On Tuesday AT&T withdrew its application to buy T-Mobile USA’s mobile licenses. It is speculated that the corporation made this move in order to avoid the publication of an internal staff report. The FCC released the document anyway, much to AT&T’s chagrin, in the belief that the merger is against the public interest.

We at LLM decided to take a look at what this withdrawal means for the future of the mobile behemoth as well as the February trial. The U.S. Department of Justice is questioning whether the proposed acquisition is even still active.

On November 22 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that the $39 billion acquisition would be contrary to public interest.  The merger, according to FCC, would result in the single largest merger in U.S. cell phone market history, nearly monopolizing the industry.  AT&T disagrees.  The company has made a statement that they are disappointed in the decision FCC made stating that the proposed merger would have created billions in new investments and jobs for the U.S. economy.

However, the internal document published by the FCC admits that jobs would be lost with this merger. In fact, FCC officials say that the suggested 96,000 resulted new jobs would actually lead to several big layoffs in order to combine duplicated positions.  Nevertheless, AT&T still states that it will not retreat on the T-Mobile acquisition.

The antitrust case trial is scheduled to start for February 13.