@jbtaylor on tech

So this afternoon, the phone rings and a reporter calls with questions about a regulatory filing Sprint had made at the FCC.

Remember the new economic model that AT&T gave the FCC in an attempt to justify their takeover of T-Mobile?

In plain terms, our latest filing was basically Sprint's request of the FCC to disregard AT&T's new economic model. Under FCC rules, companies that merge are expected to file complete merger applications at the beginning of the process. Anything new submitted in the middle of the process that is new, like AT&T's new economic model, isn't anything the FCC should accept, at least in our view of the Commission's process.

When it comes to FCC filings like this, only a handful of reporters are ever really interested in them, so I typically don't harass reporters or browbeat them into covering these filings. I'm always happy to answer questions, but I generally don't ask reporters to write about what are known as ex parte letters.

Apparently AT&T takes a different approach. This afternoon, their PR team decided to email out a statement to media blasting Sprint's filing. They even called us "desperate".

What's amusing to me is I'm pretty sure near all of these reporters would have ignored Sprint's filing altogether had AT&T's PR team not drawn attention to it. (Two reporters specifically told me that.)

By my count, so far Bloomberg News, Politico, The Hill, National Journal, TR Daily and Comm Daily all wrote (or are writing) and from what I can tell, media may think someone's desperate, but it's not Sprint.

After all, I'm not badgering them on a Friday afternoon to write about an FCC filing. So for that, my dear friends at AT&T, you have my thanks!

Hope you have a wonderful weekend and come back next week and help Sprint tell the story about about why a duopoly is so bad for America. (Kind of like the CEO of Forrester Research did this morning.)

Until Monday!

Remember that children's book about the boy named Alexander and his bad day? The full title of this classic is, "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day."

The story goes that Alexander has so many things go wrong with his day that he decides he wants to run away and move to Australia. At the end, Alexander's mom assures him that everyone has bad days, even people in Australia.

AT&T had just that kind of day today.

This afternoon, Bloomberg reported that, for the first time, a group of 32 analysts polled by the firm Stifel Nicolaus now predicted that the proposed T-Mobile takeover has less than a 50 percent chance of gaining regulatory approval.

Following that news, media reported than an AT&T attorney mistakenly disclosed confidential documents which were meant to be redacted before being uploaded to the FCC's website. The documents were removed from the FCC's site quickly, but not before news media saw them and reported their contents. The big disclosure is that AT&T considered, then rejected a $3.8 billion proposal to build out 4G to 97 percent of all Americans prior to offering $39 billion to Deutsche Telekom to takeover T-Mobile. All of that confirms what takeover critics have said all along: AT&T doesn't need to takeover T-Mobile to build out 4G. The elected officials who have endorsed this takeover were told flatly that purchasing T-Mobile was the ONLY path to 4G. Now we know that isn't true. So it begs the question, what's AT&T's true motivation?

The day got worse when the Wall Street Journal reported that AT&T has hired Bank of America and Merrill Lynch to explore divesting assets worth an estimated $8 billion in an effort to secure regulatory approval. Given that the FCC's regulatory review and the Justice Department's investigation is still in its early stages, this begs the question, is AT&T finally admitting that this stinker of a deal really stinks?

Oh and before the day ended, the California Public Utilities Commission has made a rather extensive data request of AT&T, T-Mobile and other wireless carriers in the state in a effort to learn more about the impact on consumers. Earlier today, the Commission announced that it was pushing back the schedule of its review by about a month in an effort to learn more about AT&T's "new" economic model being used to justify the transaction. As Bloomberg reported earlier this week, California is conducting what one industry observer called, "the most in-depth review [among the states]."

The good news for AT&T is that today is over. The bad news is that as the public learns the truth about this proposed transaction, their opposition is only increasing. To date, this proceeding has generated more comments at the FCC from individual citizens than any other in FCC history. And unfortunately for AT&T, people are opposed to them by about a 10 to 1 margin.

No matter how many elected officials and civic groups AT&T trots out to call for approval of this stinker of a deal, the public who they purport to represent are calling for the government to reject AT&T outright.

If I were AT&T, I'd consider moving to Australia.

In a story I've linked to above, SeattlePI quotes a T-Mobile employee who says AT&T's proposed takeover of T-Mobile isn't the "merger" AT&T and Deutsche Telekom describe. 

The employee says it's something very different.

"In reality, it's more like a car-jacking. AT&T will strip us for 'parts' (spectrum, towers, customers) and throw the drivers (employees) to the curb.

"After all, when you steal a car, you don't need the driver anymore."