Less Government President and StopNetRegulation.org Editor in Chief Seton Motley hails Verizon for standing with their competitor AT&T against a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seemingly bent on again abusing its merger approval authority to bypass Congress and create new regulations out of whole cloth.

Verizon Executive Vice President for Public Affairs, Policy and Communications Tom Tauke yesterday expressed concern that the FCC will use AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile as a pretext for creating new rules.

Less Government and StopNetRegulation.org have long decried the authoritarian and punitive manner in which the FCC has oft times conducted its merger approval process.

Less Government President and StopNetRegulation.org Editor in Chief Seton Motley:

“The FCC strung out the Comcast-NBC merger for nearly eighteen months, and strung it up like a piñata so as to allow Leftist grievance groups to beat illegal concessions like Net Neutrality out of it.

“A Net Neutrality concession which absurdly must stand even after the FCC’s Net Neutrality order is inevitably overturned by the courts – or Congress, which the FCC flouted and ignored with their passage of the order.

“Now it appears the FCC is teeing up the AT&T/T-Mobile merger for another abusive approval process – to again extort unlawful concessions out of captive parties.

“Mr. Tauke is absolutely right. The FCC should not again corrupt the merger process by conscripting illegitimate regulatory capitulations. Congress – not the FCC – should be the ones writing these rules.”