Tim Karr of Free Press writes this:
Congress may be finally waking up to the obvious: that the massive merger of AT&T with T-Mobile just doesn’t make sense. No amount of contributions from AT&T, or visits from AT&T lobbyists, will alter this simple truth.
On Wednesday, the Senate’s top antitrust official, Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, weighed the facts and wrote a letter urging Attorney General Eric Holder and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to reject AT&T’s proposed takeover.
Sen. Kohl wrote that “the acquisition, if permitted to proceed, would likely cause substantial harm to competition and consumers, would be contrary to antitrust law and not in the public interest, and therefore should be blocked by your agencies.”
Sen. Kohl’s joined a growing chorus of opposition in Washington to the proposed merger. Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) also submitted a letter on Wednesday stating that they believed AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile “would be a troubling backward step in federal public policy — a retrenchment from nearly two decades of promoting competition and open markets to acceptance of a duopoly in the wireless marketplace.”