Last week I had the chance to testify before the California Public Utilities Commission about the harms of AT&T’s pending takeover of T-Mobile. I joined a bunch of concerned citizens and an array of allied groups, including Media Alliance, the Greenlining Institute and CalPIRG, to question the deal, dispute the claims of the merger proponents who showed up at the hearing, and to urge the CPUC to take action.

I’m pleased to say, the CPUC listened and voted 3-2 to thoroughly investigate the deal. They’ll look into what the merger would do for service, pricing and competition, and submit their findings to the FCC. As CPUC Commissioner Catherine Sandoval told the Los Angeles Times, "Our analysis will give the public an opportunity to determine if this serves competition and the public interest."

Free Press has already detailed the nightmare result this merger is likely to produce, and thousands of our members, supporters and allies have made their opinions known through the FCC’s public comment process. AT&T executives have paid attention, even though they’re trying to dismiss a groundswell of grassroots activism (and conveniently ignore their efforts to buy a little astroturf support).

As I said before the Commission last week, California can’t afford to lose jobs, stifle innovation or pay higher prices —the likeliest results of this transaction. And neither can the rest of the country.

You can watch my testimony here.

And here’s a copy of my full remarks:

My name is Craig Aaron, and I’m the president of Free Press, the national, nonpartisan, nonprofit advocate for media policies in the public interest. I’m here today on behalf of our more than 75,000 members in California.

As this body considers how to best address AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile, I urge you to look closely at the harms this merger would cause to California consumers due to the lack of competition in the wireless market.

Consider that in a post-merger landscape AT&T and Verizon would control nearly 80 percent of the market for mobile telecommunications. As a result of this merger, the wireless market would be more consolidated than the markets for oil, banking, automobiles and air travel.

Just try to picture ExxonMobil merging with BP, Shell, Chevron-Texaco and Citgo.

Oh, and to make the comparison still more accurate, imagine that after the merger you have to sign a contract that would require you to buy Exxon gas and only Exxon gas for the next two years.
That seems outrageous. But we should be even more outraged about this level of concentration in the wireless market for a service that all Americans increasingly depend on to communicate.

And bear in mind that communities that can least afford it will bear the cost of lining AT&T’s corporate coffers. Half of T-Mobile’s customers are people of color, many of them benefiting from lower-cost offerings that will disappear when T-Mobile does. Also vanishing will be billions of dollars in job-creating capital expenditures that would happen otherwise – at least $10 billion worth, according to what AT&T tells Wall Street. And thousands and thousands of jobs will be lost because of new “synergies.”

In 1984, when the Justice Department broke up the old Ma Bell, the prevailing consensus was that AT&T had gotten too big. But the AT&T-T-Mobile merger would create a behemoth that’s substantially bigger than the old conglomerate. As Congressman John Conyers has said, instead of Ma Bell, we’ll be left with Ma Cell.

The results of this merger will almost certainly be higher prices, fewer choices, an inevitable loss of jobs, and serious threats to free expression and the free market on the wireless Internet.

That’s simply too great a cost for California and the rest of the country.

Thank you for your time this morning.