Bottom-up

Way back in November I wrote about the connection between Apple’s beautiful user interfaces and its top-down corporate culture. At the end of that post, I promised to do a follow-up post focusing on Google’s corporate culture. That post has now been written, but because getting paid is better than not getting paid, I’ve done it as an Ars Technica story:

On Monday, Apple unveiled iCloud, a new service for remote storage of user data. Some people, including our own Jon Stokes, are skeptical of Apple’s chances of getting iCloud to work at scale. And history seems to be on their side. iCloud is at least Apple’s fourth attempt to create a viable cloud computing service. The previous incarnations included iTools in 2000, .Mac in 2002, and MobileMe in 2008. As Fortune wrote about MobileMe a few weeks ago, “MobileMe was a dud. Users complained about lost e-mails, and syncing was spotty at best.” iTools and .Mac were not exactly resounding successes either.

Apple’s perennial difficulty with creating scalable online services is not a coincidence. Apple has a corporate culture that emphasizes centralized, developer-led product development. This process has produced user-friendly devices that are the envy of the tech world. But developing fast, reliable online services requires a more decentralized, engineering-driven corporate culture like that found at Google.

Read the rest here. I plan to write about this more but I won’t make any spurious promises about exactly when the follow-up post will be written.

For the last 13 years, I’ve been using .edu email addresses. I like running a desktop email client, and although GMail now offers IMAP service, I’ve been trying to minimize my Google exposure. Universities seemed like an innocuous party with whom to trust my private communications.

Now that I’m likely done being a student, I’m thinking more seriously about what my grown-up email setup should look like. In particular, as I’ve written more about privacy law, I’ve become more acutely aware of the poor privacy protections American law affords to email. This is a particular concern given that I’m now working as a reporter. I try to avoid doing stories where revealing my sources could cause serious harms, but I think I still have an obligation to take reasonable precautions to secure my email.

So I have a question for readers: who do you rely on for email service? I know enough about mail server administration to know I shouldn’t try to run a mail server myself. And I’d rather not entrust my email to Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. I’d be willing to pay $10-20/month for an email service that credibly promises high levels of reliability and confidentiality (though I’m not sure how I’d verify that the confidentiality promises were credible).

I’m also open to arguments that I’m being silly and should just join the GMail parade with the rest of the tech-savvy world.

I was fortunate to have three of today’s smartest libertarian tech policy scholars respond to Thursday’s post about spectrum policy. I was particularly interested in Adam Thierer’s thoughtful response:

In this case, the net result of your advocacy for a Lockean Proviso for spectrum would be a newly empowered bureaucratic regulatory regime imposing a top-down, command-and-control vision on wireless markets. Somehow I don’t think that is consistent with the traditional “bottom-up” thinking at work on this blog!

Preemptive, “Mother-May-I?” regulation isn’t the way to go. For better or worse, antitrust law will probably be with us forever, and if things go disastrously wrong in this market, presumably antitrust officials will intervene. But isn’t it better to let the experiments continue and see what the natural evolution of the marketplace brings us? The burden of proof is on you to show why 5 unelected bureaucrats should micro-manage markets and resources.

What I find interesting about this passage is the tension between the first and second paragraphs. Adam says that “if things go disastrously wrong in this market, presumably antitrust officials will intervene.” This appears to be a grudging admission that if the wireless market gets too concentrated, then the government ought to use its powers under antitrust law to prevent or reverse consolidation.

But why should the government wait until we get all the way to “disastrously wrong” before doing anything? Once you’ve conceded the point that excessive concentration is bad for consumers, and that antitrust law is an appropriate remedy for this harm, it’s not clear what the rationale is for only acting after disaster has struck. Breaking up a merged company or preventing harms via conduct remedies are much more laborious, top-down processes than blocking a merger before it happens.

This has long been a tension in the libertarian approach to antitrust law. Some libertarians, such as Ayn Rand here (around 9:00) argue that monopolies never arise in a free market. Adam himself contributed to this body of thought with this paper arguing that the Bell monopoly was the product of government regulations rather than free markets. I think this argument appeals to many libertarians because if the claim is true, then we don’t need to wrestle with the hard question of what to do when monopolies arise.

