The New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative today commended Reps. John Conyers (D-MI), ranking member of the House Committee of Judiciary, and Edward Markey (D-MA), ranking member of the Committee on Natural Resources, for standing against the AT&T and T-Mobile merger. During a Capitol Hill press conference today, Markey warned that such a consolidation "threatens to put the wireless market in a way back time machine to the days of old Ma Bell."

Benjamin Lennett, Senior Policy Analyst for the Open Technology Initiative, said, “As the oft-quoted phrase goes,'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' We should not forget what happened the last time we had a single company with such tremendous power in communications -- when your phone was literally tethered to the wall and innovation was offering consumers a choice of two colors for their rotary telephone. Nor can we afford to ignore the history of the past wireless duopoly, where handsets were the size of bricks and prices per minute for a call were five times higher than they are today.

“In 1913, the U.S. government had an opportunity to take on the fledgling AT&T monopoly on telephone service for running afoul of antitrust laws, but instead settled for a few loophole-riddled ownership limits and behavioral conditions. History would demonstrate that the Kingsbury Commitment, as it would become known, only allowed AT&T to consolidate its control. It would take over 70 years to undo that decision and break up the AT&T monopoly. We hope that the Department of Justice, the FCC, and members of congress will not make the same mistake again and oppose this merger. We already allowed AT&T to define one era of telecommunications, let's not allow it to define another.”

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