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Comment by AzzyHN | Hacker News Reader

I mean, T-Mobile bought Sprint. Antitrust laws might as well not exist in America

Sprint wouldn't have survived as an independent company. They made a fatal mistake by betting the company on WiMax and then the rest of the industry decided to go with 4G LTE instead. This left Sprint without enough capital to build out a competitive nationwide 5G network. Allowing T-Mobile to buy Sprint was a better outcome for consumers than allowing Sprint to slowly go bankrupt as there will now be three viable nationwide networks.

This is completely different. If T-Mobile hadn’t bought Sprint, Sprint would have gone out of business. It had bedn losing money for years.

Then the spectrum they had licenses to - the main reason T-Mobile wanted sprint, would have been auctioned off and probably still would have had t-mobile buy it since they needed it the most.

Besides At&T was already dealing with a ton of debt and if Verizon had bought it, the landscape would have been less competitive

I mean, Spirit wasn't sold to JetBlue, and Adobe/Figma called off their courtship (likely due to fear of regulator disapproval) with in the past few months.

But before T-mobile bought Sprint, ATT was blocked from acquiring T-mobile.

This is a recent uptick in enforcement actions.

Meanwhile, TicketMaster/LiveNation/(scalping thing) has demonstrated a textbook consumer-harming monopoly for DECADES with impunity. DECADES.

And politicians and agencies wave hands over "inflation" while the four U.S. meat producers report 90% profit increases (after whining about a "labor shortage"). NINETY PERCENT increases.

Corporate toadies in Congress sit back and pretend that the Fed's feckless interest-rate hikes are all we can do. Disgusting.

It’s unfortunate for business planning but probably fortunate for consumers that the FTC and DOJ change leadership with presidential terms —- Biden’s FTC is a much different entity than Trump’s was when Sprint and T Mobile merged.

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