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Sprint 'Betting Big On Trump,' Could Merge With T-Mobile Or Comcast (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Speculation that Sprint will merge with T-Mobile USA or another competitor has ramped up since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. That continued Friday when a report from The New York Times suggested that Sprint could be combined with either T-Mobile or Comcast, the nation's largest cable company. Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of Sprint owner SoftBank, "and his financial advisers are weighing several major possible deals for Sprint," the Times wrote. "Be it a tie-up with T-Mobile U.S., Sprint's closest competitor, or a more ambitious marriage with the cable colossus Comcast, a transaction would allow Mr. Son to fulfill a long-held ambition to invest aggressively in wireless networks in the United States and enable next-generation mobile technology." Titled "The World's Top Tech Investor Is Betting Big on Trump," the Times report says that "the Trump administration's push for lighter regulation and lower taxes has been a powerful lure for cash-rich investors the world over." SoftBank, which is based in Japan, had several of its executives "spen[d] a day in Washington talking to senior members of Mr. Trump's economic team" last month, according to bankers who were briefed on the meetings, the Times report said. U.S. regulators opposed wireless consolidation during the Obama administration, preventing potential mergers between AT&T and T-Mobile and later between Sprint and T-Mobile. With four major nationwide carriers, U.S. wireless competition recently led to an expansion of unlimited data plans.
Soon, we will have fewer choices again.
Then at least nothing of value would be lost.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Meanwhile, a thousand Trump supporters run around proclaiming "Obama bugged Trump! We know so because Trump said so!"
I'm going to risk the inevitable downmod from the rabid hard right and alt-right types by finally thinking that we have maybe another six to nine months before even a majority of Republicans in Congress begin planning to remove this imbecile from office. I think there are at least decent odds that by this time next year we'll be bitching and moaning about President Pence.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What this country needs when it comes to cable and broadband providers is less competition and higher prices. Let's fall even further behind the rest of the industrialized world.
By my understanding of mobile phone technology and protocols those are the two least compatible networks in the USA at the present time. All the customers of one would eventually be stuck buying phones running the protocol of the other. Wouldn't a Sprint / Verizon merger make a lot more sense from a technology standpoint?
Merging with Comcast might make some sense, but I don't recall hearing Comcast ever express a previous interest in going into the mobile market.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yes. There were transcripts of Flynn talking to the Russian ambassador, so there were wiretaps done on foreign communications. Nobody is questioning whether or not some monitoring of Trump campaign officials was happening.
Nowhere does that say Obama ordered it. Nowhere does it say it was Trump himself that was monitored. It was part of an investigation and done based on evidence with court approval, not some fiat declaration from the dictator-in-chief, which is apparently what Trump supporters think the president is.
The presidency is not a monarchical position. The POTUS does not have king-like powers. One of the things he cannot do, since the Nixon administration, is order a wiretap. Only a court can approve that (including the FISA secret court) and only after an active investigation provides enough evidence to get a warrant.
Get that? Do you have a tape of Obama ordering the tap? No? Then you have nothing. Nor does Trump, by the looks of it.
That's why Comey is out there asking for the Justice Department to repudiate Trump's claim, because it's a bigger lie about the way our formerly stable republic works than it is about Obama. Trump isn't undermining Obama, he's undermining his own government. He is acting like a fifth-columnist, hopefully not wittingly.
In general, I don't accept someone simply saying "I was wiretapped" and the primary defense of that being his own staff saying "Oh fur shure, he's got like evidence you don't know..."
As it stands, it's pretty clear a whole lot of people in Congress are as mystified by this as everyone else. But it served its purpose. It got everyone to stop talking about yet another senior member of the Administration being outed lying about contact with the Russians.
As to the standards put forward by CNN, whenever it amounts to "inside sources", I don't usually give the story THAT much credibility. But as we saw with Flynn, it wasn't very long before "that's a total bullshit story that's all lies!" turned into Flynn quitting/being fired.
