Wireless merger: Too big to sell?

Congress ultimately won't have a formal say in AT&T's proposed purchase of T-Mobile. That falls to the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission, which are reviewing the deal’s potential impact on consumers and competitors.

A few antitrust experts told reporters this week that they've conducted their own review, and they would urge regulators to block the deal. “We think it is anti-competitive on its face,” said Richard Brunell, director of legal advocacy at the American Antitrust Institute, a nonprofit think tank that promotes competition and often argues for more government intervention. Regulators are likely to be swayed by the deal’s impact on the competitive landscape. For the second year in a row, the FCC is expected to stop short of calling the wireless industry competitive in its annual report on the industry, according to people familiar with the report. The Mobile Wireless Competition report has not yet been publicly released, but it is expected to find that concentration has increased within the wireless industry. But the FCC also won't go so far as to call the industry uncompetitive, sources said. An FCC official said the “mobile marketplace is so incredibly diverse; an up-or-down determination on competition would be over-simplistic.”