The timeline is that the merger approval happened and sometime after that, the new principles were published.<p>If we assume positive intent, someone at DOJ was tired of approvals like the T-Mobile deal, and was able to (somehow) build concensus to an announcement of new principles. These newly announced principles are quite a bit different than the old ones, so we shouldn't be surprised that old deals don't align, that's kind of the point.<p>It's also not too surprising that an old deal finalized a few months before the new principles finalized. Everything is on a long pipeline, and it gets done when it's done, changing principles in the middle is hard --- especially when the new ones are unpublished and you had already done significant work under the old ones.
I think in this case, the decision was to either allow the merger and create a three way competition with AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint/T-Mobile, or watch as AT&T and Verizon slowly pushed out Sprint and T-Mobile. Sprint was mostly dead by this time. T-Mobile got a jump start due to innovation in the consumer space, but that was dying out. Instead, by allowing the merger, we have a viable third company to compete with AT&T and Verizon.
Techdirt is acting like Sprint was going to remain as a viable company "if only they didn't merge".<p>But the reality was either they merged, or Sprint would shut down. There was no scenario where Sprint stayed in businesses acting as competition.<p>On top of the that T-Mobile had a really hard time competing with Verizon and AT&T because of lack of spectrum, so preventing them from getting Sprint's spectrum would actually make them <i>less</i> competitive.<p>I think the author may have forgotten that Verizon and AT&T are competitors to T-Mobile and instead only paid attention to Sprint.<p>> "Not only did the DOJ ignore all objective data showing the deal would clearly be terrible for customers, the market, and employees"<p>What data is this? Because out here in the real world the deal has been amazing for T-Mobile customers and the market. Perhaps not employees, but that's not really a reason to stop it.