Sprint and AT&T take merger battle to print: ‘Competition is American, Competition plays fair'

Sprint’s battle to stop AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile USA dead in its tracks is officially at a fever pitch ahead of the May 11 congressional hearing on the matter — the first of likely many over the next several months. Evidence of the battle was taken to the consumer front lines today with print ads that apparently ran in a number of newspapers and journals, with Sprint’s touting the value of competition in an almost poetry-like 24 lines of text. Interestingly, the ad ends without ever mentioning AT&T, T-Mobile, or the merger directly, though the jab is obvious in one key line: ”Competition keeps us all from returning to a Ma Bell-like, sorry-but-you-have-no-choice past.” Of course, “Ma Bell” is a not-so-veiled reference to the monolithic AT&T that controlled virtually all of the nation’s telecom industry prior to a government breakup in 1984.