The Not So Good, Very Bad and Really Weird Merger of T-Mobile and Sprint

For those of you unfamiliar with the merger, 17 months ago, in April 2018, T-Mobile and Sprint announced that they would merge in a deal valued at around $26 billion dollars and sought permission from the Justice Department to do so. You might think that with clear evidence of price increases and other consumer and competitive harms, and before a Justice Department that had sued to block the vertical merger of AT&T and Time Warner, and whose Antitrust Chief, Makan Delrahim, had made it abundantly clear multiple times that behavioral remedies were inadequate to resolve competitive harms, this 4-3 merger would have been blocked a long time ago. But you would be wrong. Instead, we’ve witnessed one of the worst and weirdest cases of industrial policymaking I’ve ever seen in any Administration, Democratic or Republican.