I'm surprised at the knee-jerk alarm about this merger. Do you people really think that this is going to lead to monopoly?

Hardly. For one thing, there are still a ton of telecom providers out there... it'll be Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth, Qwest, and two dozen smaller regional carriers. All these mergers have accomplished is the undoing of the ill-considered 1986 telecom act, which said you couldn't do both long-distance and local telephony. Now the big guys do both.

But more importantly, there's more competition than ever before in the industry because of emerging technologies and the net. Voice over IP providers --including pure-play guys like Vonage, as well as all the cable companies-- are starting to compete with the phone companies. So AT&T and Verizon are going to have to stay competitively priced in order to keep from losing customers to those services.

And have you ever heard of cell phones? The wireline carriers can't crank up costs, because they're already losing people to their mobiles.

Not that it matters, but I'm a liberal and usually object to any conglomeration of corporate power. But it's silly to instantly panic at any sort of merger and assume it's a nightmare.

All these companies are doing is trying to stay alive in the face of killer new technology. The only people screwed here are the carriers themselves.