What I'm seeing here is the Trump Administration rather awkwardly trying to pivot some fairly well known information about the FBI looking into Russian interference into "Obama wiretapped Trump!" as a form of misdirection about the fact that his AG has been outed lying to the Senate confirmation hearing. And that for me is a puzzler. Why did Flynn lie to Pence and why did Sessions lie to Franken? After all, neither man, on the fact of it did anything wrong. But at any rate, the reasons may never be known, but that doesn't mean that they didn't get caught lying, nor is it justification for Trump loudly proclaiming, without providing any evidence, that the previous POTUS ordered his phone to be tapped (which would appear to be a pretty huge distortion of what happened largely based on some right wing conspiracy theory shock jock's bizarre claims).
To me that's the most trouble part of most of Trump's activities. He seems to react to things he sees on the fucking television. He has probably the most effective espionage apparatus the world has ever known at his fingertips, and CNN, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbarts and some right wing conspiracy poo flinger named Mark Levin. You can tell by the awkward interviews with Trump's own PR people that not even they know what the fuck he's talking about.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well at least my stalker has an actual account.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My hunch is that the leaks in the White House aren't meant to be attacks on Trump himself, but rather various factions in what appears to be a very competitive White House environment trying to take the piss out of each other.
In the past, when "White House sources" leaked something, that was shorthand for "the President wants the public to know this, but doesn't want anyone going on record", in other words, it was a targeted form information/mis-information dissemination.
But the Trump White House doesn't function like that. It appears that Trump, perhaps quite intentionally, has created a White House built out of various competing factions, all trying to curry his favor and show their the best and most loyal. That's why they all seem to have their knives out for Priebus, because, as Chief of Staff, he's nominally supposed to be in charge of access to the President and general administration of the White House staff itself. But in this kind of environment, the CoS's primary job as gatekeeper would inevitably mean he's viewed as an obstruction, and what's more, with a dizzying array of "chief advisers" with Jared Kushner and Ivanka on one side and Steve Bannon on the other, Priebus seems to be viewed in equal parts with contempt and jealousy, and likely has no real control at all. The long and the short of it is that Trump's White House is a badly malfunctioning one with no clear lines of authority and where people seem to be using the press as a means of plunging knives into each others' backs, and in the process they're damaging the credibility of the Administration.
And that's all before Trump picks up his cell phone and begins tweeting...
Meanwhile, I'm reading these articles about what a steadying hand Mike Pence is (which makes us wonder how chaotic the White House would be if he wasn't there), how he's formed his own effective team and seems to generally be maintaining an air of calm orderly competence. Which makes me wonder if Pence is positioning himself in such a way as to a Trump loyalist, while sending coding signals to Congress that amount to "I'll back the President all the way, but if you do decide that he's too fucking batshit insane to be President anymore, well, I'm ready to go..."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And that's where the two issues collide. Let's assume for the moment that Levin, Breitbart and Fox opinion crew who are spreading this conspiracy theory are right, that somehow Obama personally managed to get Trump Towers wiretapped. Let's assume that President Barack Obama is an evil man of Nixonesque subterfuge and willful vileness who overrode decades-old restrictions that basically shut the POTUS out from ordering wiretaps on domestic phone lines. How does that make the problems that Trump has with his proxies being so tight with the Russians during the campaign? It's not like some great revelation that Obama is a wiretapper (which I don't think anyone actually believes, not even Fox News) somehow makes the allegations against Sessions just disappear.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The talk of Comcast makes a lot of sense to me. The writing is on the wall for wired home services--it's just a matter of time before the cell companies decide to push hard into that market. For most consumers, they could swap out their cable boxes and cable modem for versions that use LTE instead of coax. It would just be a matter of the cell companies having sufficient bandwidth.
Certainly Comcast sees this coming. Buying Sprint would be their best move to stay relevant as the market shifts. Instead of sitting around while the cell companies eat into their market, they can use Sprint to eat into the markets of their competitors.
Now I would much rather see Alphabet (Google) buy Sprint. That could enhance the competitive marketplace for home Internet and video instead of constrict it.
Trump claiming Obama wiretapped his phone is not the same as a Russian phone line being wiretapped, and one of Trump's aides calling the phone line in question. Do you see the difference? The former is fantasy, the second standard operating procedure. That's why it's called fake - because it is demonstrably fake.
It doesn't make you or your argument look particularly sound if you attack the "mental capacity" of others with a news article you didn't understand. Ouch.