An overreach? Really? I'd say that you're not paying attention. And how do you come to that conclusion? By the fact that "very little" of the original AT&T is in the current monolith? Well, given the entire 'two-tiered' money-grab-tastic issues involved, I'd say you're a little out of touch. - ferg -- "Eric A. Hall" wrote: On 3/5/2006 7:10 PM, Steve Sobol wrote: > Eric A. Hall wrote: > >>What are people worried about here exactly? > > The same lack of competition in telecommunications that we had in the 1980s? Well that's an overreach. And if the primary concern is consolidation then we should have blocked NYNEX and Bell Atlantic from merging back in 1997, since this deal is basically SBC + BellSouth/Cingular, which is mostly indistinguishable from the earlier one. I think people are reacting to the brand, the AT&T ghost really, since there's none of it left. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/ -- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg@netzero.net or fergdawg@sbcglobal.net ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/