But the more I think about this line of reasoning, the more it seems like a non-sequitur. We don’t live in an ideal free market, and monopolies clearly do happen in the actual economy we’ve got. Maybe libertarians are right and they’re the product of government interference in the free market. Maybe we’re wrong and some monopolies would occur even in a perfect free market. But I don’t think this matters if the question is what to do when a market becomes highly concentrated.

Like most libertarians, I suspect that a more liberal spectrum regime would produce more competition in the wireless industry rendering spectrum caps irrelevant. But if anything, this seems to me like an argument for, not against, blocking mergers that would take us farther from the outcome a true free market would produce. The federal government has a responsibility to clean up its own messes, as it did with the Ma Bell breakup in 1984, and it will hopefully do by blocking the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.

I’ve been following the ongoing debate over the AT&T/T-Mobile merger with interest. As regular readers have probably guessed, I have a lot of sympathy for the arguments of merger opponents. Going from four national wireless carriers would represent a significant loss of consumer choice, and I think it would also make the wireless industry less hospitable to innovation. T-Mobile’s relatively open policies serve as an escape hatch for both consumers and handset vendors whose needs are not being met by the larger carriers.

But against these concerns, some of my fellow libertarians offer a compelling counterargument: let the free market work. It’s hard to predict how the mobile market will evolve, but there are strong economic and moral reasons to think that the unfettered free market will produce better outcomes than government meddling in the private sector.

As a libertarian, this is an argument I take very seriously, but I think it’s misguided here. To understand what’s wrong with it, we need to go all the way back to one of the founders of classical liberal thought, John Locke. In Chapter 5 of his Second Treatise of Government, Locke articulated a moral theory of property rights that continues to be influential to this day:

Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick dubbed this last caveat the Lockean Proviso. Taken literally, the proviso doesn’t make much sense. Surely, American property claims didn’t all become illegitimate the day the frontier closed and there was no longer land “left in common for others” to homestead.

Still, I think the proviso captures an important moral intuition. The legitimacy of a property rights system depends on it being open to everyone. True, we’ll never have a society in which everyone is a landholder. But our system of land ownership gives everyone the opportunity to purchase land at market rates. And the diversity of land titles means that those who don’t own themselves have many landlords from which to choose.

And this is an important safeguard for liberty. In a society with highly concentrated land ownership, people with unusual or unpopular housing needs—interracial couples in the 1950s, gay couples in the 1980s, people who want to throw loud parties or own unusual pets—might have trouble finding housing that allowed them to live in the way they chose. But in a world with thousands of landlords, almost everyone can find somebody willing to rent to them, no matter how unusual their demands might be. The diversity of landholdings doesn’t just hold rents down, it has direct implications for individual liberty.

Land ownership has been so decentralized for so long that we aren’t in the habit of thinking of it as an issue of liberty. But it is. A real estate market in which three landlords owned all the land would be less free than a real estate market with 3000 landlords. And the same is true of most other natural resources. The liquidity of commodity markets protect our rights to do as we please with oil, gold, copper, and other natural resources we purchase. My gas station doesn’t try to dictate what brand of car I drive because it knows there are lots of other places I can buy gasoline.

Spectrum is different. If I want to use the electromagnetic spectrum in a novel way, at power levels above those allowed by the unlicensed bands, I need to buy (or more likely rent) spectrum from someone. And in the contemporary American market, there are only a handful of firms to choose from. These firms are vertically integrated and place tight restrictions on what kinds of signals can be transmitted.

In other words, there is not “enough, and as good” spectrum “left in common for others” to use for their own purposes. A handful of parties have claimed for themselves all the available spectrum and tightly constrain how it’s used.

It’s not obvious what should be done about this. Maybe the distinctive characteristics of spectrum make it impossible to allocate in a way that’s consistent with the Lockean Proviso. There are economies of scale in mobile service, and so I don’t expect we’ll ever have dozens—to say nothing of thousands—of wireless carriers.

But one thing the government can do is make sure the problem doesn’t get worse. As I mentioned in my last post, the Clinton FCC used to prohibit any single company from holding too large a share of the spectrum available for use by mobile phone companies. The Bush administration dropped this rule, and the Obama FCC has not resurrected it. I think they should.

