DOJ Rubberstamps AT&T and BellSouth merger

DOJ sidesteps Congress, Judiciary

From MyDD:

This is stunning news. The Justice Department has OK'd, with a simple press release, a massive merger between Bellsouth and AT&T with no conditions and without a consent decree or judicial review, effectively reconstituting much of the old AT&T monopoly. The new AT&T will control nearly half of the landlines in the country, and the CEO of AT&T is already on record essentially saying he's going to get rid of net neutrality.

Over the past decade, there has been a wave of telecom mergers, and these have concentrated the telecommunications business quite radically. Prior to a merger, the DOJ usually goes through with consent decree in which it describes possible concerns and conditions for a merged entity, which are then reviewed by a judge. That's what both Republican and Democratic Congressmen asked the Department of Justice to do in this case as well....

This move, to sidestep judicial review of this merger, is a slap in the face of Senator Dewine and Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who already had his Judiciary committee's jurisdiction stripped by Hastert and Barton earlier in the net neutrality fight. This is the equivalent of one of Bush's signing statements, where he simply goes around the regular legislative process. This is a slap not only at Republicans and Democrats in Congress, it's also a slap at the Judicial branch, which the DOJ has stripped of power, because judges have shown an unwillingness to accept the idea that concentrating power like this has no anticompetitive effects.

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