"I've often been critical of the FCC's handling of merger applications in the past, especially when the Commission has imposed extraneous conditions that are outside of the bounds of its proper inquiry and when it unduly delays acting on the applications.

In this instance, the Commission deserves credit for not imposing conditions its approval of the merger, even though it was asked to imposed extraneous job protection provisions. And it deserves credit for acting in a somewhat timely fashion, at least by the Commission's standards. In this instance, there was certainly no reason for the Commission to second-guess the business judgment of T-Mobile and MetroPCS that, together, they would comprise a strong national wireless competitor and would be in a position to facilitate the deployment of next-generation mobile broadband facilities. In today's current dynamic mobile market, the Commission did the right thing in approving the merger application."

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Randolph J. May, President of the Free State Foundation, is a former FCC Associate General Counsel and a former Chairman of the American Bar Association's Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. Mr. May is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.

Mr. May is a nationally recognized expert in communications law, Internet law and policy, and administrative law and regulatory practice. He is the author of more than 150 scholarly articles and essays on communications law and policy, administrative law, and constitutional law. Most recently, Mr. May is the editor of the new book, "Communications Law and Policy in the Digital Age: The Next Five Years." He is the author of A Call for a Radical New Communications Policy: Proposals for Free Market Reform, and he is the editor of the book, New Directions in Communications Policy, and he is co-editor of other two books on communications law and policy: Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated? and Communications Deregulation and FCC Reform.