The debate over the merger has largely focused on whether prices in the post-merger world will be higher than they are now. That’s a relevant question, but I don’t think it’s the most important one. The real dangers of the merger is to the liberty that the Lockean Proviso is designed to protect. The merger will harm consumers who are no longer free to use wireless spectrum in ways allowed by T-Mobile but not AT&T. And it will harm future innovators who are unable to find a spectrum owner willing to allow their innovations on its network.

For the last three years I’ve been a computer science grad student at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. I received a master’s degree late last year, and was working toward my PhD. CITP is full of talented people doing important work. I’ve learned a lot and became close friends with many of my colleagues. It’s been a particular privilege to study under my brilliant advisor, Ed Felten.

The function of a computer science PhD program is to prepare you for a career doing academic computer science research. I went to grad school expecting to excel at this, but in recent months it has become clear to me that my talents are better suited to writing about public policy. So I’ve asked Princeton for a one-year leave of absence. I’ll have an option to return to school in 2012, but I don’t expect to exercise it.

For you, my readers, this means you’ll be hearing from me more often. I’ve committed to spend the majority of my time writing for Ars Technica, the best technology news site on the web. I’ll link to some of those articles here, and I’m also hoping to do more original writing here at Bottom-up.

For the editors in the audience: my relationship with Ars leaves me some time to work on other projects. So if you’d like to pay me to write for you, please get in touch.

May has been a busy month, and as a result, I’ve neglected you, my readers. Here are a few links to stuff I’ve posted elsewhere on the web.

Over at Freedom to TInker, I report on some research I’ve done into redaction failures in federal court documents. I’ve written software that automatically detects cases like this one in which someone tries to redact a PDF document, but the information is still “under” the rectangle. I examined 1.8 million documents and found about 2000 had redaction rectangles. In 194 of those documents the rectangles actually still had data under them. I urge the courts to make this kind of scan an automatic part of the document submission process

I’ve also been doing some reporting for Ars Technica about an organization called Medical Justice. On Monday, I did an in-depth story about a Medical Justice program to use copyright law to censor patient reviews. Since that story came out there have been two additional allegations of wrongdoing by Medical Justice or their clients. Follow-up stories are coming soon.

I’ll have a big personal announcement next week, and regular blogging should resume soon. Stay tuned!

Responding to the growing trend of Fox News personalities (Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, etc) forming PACs and promoting them on the air, Stephen Colbert recently announced plans to create a PAC of his own. But then he got a letter from a Viacom lawyer (which he of course read on the air) informing Colbert that his promotion of the PAC on-air could constitute an “in-kind donation” by Viacom to the (not yet created) PAC, and that Viacom could therefore be guilty of violating federal law if Colbert actually created it. So on Friday, he made a media stunt out of traveling to the FEC to ask for a “media exemption,” which allows members of the news media to ignore campaign finance laws that apply to everyone else:

Colbert’s shtick is to play a buffoonish right-wing pundit who spouts ridiculous arguments that the audience is supposed to root against. So I think the idea is that we’re supposed to think it’s ridiculous that Stephen Colbert would use his position as a media personality to raise money for a PAC that would then attempt to influence elections. But there’s some serious cognitive dissonance going on here. Colbert’s parody beautifully, if inadvertently, illustrates what’s wrong with the liberal critique of the Citizens United decision.

In progressive mythology, Citizens United is a case about whether large corporations like BP, Verizon, and Pfizer can use their vast resources to buy ads that drown out the voices of other participants in the political debate and sway elections toward candidates they favor. This is a real problem, and I think Senators McCain and Feingold sincerely believed the legislation that bears their names would help solve it.

But “corporations” include many entities beyond the Fortune 500. The ACLU, Sierra Club, and Human Rights Watch are all corporations. “Free speech for corporations” might sound insidious if the corporation in question is Exxon Mobil. But it’s harder to get worked up about the corrupting influence of “corporate speech” when we’re talking about the ACLU running television ads criticizing a candidate for supporting the Patriot Act.

Under the First Amendment, citizens are entitled to buy ads criticizing a political candidate, especially in the last 30 days of an election. And a group of citizens who lack the resources to buy ads individually are entitled to use the corporate form to pool their resources and buy those ads collectively. That’s what Citizens United (the non-profit conservative organization) was doing when it bought ads promoting an anti-Hillary Clinton movie during the 2008 primaries. And in Citizens United (the Supreme Court decision) the high court affirmed their right to do so.

