For the first time since the announced merger this March between AT&T and T-Mobile, regulators in the Obama administration stated unequivocally that they think the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is a bad idea.
“Any way you look at this transaction, it is anticompetitive,” said Sharis A. Pozen, the Justice Department’s acting assistant attorney general, said in a press statement issued Wednesday.
Below is a copy of the administration’s complaint. The administration is asking the court to define the wireless market as a national market as it considers the administration’s case, but it has also broken down the market into a national market of professional wireless customers (the government, large businesses) and the consumer market, and it says that the merger would impact both markets negatively.
Justice Department officials also broke down the numbers for all of the local wireless markets for U.S. District Judge Judge Ellen Huvelle of D.C. to illustrate the competitive impact of the merger, and the picture, in their view, isn’t pretty.
The officials are using a specific metric called the Herindahl-Hirschman Index that measures the market concentration in various markets where the two companies compete.
“Markets in which the HHI is between 1,500 and 2,500 points are considered to be moderately concentrated, and markets in which the HHI is in excess of 2,500 points are considered to be highly concentrated,” explain the officials in their complaint, as you’ll see below.
Most of the local markets listed would be well above the 2,500 number if the merger were allowed to go through. If you’re wondering what the impact of the merger is likely to have on your choices where you live, you can check that out in DOJ’s chart below. (The higher the number, the less competitive the market is.)
Some of the most concentrated markets listed in the complaint are: the Denver-Boulder area in Colorado; Rochester, New York; Birmingham, Alabama; the Greenville-Spartenburg area in South Carolina, and Canton, Ohio.
