FCC Opens Public Comments On T-Mobile-Sprint Merger (engadget.com) 43
Now is your chance to voice your opinion on the $26 billion merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. The FCC is now accepting comments as well as formal petitions to deny the merger until August 27th. The companies and supporters of the deal can then file oppositions to those petitions by September 17th, while a final round of replies has a deadline of October 9th. Engadget reports: Anyone can file petitions to deny, and you might expect to see some from consumer advocacy groups and industry experts who may be concerned over the reduction in the number of national carriers from four to three. The FCC has laid out a 180-day review timeline to determine whether the merger is in the public interest, but that's more of a guideline and there's no required deadline for the agency to issue a decision.
Wait, our opinions matter now ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, if the majority of comments are not to the FCC's liking, are we just going to claim they were hacked again ?
Quit pretending you give two shits about what the people think because your pretending to do so is insulting.
Re: (Score:2)
No, say something interesting. It's not a vote (Score:5, Informative)
"Opinion" is probably the wrong word. If your opinion is "Sprint sucks", nobody will pay any attention to that. You CAN say things they WILL pay attention to, though, if you're informed on the topic.
I have been effective at influencing these kinds of things with regulators, but you have to know what type.of comments will be effective.
This is an appropriate an effective time to point out things that they may not have thought about, finer points. It's not particularly effective to say "no, I don't want this", because it's not a vote.
Regulators frequently require than before a merger, the companies must sell off certain assets, preferably to a smaller competitor, in order to maintain competition in a particular market. Suppose you know that in your area there are three carriers:
T-Mobile is available to you
Sprint is available to you
Blaze Wireless is available a few miles away, in a neighboring town, but not in your area
You could point out that the merger would create a monopoly in your area, but that could be fixed by having them sell the Sprint or T-Mobile towers to nearby Blaze Wireless. The combined T-Sprint would then have Blaze as competition in your area. THAT is the type of thing that can make a difference.
Look into the details of the merger proposal. Do any of the details raise red flags? What should be changed? Suggesting changes that regulators haven't already considered can be helpful.
Re: No, say something interesting. It's not a vote (Score:2, Insightful)
What is wrong with this merger? ATT and Verizon dominate all real markets. Sprint and T Mobile try to clean up a bit, but combined, they could be a challenger. You sound like a shill for one of the Big Two as opposed to someone who wants real competition.
Make them say "Interesting, I hadn't thought of (Score:3)
In other words, your goal is to have the person who reads your comment say to their co-worker "hey look at this, this is interesting". It's a COMMENT period, not a VOTING period.
Re: (Score:3)
You CAN say things they WILL pay attention to, though, if you're informed on the topic.
I might have believe this before the shitshow around net neutrality. In one fell swoop this Republican led FCC has shown it has no interest in consumers, their comments, or anything besides making their corporate masters wealthier.
Re: (Score:2)
Ahem, this is not free-enterprise... and it is pretty disingenuous to outright intentional misleading to advance the notion. There is nothing free-enterprise about the Telecommunications landscape bribing regulators for practically a century. The sector is heavily regulated and there are several monopolies littered about the scape in multiple ways.
But I will say that you are right about this part.
"The American Dream works, just not for people like you."
The problem is that allowing the FCC to regulate this
So here comes ... (Score:1)
... the goddam bots to skew things toward what the fucking FCC has already decided to do.
Less concerned about a mobile monopoly than... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am less concerned about a mobile phone monopoly than I am about collusion amongst cable delivery companies. The fact that the large cable companies won't even try and compete with each other and openly acknowledge such a strategy is a far greater threat to my mind than a possible mobile carrier monopoly. I feel like 3 companies with a healthy churning market is better than a locked in cable market that exists today in a large portion of the North American market.
http://fortune.com/2015/05/19/... [fortune.com]
https://muninetworks.org/conte... [muninetworks.org]
Even less concerned (Score:3)
I am less concerned about a mobile phone monopoly than I am about collusion amongst cable delivery companies. The fact that the large cable companies won't even try and compete with each other and openly acknowledge such a strategy is a far greater threat to my mind than a possible mobile carrier monopoly. I feel like 3 companies with a healthy churning market is better than a locked in cable market that exists today in a large portion of the North American market.
http://fortune.com/2015/05/19/... [fortune.com]
https://muninetworks.org/conte... [muninetworks.org]
For the record, I am more concerned with unregulated illegal immigration than I am with this proposed merger.
Should I then ignore this because there are more important issues?
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely not. I just felt that the potential mobile monopoly and the cable issue were sort of intertwined. What with the phone companies buying up the cable companies and vice versa. The line between content provider and content delivery becomes hugely blurred. The way things are headed now will return us to the days of Prodigy vs. AOL vs Genie vs CompuServe, and a segmented internet where certain resources are available only to the 'citizens' of certain services.
Dear FCC (Score:5, Funny)
Mixing the magenta of TMobile with the yellow of Sprint results in an unpleasant shade of orange. Please do not allow this merger.
Oppose the merger? You must be a bot!!!111 (Score:1)
Just like what they did with Net Neutrality, they will probbaly ignore all those that oppose the merger, and help create more monopolies.
Smoke and Mirrors (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the usual "feel good" politics designed to distract people from the real action and the real problem. Sadly it works all too well.
There is only one comment period... and they are all called elections. Remember that congress has always had the power to tell the FCC and other regulatory agencies exactly what to do and or remake or destroy them when they turn into capture and the fact that they don't means that elected politicians know that they were successful in getting citizens to ignore congress and focus on the agencies instead allowing congress to largely get a pass on actually having to deal with the corruption in agencies. People are going to be too busy worried about which letter got voted in, over petty politics, instead of which letters actually did or are doing anything about the many problems. Empty platitudes along with ineffective or counter productive action is the order of the day.
And since the ole regulation/deregulation arguments have become so nebulous and meaningless in context no one is really saying anything. Someone says regulation and congress or the agencies interpret the calls as "moar rules" even when those rules wind up helping businesses and hurting consumers. And then after those rules get put in everyone goes home like the problem is solved only to come back in another couple of years wondering why it is still a problem, rinse and repeat.
Comment? (Score:2)
And it will be regarded just like our comments on Net Neutrality, I assume? I.e. if it is "surprisingly" overwhelmingly against whatever Ashit Pile wants, it's gonna be dismissed as fake and fabricated?
Forget about commenting (Score:2)
FCC regulates spectrum – a public good (Score:2)
T-mobile needs a license to merge Sprint into obscurity for the common good of 5G success.
T-mobile is the highest embodiment of existing cellular network technology that affords the best human scaled feature set for mass consumption at reasonable cost. That deserves T-mobile bid to live-on into the next generation technology platform - 5G.
There are two ways this will play out: (Score:3)
Sprint and TMO don't merge. Sprint fails under it's massive debt. The licenses and IP go to auction for pennies on the dollar.
Either way Sprint isn't going to survive. They never recovered from the Nextel acquisition and they're hemorrhaging customers due to the fact they're still behind on LTE.
Either way Sprint isn't going to make it; the numbers of carriers will be reduced to three. It's just a question of WHO is going to wind up with it. TMO from a merger, or Verizon.
I don't see TMO or AT&T being able to compete with Verizon at an auction.