Which gets to the weirdness of Colbert’s parody. Stephen Colbert is trying (or at least pretending) to create a vehicle for his fans to pool their money so that Colbert can create ads “promoting” (mocking) conservative candidates. The ads are guaranteed to be funny, and they could also influence 2012 political races. I think that’s a brilliant idea, and I’m glad that the Supreme Court has affirmed Colbert’s (and his fans’) right to engage in this type of political speech. Colbert, in contrast, seems to be mocking his own free of speech rights. By asking us to root against Colbert-the-character’s quest for a PAC, Colbert-the-comedian seems to be implying that it’s ridiculous that the law would allow him to create such a PAC. But it isn’t ridiculous. Colbert should be free to create the PAC, people should be free to give to it, and Colbert should be free to tell people about the PAC on his show.

I think Colbert’s response would be that although Colbert’s PAC will mostly get donations from his fans, the “bad” PACs he is parodying take much larger (and more corrupting) donations from large, for-profit corporations. But this isn’t how free speech jurisprudence works. For censorship to pass constitutional muster, it needs to be narrowly tailored to a compelling governmental interest. Maybe the First Amendment allows Congress to regulate certain kinds of corporate speech, but if so it still requires Congress to do it without censoring other, constitutionally protected speech. And it’s hard to see a plausible rationale for regulating the political speech of the ACLU, the Sierra Club, or (yes) the Colbert Super PAC.

And as much as liberals might not like it, the same point applies to Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. They’re not my favorite politicians, and I doubt I’ll like how they spend peoples’ donations. But the fact is that millions of American voters share Palin and Huckabee’s politics. They’re entitled to have their views represented in the political arena, and giving to a PAC run by Palin or Huckabee seems like a reasonable way to do it. There’s nothing alarming or corrupt about them using the soapbox Fox News provides them to inform their viewers about this opportunity to participate in the political process.

Laws that restrict this kind of grassroots political activity—or the use of corporate-owned television networks to promote it—are inconsistent with the First Amendment. If Congress wants to address political corruption problems, it has an obligation to do it without burdening the political speech of people like Stephen Colbert. Colbert doesn’t seem to understand this point, but his antics are proving it anyway.

It’s hard to know how to react when someone you’re criticizing insists you don’t actually disagree. Tyler Cowen is a smart guy, so I’m going to take it as a compliment. And it’s true that very little in Chapter 3 of The Great Stagnation directly contradicts anything I say in my last post. Still, there’s a big difference in emphasis between his chapter and my post, and I think readers of The Great Stagnation are likely to get a misleading impression of how the software industry is affecting the “real economy.”

Cowen draws a distinction between “the Internet”—which he portrays as a kind of playground for white-collar workers—and “the revenue-generating sectors of the economy.” The impression that the software industry is largely producing new forms of leisure is important because a lot of people are concerned with their material standard of living defined in a relatively narrow way. Reading The Great Stagnation, one gets the impression that someone making $50,000 in 2010 lived about as well as someone making $50,000 in 1990 (in real dollars as computed by the BLS) except that the guy in 2010 had more fun when he turned on his PC.

The point of my last post was that the 2010 guy’s $50,000 goes farther because there’s a long list of products that he would have paid money for in 1990 that had free, or dramatically cheaper, digital substitutes in 2010. The money the 1990 guy would have spent on newspaper and magazine subscriptions, books and CDs, travel agents and maps, cameras and film development, and the rest is disposable income that the 2010 guy can spend on other “real economy” goods and services like restaurant meals, housing, travel, etc. Which is to say that the 2010 guy is wealthier, even if we only care about goods and services that were in the “revenue-generating sector of the economy” in 1990.

In Cowen’s account, the difficulty of measuring the wealth produced by Twitter and Facebook helps explain why those companies haven’t measurably increased GDP, but we still have to explain why the rest of the economy hasn’t been growing very fast. My point is that software might actually be reducing measured GDP by driving certain industries out of business. If that’s true, then it’s possible that the rest of the economy actually is growing at a healthy clip, but that this fact is being masked by the rapid implosion of a few unlucky industries.

