@jbtaylor on tech

The last few days in the fight over AT&T's bid to takeover T-Mobile have been a blur, but today stood out. Because today, on behalf of consumers everywhere, the Federal Communications Commission struck what perhaps may be a fatal, knock out blow against AT&T's Ma Cell ambitions.

The Commission granted AT&T's and Deutsche Telekom's request to withdraw their AT&T/T-Mobile merger application from further agency consideration, but not before releasing the results of the agency's eight month long investigation into the transaction. The report's conclusions are devastating and inescapable.

And here's the rub: there's nothing in the report which would lead any objective reader to conclude that the FCC will react any differently if or when AT&T and Deutsche Telekom come back for a second attempt at FCC approval, a step the companies indicated the would take later, assuming they are successful against the Justice Department at trial next year.

Significantly, three out of four sitting FCC commissioners (Genachowski, Copps and Clyburn) issued formal statements endorsing today's Commission action, indicating that had AT&T and Deutsche Telekom not sought to yank their merger application on Thanksgiving Day, the Commission would have voted to move the matter to an Administrative Law Judge, a prelude to an inevitable official agency rejection.

But that's not even the best part. The best part is that now, with the report's release, the public, the financial analysts, investors and the Boards of both AT&T and Deutsche Telekom will see that the FCC doesn't accept any of the companies' main arguments surrounding the transaction. Most importantly, Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, the judge trying the Justice Department's case against AT&T will see the report. I fully expect that Justice Department will introduce the report and other items in the FCC's merger docket as evidence at trial next year. Judge's tend to give a great deal of weight to the opinion of independent expert regulatory agencies.

We'll see what happens next. AT&T has 6 billion reasons to drag this out well into next year, so this is not over yet.

That's why I don't think the proverbial fat lady is singing, but I do think I hear her warming up.

p.s. Please remember that this is my personal blog and does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

I feel like I'm playing Whack-a-Mole with AT&T's PR team when it comes to the company's rapidly disintegrating proposed merger with T-Mobile.

At every opportunity, AT&T's PR machine will find some journalist somewhere who is unfamiliar with the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust guidelines, the DOJ's suit against AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile, or the FCC review process for mergers. Once they find such a writer, they spin the tale that some sort of settlement or divestiture can make the whole thing go away.

It's an appealing narrative for a financial writer. These folks love deals and their sources, Wall St. bankers who make millions off of mergers and acquisitions, love them even more.

But it's one that a journalist familiar with the workings of the DOJ or FCC would take with huge grain of salt. And in the case of AT&T's ill-fated proposed merger with T-Mobile, it will likely never happen.

In what has to have been one of their worst PR moves of the last 8 months, AT&T and Deutsche Telekom announced at 2:30 a.m. ET on Thanksgiving morning that they, in the companies' words, on Nov. 23, "withdrew, without prejudice" their pending application to transfer T-Mobile USA's spectrum licenses to AT&T.

The move meant reporters in the U.S. who have been covering the story woke up to the fact that their competitors in Europe had the scoop. It also meant that they spend all of Thanksgiving Day dealing with AT&T's turkey of announcement, rather than spend it with their families.

And let me tell you, reporters are fuming.

This afternoon, media reported that Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has announced plans to move AT&T's proposed bid for T-Mobile to an Administrative Law Judge.

Vonya McCann, Sprint's Senior Vice President for Government Affairs issued the following statement to media:

"As Chairman Genachowski said in August when the Justice Department filed its antitrust lawsuit against AT&T, the record before the FCC presented, 'serious concerns about the impact of the proposed transaction on competition.' That record is complete and more than justifies moving this matter to an Administrative Law Judge for a hearing. We appreciate Chairman Genachowski’s leadership on this issue and look forward to the FCC moving quickly to adopt a strong hearing designation order.”