The FCC’s excuse for delaying the AT&T/Qualcomm spectrum deal was to work on the AT&T/T-Mobile deal. The latter has been withdrawn, so what’s the excuse now?
AT&T and Sprint both get bad reviews. Sprint’s Nextel deal went through. AT&T’s T-Mobile deal is getting blocked. Hmm. Looks shady, which is why I support Chuck Grassley’s push for FCC transparency involving LightSquared, even though so far their claims on spectrum make sense to me and John Deere and the GPS industry are getting rural pushback against their LightSquared opposition.
Yeah, I never thought I’d mention John Deere in Tech at Night, either.
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Twitter has a credibility problem on its hands, all of a sudden. Even as I’m getting blind link spam sent to me every single day on the site, Twitter has singled out a conservative activist group to have its accounts wiped out. Not only was the Empower Texans feed shut down, but every single employee’s personal feed was targeted as well.
Twitter’s response has been non-descriptive, and lacking in any support. Conveniently for Twitter, by blocking the accounts, it’s impossible for any observer to confirm or deny their allegations of Twitter rules violations. I can only conclude, in the absence of evidence, that somebody in Twitter has decided to get political. And that is Twitter’s problem to fix.
Follow FreeMQS for further developments. Update: Actually, don’t. I was misinformed on this one as the story developed last night.
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Regular readers of my Tech at Night series have seen me make the case for the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA by pointing out how it would improve competition because the two companies combined could compete better with 4G networks like Verizon and the combined Sprint/Clearwire.
But there’s a more basic reason than that to oppose any government meddling in the deal, as proposed by Sprint Nextel itself, as well as George Soros/OSI-funded front groups like Public Knowledge or Free Press. Both a Constitutional and a common sense approach would be not to intervene unless we have good reason. And the reason for intervention given by the radical left, as well as by competitors like Sprint, just doesn’t make sense.
Put simply, the AT&T/T-Mobile deal cannot simultaneously hurt Sprint and give AT&T price setting power, especially not when the Sprint/Nextel deal had the opposite effect on prices.
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Have you ever noticed that the Soros-funded left never refers to Sprint Nextel by the firm’s full name? They only talk about Sprint. You know why? If they say Sprint Nextel, it’ll remind everyone that when #3 Sprint and #4 Nextel merged, wireless competition, prices, and service all improved. If you remember that fact, they think you might make the “wrong” predictions about #2 AT&T and #4 T-Mobile merging, creating a better threat to Verizon, improving competition, service, and prices.
But the whole Sprint/George Soros Unholy Alliance is all about deception. Soros-funded groups like Public Knowledge know nothing else. So says Mike Wendy: “they do great damage to the integrity of the review process, which ultimately harms the American consumer.” And so says Seton Motley: “The “public interest” is best served by what the public is interested in. And the public – the consumers, the people – aren’t at all interested in what Free Press, Public Knowledge and Media Access Project have to offer.”
They’re both right on the money. Their interests are not those of the public. they want to socialize the mass media in America. They call it media reform. Remember “health care reform?” Yeah.
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