The following statement on today’s House Judiciary oversight hearing on “How Will the Proposed Merger Between AT&T and T-Mobile Affect Wireless Telecommunications Competition?” may be attribute to Mike Wendy, Director of MediaFreedom.org.
Alexandria, VA, May 26, 2011 – Clearly, Congress has a vital oversight role in the approval process for the AT&T / T-Mobile merger. The data and testimony gathered at hearings like today’s will help the FCC and the DoJ make informed decisions on the potential effect of the merger on the public interest, markets, jobs and on our economy.
Already, early in this review process, we see that one sector of our economy has experienced explosive growth due to the merger plans – the so-called corporate-supported, “public interest advocates” and their growing legions of pro-regulatory minions. As Congress takes a look into the plans of the merging companies, it should also take a gander into the public interest advocates’ apparent Cosa Nostra set-up on this and other recent public policy matters in the tech sphere.
These “consumer” groups have gamed the system, working to impose needless regulations, burdens and other costs on American consumers primarily to benefit their corporate overlords, not the public interest.
They have funneled millions of dollars to create a faux Net Neutrality scare, taking just four specious Net Neutrality “violations” and exploding them outward to bring about deleterious Internet regulation on an entire segment of the industry (network providers), willfully blind to healthy, teeming competition in the local broadband market. Similarly, they are here today, working to collapse the marketplace so that it appears ossified by the potential of “only” 3 national competitors, purposely ignoring the inconvenience of a vibrant and growing local wireless marketplace.
Congress should look at this ongoing, RICO-like attempt to arbitrage the review process and the efforts of the corporate-supported, public interest advocates to kite “the problem” in order to extort concessions from the merging parties. Not only do they seek to bring harm to those parties, they do great damage to the integrity of the review process, which ultimately harms the American consumer.
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