Thank You AT&T!
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!
