Former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh endorsed a controversial...

I believe it is fully consistent with its longstanding approach to competition policy under Republican and Democratic administrations alike,” Thornburgh wrote. He was attorney general under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. “The DOJ filing properly draws upon decades of its antitrust policies and precedents in offering its comments,” he said (http://bit.ly/11fLSzO). “For the last 40 years, the Department has consistently supported public policies that promote competition and innovation in the telecommunications industry -- from the breakup of the Bell System in 1984 during the Reagan administration, to the allocation of new broadband PCS spectrum as competition to the old analog cellular duopoly during the George H.W. Bush administration, to challenges to proposed telecommunications mergers under the George W. Bush administration, to the Department’s exercise of its case-by-case merger review authority.” T-Mobile Vice President Kathleen Ham also defended the DOJ filing in a Tuesday blog post. “Importantly, DOJ did not argue that AT&T and Verizon be barred from the upcoming auction or that they be denied a chance to add to their low-band spectrum cache,” she said (http://bit.ly/17lFu2q). “T-Mobile, likewise, has made clear that its proposed spectrum aggregation rule would contain an exception allowing the dominant carriers to purchase 600 MHz licenses in every market even if their spectrum holdings are already in excess of the established cap in particular geographic areas.” That hasn’t stopped AT&T from going on the attack, Ham wrote. “AT&T nevertheless has begun an all-out campaign to quash any limits whatsoever on its self-perceived right to acquire any and all licenses so long as it has the money and power to do so, at the expense of competition and future innovation in the wireless industry,” she said. “At the same time, AT&T contends that the 600 MHz spectrum is really nothing special, and regulators have no need to worry about excessive concentration of the low-frequency licenses in its hands.”