att/t-mobile and icann share economic consultants
August 30th, 2011 by kcThe last line of this FCC announcement is ominous enough:
On July 13, 2011, a workshop of economists was convened at the Federal Communications Commission to discuss certain economic issues of AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. The workshop was divided into two panels. The first, on Market Definition and Unilateral and Coordinated Effects, included the following panelists: representing the Applicants from Compass Lexecon, Dennis Carlton, Robert Willig, and Mark Israel. Representing Sprint from Charles River Associates were Steven Salop, Serge Moresi, and Craig Romaine.
Participating in the second panel, which discussed Efficiencies, the But-For World, and Exclusionary Effects/Raising Rivals’ Costs, were the following panelists: representing the Applicants from Compass Lexecon, Dennis Carlton, Robert Willig, and Mark Israel. Representing Sprint from Charles River Associates were Steven Salop, Stanley Besen, and John Woodbury.
When it is available, the transcript of the workshop will be provided for review by individuals with access to highly confidential and confidential information.
But equally eye-opening is the economic consulting firm AT&T is using — the same one ICANN used to “study” whether gTLD expansion would benefit consumers. Unlike this transcript, that study I was actually allowed to read, so I and many others learned how dishonest it was. It is not clear who will learn about “certain economic issues of AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile”…
It strangely reminds me of CCIED’s spam value chain study which revealed “the first strong evidence of payment bottlenecks in the spam value chain; 95% of spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks.” This shared-economist coincidence might be evidence of similar bottlenecks in economic policy development, due to too few neutral economists capable of generating sensible policy recommendations. Like most “independent” pharmaceutical researchers, most economists seem to be on the receiving end of funding from organizations who stand to gain financially from their research generating a certain result.