to do what is in their own best interest!
For example, if there is 1 fewer wireless company, there WILL be less total job positions needed. That is an obvious truth of economics : one fewer company means more consolidation, fewer independent cell towers needed, etc. Yet AT&T PROMISES to hire more Americans as CSRs, despite the fact that it would be cheaper for them to keep outsourcing.
AT&T will find it easier to raise prices with the merger because with 1 fewer competitor, the Nash Equilibrium inches closer to monopoly prices. AT&T PROMISES to do otherwise.
AT&T has no competitor to fight for rural broadband market share, yet they PROMISE to build the wires anyway.
And so on and so forth. Every rebuttal basically says "well, maybe it doesn't make market sense, but we have plans to do X if we get our way".
Think about who made this report : some lawyers and marketing folks in AT&T's executive branch. Those people are not going to be unbiased.
Did AT&T really think they could do this anti-competitive $39 billion dollar move? When the provider with the most expensive plans buys out the provider with the cheapest plans it can't be anything but anti-competitive.
SEVP? Jesus christ why not either just call him a "president" or something. The tech industries titles today are extremely out of hand. VP, SVP, EVP, SEVP, President, Cxx...
This is awesome. A few posts ago I got to read about how Obama is pro-AT&T and pro big business because they gave him so much money during the '08 campaign.
Could you dipshits make up your minds and at least keep your rhetoric consistent?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
The difference between a politician and an honest politician is that an honest politician stays bought.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The FCC's mission is to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges.".
You may notice that it is not their mission to ensure full employment.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Perhaps they'd get some sympathy if they hadn't burned all their bridges with anyone who might listen. Even their own customers hate them.
Maybe they should spend that $39 billion on upgrading their infrastructure instead of eliminating competition.
One interesting thing to look at is the percentage of an individual politician's money that comes from small donors. Contrary to what some would expect, it doesn't split by party lines (nor by candidate sanity). Instead it gives you a good, non-partisan view of just how beholden a politician is to their corporate donors. Because while the corporations may always give lots of money to both sides, if (for example) Generic Democrat #1 pisses them off, they'll just stop giving to him, and give to Generic Democrat #2 instead. Assuming Generic Democrat #1 wants to keep his job, he either needs to play nice with the big donors, or bring in lots of small ones.
Obama, Ron Paul, Gingrich, and Bachman (I told you sanity didn't matter) all get around 50% of their money from small donors. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney get 90+% of their money from major corporations and billionaires. That should tell you all you need to know about those two.
Huntsman is also in the 90+% camp, but in his case it might just be lack of name recognition. This method really only works for the big names, since the small players have trouble reaching out to individual donors through no fault of their own.
We thought we had this one bought and paid for.
Maybe their lobbyists should have gotten receipts....
Check your premises.
The argument that monopolies raise the price of cell phone service is well-supported.
Cell phone service voice and data plans are extraordinarily high in the U.S., Japan and Canada, compared to other nations. America is way above the international average. We're the most expensive when it comes to texting. For the whole package of cell phone service America and Canada are the most expensive. Guess which countries keeps coming up as among the most expensive? The U.S. and Canada.
http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/an_international_comparison_of_cell_phone_plans_and_prices
As for PC prices, the number of competitors had very little effect compared to the power of Moore's Law. Had we had more competitors, PC prices might be 25% less right now. A huge part of what we pay for PCs is Windows. If we had more competition there we certainly would see lower prices.
So yes, oligopolies mean higher prices. And Jesus WAS/is in fact a liberal. :D
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The old AT&T was broken up before ISDN to homes came along. It was the "baby bells" offering you ISDN. Although in my area I had DSL in 1996 or 7, I can't remember which. From a baby bell (Pac Bell).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The FCC's directive is not to ensure the value of your stock. The FCC asked AT&T why the merger was good for consumers and AT&T wasn't able to provide a reasonable one.
As someone who recently came of voting age, its kind of jarring to see our government function like this. I'm used to seeing the public interest railroaded to benefit a corporate interest, a corporate interest railroaded to benefit a different corporate interest, but I've never seen the public interest held above a corporate interest like this. Hell, they didn't even decide anything and I'm excited to see this, I know they would be able to jam up the merger eventually, but right now they've just presenting findings.
Is this what democracy is supposed to look like? I fucking love it. Shit, even if government decisions continue to be against the public interest, I'd be psyched if they just had the balls to admit it with reports like this. That would be a huge step forward from the bullshit "someone is making money, therefore its good, fuck off" level of analysis I'm used to seeing.
Who does AT&T think they are fooling?
They think, and are correct, that they are fooling the people who believe that Fox News is fair and balanced.
This is a technique used regularly in controlling public opinion about policy. The further out you can pull one side of the argument, the further out you can pull the middle. This is a very effective approach, because so many people believe that justice means being reasonable, and that being reasonable means giving each side half of what they are asking for.
People are social animals and have a natural tendency to believe that both sides in a debate are being fair in their assessment and sincere about what they believe is just. They believe that each viewpoint must have merit. They believe, therefore, that any point roughly halfway between the two views must fall on reasonable ground. Trusting to this belief, they believe they do not have to know he details to know a fair solution. Any entity with a stake in public policy -- corporations, politicians, power-brokers -- knows about this mechanism. The big guys all have public relations people whose job is to manipulate this, and many other similar flaws.
This results in self-feeding bias. Left unchecked, it creates a disadvantage for entities that do not exploit the problem. In an otherwise competitive system, this selects for the entities most willing and capable of exploiting the flaw. This naturally breeds ever stronger abusers of such flaws.
Eventually, there comes a correction. If it happens early, it can be mild and the problem will be abated without a significant disturbance. The longer it goes, the stronger the distortion becomes -- as does the associated correction and disturbance.
If one believes in the value of economic stability as a path toward economic advancement, it is important to seek to avoid such extremity and correction.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
That's because you're new, and have been mostly going on anecdote, media, and word-of-mouth.
Media sucks, but word of mouth is actually less accurate. Believe it or not.
Consider this... the vast majority of our "government" is people who work for a living. For the USA. When the President or congress change party, you don't get a new mail carrier, firefighter, or IRS auditor. They work the same job, under largely the same rules, from one year to the next. They are neither thieves or sell-outs, but workers. And most of them are patriotic. That is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Don't let the idiocy of the elected officials and a couple bad court cases make you excessively cynical. It is not only a personality flaw, it will bite you. Consider an IRS audit; if you assume that The Guberment wants all your money, you're going approach it as most people do, in an adversarial way. The IRS agent can only work against you. If you consider instead that this is probably just a worker who doesn't have any ill will towards you at all, and whose job it is to make sure the number are correct, who doesn't work for a company and isn't evaluated on "profit" then you can see that a cooperative approach can have this person helping you to make sure you did your adjustments correctly so that you can keep them. I've seen people take this approach and come out of an audit ahead of where they went in, because the IRS auditor gave them some hints about deductions they were missing.
At the level of the FCC, when the agency's primary duty is to manage communications for the companies it is no surprise that they typically look for a way to give the companies as much of what they want as they can. That is actually their purpose. Most regulatory agencies are tasked more with making sure the companies are fair to each other than anything else. Can't blame them for doing their job. In this case, AT&T was basically asking to do a merger that would make them bigger than is fair to the other companies, and their correct criteria in that case is to only allow it if it is clearly better for the average citizen. That's the only reason to let one company control more of the field than congress said, with consultation from the companies, would still allow competition.
Changing the mandate of some agencies to be more worried about the average American would be great, IMO. Of course, most of the "government workers" at those agencies would like that too, they're patriotic themselves!