The culture war over a proposed telecom merger

[Commentary] The chairman of Sprint is putting on a blitz to sway skeptical regulators to approve his acquisition of T-Mobile US.

There are good reasons to approve Sprint’s acquisition of T-Mobile, but an allegedly lousy US mobile broadband market is not one of them. Son, the CEO of Sofbank, seems caught in a Japanese mindset where government supervision and intervention is required to be sure everything turns out the way the state wants it to. He embarrasses himself making such an argument at the US Chamber of Commerce, the bastion of capitalism.

The truth is that the US mobile broadband system is outstripping the world. It’s one of the reasons that the six most visited websites in the world are US firms and that seven of the ten largest Internet companies are US-based and just one is Japanese. The robust and competitive mobile broadband market has ignited major capital spending -- according to CTIA, the Wireless Association, six times more per subscriber than global counterparts. Meanwhile, data prices per megabyte have dropped 93% in five years.

As for a price war, T-Mobile has also started one. Who says there is no competition? Claims that the US mobile market is “not good,” that we have “terrible connections” (as Son said in a press conference) and that the US has “one of the world’s highest mobile fees” (as he also said) -- those claims are myths, perpetrated by interested parties, like Son himself, that are grinding their own axes.