Californian opponents of T-Mobile’s proposed takeover of Sprint want more hearings and another round of written evidence and rebuttals, before the California Public Utilities Commission moves ahead with approving or rejecting it. Prior to last week’s hearings, the CPUC in-house consumer advocacy unit – the public advocates office (PAO) – asked the administrative law judge hearing the case to, in effect, slow the proceeding down to give them time to review four thousand pages of testimony and evidence that T-Mobile and Sprint dropped on them. The PAO is recommending that the CPUC not allow the merger to take place.
After the hearings, other opponents – two private consumer advocacy groups, TURN and the Greenlining Institute, and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a telecoms labor union – endorsed the request for more testimony and hearings. As CWA put it…
Justifying an application for the first time with 4,000 pages of “rebuttal testimony” is entirely improper and violates intervenors’ due process rights. The Commission has held that “[p]roviding the basic justification in rebuttal is unfair, since parties are not generally given the opportunity to respond to rebuttal with testimony of their own.”
Sprint and T-Mobile naturally don’t agree. They submitted more than 250 pages of additional material that argues that there was nothing in the 4,000 pages that was particularly new or didn’t directly respond to points previously made by opponents to the deal. The companies particularly object to adding more hearings and filings because doing so “would substantially disrupt the schedule adopted by the Commission – adding at least six weeks of unjustified delay”.
The Federal Communications Commission is also reviewing the proposed merger. Assuming there isn’t another federal government shutdown, it’s scheduled to reach a decision by the end of May. Even if the CPUC’s review remains on its original track, it could run even longer than that.
Collected documents from the CPUC’s review of the proposed merger of Sprint and T-Mobile.