Word: worldcom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just last month, when Sprint's proposed merger with WorldCom was blocked by antitrust regulators, Sommer sent a marriage proposal to Sprint, where he already has a 10% stake. No dice. The plan was immediately attacked by a group of U.S. Senators who vowed to thwart any effort by DT, which is 58% owned by the German government and not exactly renowned for being customer friendly, from taking control of Sprint. Their position has angered the European Union, which calls it a violation of a 1997 global-trade deal and is threatening to retaliate...
BERNIE EBBERS WorldCom-Sprint deal looks dead. Who'd really want to be part of a mega-media merger anyway...
...Europeans really trying to keep America down? Monti's staff is telling him that a short list of U.S. Internet companies are poised to own Europe's Internet backbone, and WorldCom and Sprint are high on it. Would it help if WorldCom were a French outfit? Maybe. European business does think nationally first, and officials there may be underestimating U.S. companies' determination to compete with each other. But Monti has a record of being plenty tough on Eurodeals, too, and he has as many detractors among Europe's pols and CEOs as Klein does in Redmond (well, maybe not that...
Mario Monti doesn't necessarily hate America. The European Union's Competition Commissioner, the Joel Klein of the Continent, is Italian, after all, not French. But this week his commission moved to block the WorldCom-Sprint deal and launched an investigation into AOL-Time Warner (parent of this site), and in the past year it has started similar probes into deals by Boeing and Microsoft. Could Monti's evident distaste for American corporate marriages be less about antitrust law than geopolitics...
...Certainly, Europe's politicians and business leaders aren't complaining about Monti's moves against the high-tech mergers. To a continent still following America's lead on all things connected (except for cell phones), the threat of WorldCom or AOL owning too much of Europe's Internet plumbing is practically a matter of national security, or at least of national pride. It's worse than McDonald's, Coke and Nike all rolled into one, because even the Europeans know that high-tech telecom is the future of the world economy, and they're determined that globalization not mean - sacre...