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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

While I'm usually wary of giant corporate mergers like this, the fact that they are 3rd and 4th leads me to believe it would actually position them to better compete against Verizon and AT&T in a way that would be good for consumers.

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Let them invest to compete, instead of merging. Merging will only make things worse.

How are they going to invest? They make barely any money and are saddled with massive amounts of debt and no way to raise

How do you figure? If they merge, we get three main market leaders all competing head to head.

If they don’t, Sprint tanks, and we still have three main market leaders, however two will remain significantly ahead of the third. Keeping in mind that the two that are ahead are now playing the monopoly game and buying into other industries (see AT&T and Time Warner or AT&T and DirecTV or Verizon and Yahoo, etc)

Break up Verizon and AT&T.

We then need to keep them broken up.

Compete how? Competition with the market leader will improve if this merger results in a more formidable opponent.

They should become more formidable without merging.

T-Mobile moght, Sprint won’t. They are a distressed company and no amount “shoulds” will change their trajectory. The question is whether T-Mobile deserves to grab all of Sprints customers in a “migrate by default” scheme, or their gonna have to fight for those customers when Sprint inevitably goes down.

Exactly. Sprint is tanking. Who else should be able to acquire it?

ATT nor Verizon would be able to acquire Sprint the company. But if the company goes down without being acquired by T-Mobile, let's say their customers would migrate to the remaining 3 carriers proportionally existing market shares. This outcome would be pretty great for AT&T and Verizon and strictly increase the market concentration.

Approve or not approve, regulators are sometimes forced into a position of "picking winners" :-(

Another thing that needs thinking through is what happens to Sprint's spectrum if the company goes under. What kind of rules will be placed on that auction? Would ATT and Verizon be likely winners of such an auction?

If either of them knew how to do that I think they would have by now. For real, if you can tell either of them how you'll be an overnight millionaire.

I strongly disagree. These are the lower priced, more scrappy competitors. I think they'll reduce competition, especially toward lower priced customers.

No, they'll just have poor service from not enough towers and spectrum.

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