Cowen’s focus on Facebook and Twitter also gives a misleading impression about opportunities for future software-driven growth. The low-hanging fruit of our generation is not just “the Internet,” but software powered by Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law made the modern Internet possible, but it also gave birth to the personal computer, various consumer electronics devices like iPods and smart phones, electronic financial networks, medical breakthroughs (e.g. medical imaging, computational genomics), and a vast array of embedded systems (computerized fuel injection in cars, airplanes with auto-pilot, industrial robots).

Looking at this list, it’s obvious that software innovation is not necessarily (in Cowen’s words) “interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor.” The output of a CAT scan is “interior to the human mind” in the trivial sense that it’s displayed on a computer screen, but the ultimate result—spotting a tumor, say, is clearly a “real world” result. I think people have a skewed intuition about this because the PC is the computing device with which they have the most direct contact. But as computers get cheaper and more powerful, they’re going to get embedded in an ever-growing list of devices, and the distinction between “Internet innovation” and “real-world innovation” will make less and less sense.

Self-driving cars are a good example of where things are heading. They will probably put millions of truck drivers out of work, lowering the cost of almost every consumer product. They’ll make taxicabs drastically more affordable, putting taxi drivers out of work and virtually eliminating demand for off-street parking. They’re likely to have significant environmental benefits, as consumers can order only as much car as they need for any given trip. They are likely to save thousands of lives by reducing accidents. They’re likely to transform the retail sector—how often would you drive to store if a self-driving Amazon-bot delivered your orders in an hour rather than 2 days? And of course they’ll have many other consequences we can’t anticipate.

The wealth created by self-driving technology will not be “in our minds and in our laptops” the way Facebook and Twitter are. By using these sites as exemplars of software innovation, Cowen dramatically undersells software’s potential for creating wealth in the “real economy” and producing our generation’s “low-hanging fruit.”

I recently had the pleasure of reading The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen’s excellent “Kindle Single” about the future of innovation and economic growth. Cowen makes the case that, contrary to the right-of-center conventional wisdom, the American economy is in the midst of a decades-long period of mediocre economic growth. Previous generations of Americans enjoyed an abundance of “low-hanging fruit”—cheap land, technological breakthroughs like electricity and the internal combustion engine, rising levels of education, an end to racial and gender discrimination—that allowed rapidly increasing living standards with relatively little effort. But now, he says, the orchard is getting bare. Since the 1970s, big innovations have been few and far between, and this explains the comparatively slow rate of GDP growth in recent decades.

The obvious response is to point to Silicon Valley, where there’s clearly a lot of innovation going on. Cowen anticipates this objection in his third chapter and argues that the IT revolution is overrated as a source of economic growth. Drawing on a previous book, he argues that the Internet is great for “those who are intellectually curious, those who wish to manage large networks of loose acquaintances, and those who wish to absorb lots of information at phenomenally fast rates.” But, he claims, there’s less there than meets the eye. Most people don’t spend enough time on the web for it to significantly improve their standard of living. And in any event, blogs, Facebook and Twitter don’t create jobs or produce revenue for the government, which means that we can’t count on them to drag us out of our current fiscal predicament.

By focusing on “the Internet”—and specifically Facebook and Twitter—Cowen trivializes an industry whose economic effects extend far beyond a few overhyped websites. And Cowen fails to appreciate that information technology innovations have a different economic character than the innovations that drove economic growth in the 20th century. It’s true that software innovations often make a relatively small contribution to measured GDP. But this this is less a reflection of a “great stagnation” than a sign that official economic indicators are a bad way to measure our generation’s low-hanging fruit.

To understand what makes software-powered innovation distinctive, it helps to contrast it with the industrial-age innovations that proceeded it. For most of the 20th century, innovation was embodied in physical products like cars, televisions, washing machines, and airplanes. This style of innovation is relatively easy for government statisticians to deal with. If an economist at the BLS circa 1961 wanted to know how much the television industry was contributing to GDP, he simply added up the prices of all televisions sold to consumers.

Of course, economists aren’t only interested in measuring national output at a single point of time; they want to measure how the standard of living changes from year to year. If total spending on televisions falls, statisticians need to figure out whether this is because consumers are buying fewer televisions or because televisions are getting more affordable. The distinction is crucial because the former represents a decline in national output, while the latter amounts to an improvement in the standard of living. And of course, economists have to be careful about making apples-to-apples comparisons. For example, the switch from black-and-white to color pushed up average television prices, but it would have been a big mistake to record this as a sign of televisions in general getting more expensive.

