Reactions To DoJ Move Against AT&T, T-Mobile USA Deal

[WSJ Law Blog]

News of the government moving to block the AT&T-T-Mobile USA deal is reverberating throughout the wide landscape of telecom watchers.

Antitrust lawyers had said in recent days that the company’s chances of winning approval rested on political issues trumping legal concerns. The fact that the government challenged—months earlier than observers had expected—demonstrates that the legal issues won the day, Peers writes.

The Justice Department’s primary test “is whether a merger causes prices to be higher than they otherwise would be,” Joe Simons, co-head of the antitrust group at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, told Peers before the filing. And that doesn’t have to mean prices going up, he noted. Even if prices are falling, and continue to fall, the question is whether they would have fallen materially more absent the merger.

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