Several reports say today that Sprint has abandoned its quixotic pursuit of T-Mobile because of regulatory concerns. That's business-speak for the fact that America is so fed up with these mega-mergers, and with workers and consumers getting nothing of value from them, that the government is actually reacting to our rage. But we can't stop. As soon as we do, we'll lose.

Good For Stock Price, Bad For Humans
The problem isn't in all capitalism, as the workers at Market Basket will tell you, defending their compassionately capitalistic ex-CEO against his enemies. The problem is an unchecked, rapacious capitalism that sees resource extraction as the highest goal, customers as marks, and shareholders as the only constituency.

Well, guess what? When your business relies on public infrastructure like wireless spectrum, shareholders don't get to be your only constituency. AT&T and Softbank both tried to spin their attempts to purchase T-Mobile into saying that less competition would mean more scale from better networks. That's true, it would. It would also mean higher prices and less innovation, just like rain follows clouds.

All of this has to be seen in the context of a slim class of investors and executives reaping huge profits while working Americans see none of the gains. Everybody has a cell phone; this merger affects everyone. We all see Sprint and T-Mobile competing vibrantly on every main street in America. It doesn't take an economist to understand what knocking one of them out would do.

We saw through those false promises of growth. The prophets of stock price uber alles demand massive human sacrifice to appease their yacht gods: this merger would likely have shut down Sprint's Kansas City headquarters and led to tens of thousands of job losses as duplicate retailers, customer service agents and repairers were declared redundant. That's known as "synergy."

Force Them To Compete

We've seen an amazing amount of competition and ferment in apps and Web services, but infrastructure businesses like ISPs and cellular carriers simply don't work that way. There's limited spectrum and, most especially, the barrier to entry is way too high. Since new competitors are unlikely to appear, the best way for investors to create value in that industry is to merge all the carriers into a single mass and charge sky-high prices for as little investment as possible. Only by making that impossible can we force them to compete.

I'll get to what Sprint needs to do now in another column, but the idea that a wireless carrier with more customers than the entire population of Poland is doomed, is ridiculous. Especially if it's run by a shark like Masayoshi Son. Just look at T-Mobile a few years ago: hopeless, right? Then John Legere and Neville Ray's inspired leadership turned it into a carrier people want to join. Mergers are the lazy way to grow. Let's see if Son's Softbank has the stomach for the real work.

We're Not Done Yet

We cannot let up now. Big money is in the halls of Congress every day. The FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, is a former cable lobbyist. As soon as we turn our backs, the big ISPs and telecom firms will start picking our pockets.

Time Warner and Comcast should be in our sights now. After new laws were written in 1996, a competition-friendly legal regime led to a flowering of third-party DSL ISPs, just like they have in Europe. Competition was vibrant. Then a series of court rulings locked competitors out of using incumbents' cable and DSL lines, and the slaughter came.

The big guys won again when they got more than a dozen states to pass laws limiting or forbidding municipal broadband networks - showing how much they really hate competition. Where municipal broadband exists, like in Chattanooga, Tennessee, innovation and business follow.

Comcast has shown in recent weeks that it sees consumers as idiot children, needing to be duped and guided. Well, the kids are fighting back, Comcast. We took down AT&T's Astroturfing campaign and Softbank's attempt to end a new competitive world. You're next.