There are many important subtleties to measuring changes in economic output, and official statistics have tended to overstate inflation (and hence understate growth rates) to some extent. But the important innovations of the industrial era had some common features that made such problems manageable. They came embodied in discrete physical objects with a fixed feature set. And the value of new innovations was roughly reflected by the prices consumers were willing to pay for them. If consumers were paying twice as much for a 60-inch television as a 40-inch one, it’s reasonable to infer that the former is twice as valuable.

Now imagine an alternate universe in which industrial products did not work this way. Suppose we lived in the world of Harry Potter, and one day in the late 1950s RCA hired a wizard to wave his magic wand and transform all of the world’s black and white sets into color sets. This would clearly represent a large increase in the standard of living—a larger increase, in fact, than the non-magical process whereby people have to buy new, more expensive, televisions. Yet the government in the alternate universe would almost certainly have recorded a smaller increase in GDP. Our own BLS would see consumers buying more expensive televisions while in the Harry Potter universe consumers would be happy with the old, cheap ones. Hence, consumers circa 1970 would be wealthier in that universe than in ours, but official GDP statistics would show just the opposite.

Today these magic wands exist. For example, a couple of years ago, Google waved a magic wand that transformed millions of Android phones into sophisticated navigation devices with turn-by-turn directions. This was functionality that people had previously paid hundreds of dollars for in stand-alone devices. Now it’s just another feature that comes with every Android phone, and the cost of Android phones hasn’t gone up. I haven’t checked, but I bet that this wealth creation was not reflected in GDP statistics. And it’s actually worse than that: as people stop buying stand-alone GPS devices, Google’s innovation will actually show up in the statistics as a reduction in GDP.

Cowen writes that the Internet is producing wealth that “is in our minds and in our laptops and not so much in the revenue-generating sector of the economy.” This isn’t exactly wrong, but it fails to appreciate the extent to which the software industry is entangled with the “revenue-generating sector of the economy.” The digital revolution isn’t just introducing novel ways to amuse ourselves, it’s rapidly displacing a wide variety of “revenue-generating” products and services: typewriters, newspapers, magazines, books, maps, cameras, film development, camcorders, yellow pages, music players, VCRs and DVD players, encyclopedias, landline telephones, television and radio broadcasts, calendars, address books, clocks and watches, calculators, travel agents, travelers checks, and so forth.

Paul Graham and Reihan Salam have been popularizing the term “ephemeralization”, originally coined by Buckminster Fuller, to describe this process whereby special-purpose products are replaced by software running on general-purpose computing devices. As the list above suggests, ephemeralization is affecting a growing fraction of the economy. And with technologies like self-driving cars on the horizon, its importance will only grow in the coming decades.

Ephemeralization offers an alternative explanation for the puzzling growth slowdown of the last decade. Every time the software industry displaces a special purpose device, our standard of living improves but measured GDP falls. If what you care about is government revenue, this point might not matter much—it’s hard to tax something if no one’s paying for it. But the real lesson here may not be that the American economy is stagnating, but rather that the government is bad at measuring improvements in our standard of living that come from the software industry.

Milton Meuller makes the case against the AT&T/T-Mobile merger:

Let’s begin at the beginning and ask why this merger is happening. It’s not as if AT&T is gaining dominance the way Google gained it in search and advertising, or the way Intel did in chips: i.e., through low prices, superior products and customer loyalty. No, last time I looked AT&T was the carrier with the lowest customer satisfaction ratings, some of the highest prices and one of the weakest network performance metrics. In my opinion there is no reason for this merger to take place other than to make life easier for AT&T by reducing competitive pressures on it. AT&T seems to be driven by the following calculus. It can either grow its services and its network under the harsh constraints of market pricing and competition, or it can attempt to reduce the field to an oligopoly with tacit price controls by using its size and financial bulk to eliminate a pest who keeps downward pressure on pricing and service requirements. I think it is rational for AT&T to try to get away with the latter. I think it’s insane for free market oriented thinkers to support it.

I’m still mulling over the merger, but I have a lot of sympathy for Mueller’s argument.