T-Mobile Merger Approval Violated Every One of the DOJ's 'Antitrust Principles'

If we assume positive intent, someone at DOJ was tired of approvals like the T-Mobile deal, and was able to (somehow) build concensus to an announcement of new principles. These newly announced principles are quite a bit different than the old ones, so we shouldn't be surprised that old deals don't align, that's kind of the point.

It's also not too surprising that an old deal finalized a few months before the new principles finalized. Everything is on a long pipeline, and it gets done when it's done, changing principles in the middle is hard --- especially when the new ones are unpublished and you had already done significant work under the old ones.

But the reality was either they merged, or Sprint would shut down. There was no scenario where Sprint stayed in businesses acting as competition.

On top of the that T-Mobile had a really hard time competing with Verizon and AT&T because of lack of spectrum, so preventing them from getting Sprint's spectrum would actually make them less competitive.

I think the author may have forgotten that Verizon and AT&T are competitors to T-Mobile and instead only paid attention to Sprint.

> "Not only did the DOJ ignore all objective data showing the deal would clearly be terrible for customers, the market, and employees"

What data is this? Because out here in the real world the deal has been amazing for T-Mobile customers and the market. Perhaps not employees, but that's not really a reason to stop it.