from the flimsy-cover-for-bad-choices dept
I generally try not to engage in “I told you so,” but I told you so. The Trump administration’s long-percolating plan to use Dish Network as flimsy cover for harmful wireless consolidation is dead, just as I predicted five years earlier. Dish will lumber forward as another lazy MVNO for a while longer, but the Trump administration’s promise of a serious fourth competitor in wireless is effectively over:
“With Dish Network owner EchoStar selling $23 billion in valuable spectrum to AT&T, any pretense that the TV provider will become a serious wireless competitor is dead. But the project was always doomed to fail, and despite plenty of assurances by the Trump administration and other companies involved, the very obvious writing was always on the wall..”
Back in 2019, the Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb plan to try and hide the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they’d pretend they were helping satellite TV company Dish Network create a new 5G wireless network out of vibes and twine. As I noted back in 2019, the entire gambit was doomed to failure for a long list of reasons.
Dish never had any real experience building wireless networks. The Trump administration had no real interest in overseeing companies or fostering competition (its “antitrust enforcer” at the time used his personal phone to help the companies dodge regulatory scrutiny). AT&T and Verizon wanted the spectrum Dish was hoarding, and nobody in wireless really wanted to have to seriously compete on price.
Fast forward to 2025 and Dish’s wireless ambitions have died, right on schedule. The Dish 5G network was already an embarrassing joke, with limited phone selection and footprint. But the project effectively ended last week with the news that Dish would be forced to sell $23 billion in valuable spectrum licenses to AT&T, after facing a bogus “investigation” by the Trump FCC (I wrote about the news over at The Verge).
It’s important to remember that the first Trump administration’s rubber stamping of the Sprint T-Mobile merger immediately resulted in more than 9,000 layoffs and less U.S. wireless price competition, precisely as most (objective) folks predicted.
That Dish would create a fourth wireless competitor to fix the damage caused by this deal’s approval was a long con born during the first Trump admin and now finalized by the second.
As part of its 2019 agreement, Dish agreed to adhere to certain wireless build out requirements monitored by the FCC. But it became very clear over the last few years that not only was Dish going to miss some of its targets, it was starting to run into financial problems and miss debt payments. So last year, hoping to maintain any hope of a 4th wireless carrier, the Biden FCC granted an extension.
But less than a year later, FCC boss Brendan Carr opened an investigation into Dish and its parent company Echostar to “ensure that the companies we regulate comply with the terms of
their federal spectrum licenses.” The move annoyed folks all across the political spectrum, from left wing consumer activists to right wing “free market” Libertarians, albeit for very different reasons.
Consumer groups tended to think (correctly, I believe) that Carr was abusing government power to redirect valuable spectrum to Trump allies like AT&T or Elon Musk (a recent lawsuit accuses Carr’s FCC of as much). More Libertarian-leaning folks were aghast that radical authoritarian zealots would bully a private company and force them to give up valuable property less than a year after striking an arrangement with the same agency.
But this was always how this was supposed to work.
Trump officials got media and policy cover for clearly harmful consolidation. Dish figured the worst-case scenario is that it would offload a half-built network and valuable spectrum after spending five years stringing regulators along and letting the spectrum value appreciate (it has some additional $30 billion in spectrum that analysts suspect will likely be sold off to other companies, likely including Elon Musk’s Starlink). Entrenched telecom giants wanted more valuable spectrum for themselves.
In the interim U.S. wireless competition took a major hit, resulting in some of the highest prices for wireless data in the developed world. Dish CEO Charlie Ergen walks off into the sunset with a giant bundle of cash. AT&T’s market power gets stronger. Consumers and healthy markets lose, a relatively small handful of rich assholes win. Same as it ever was, and not that hard to predict.
Filed Under: ajit pai, brendan carr, competition, consolidation, fcc, mergers, trump, wireless
Companies: dish network, echostar, sprint, t-mobil
