For customers’ mobile costs to come down, we need more telecoms providers, not fewer. It’s time to break up the big four
- Nicholas Shaxson is a cofounder of the Balanced Economy Project, an anti-monopoly organisation
Hold on to your wallets. Vodafone and Three, two of the UK’s biggest mobile telecoms firms, want to merge – and they are making some odd claims in their PR blitz about why they should be allowed to. Make no mistake, this is a classic monopolisation play that will have classic results – higher prices, stagnant investment, poor service and job cuts – while shareholders and bosses make off like bandits.
Vodafone’s group chief executive, Margherita Della Valle, is telling an Alice-in-Wonderland story about this merger: it would, she claims, be “great for customers, great for the country and great for competition”. It’s hard to follow her logic: the merger will “create a third operator with scale” to take on the biggest firms, EE and O2, and will have wider coverage. But it is still a reduction from four to three.
Nicholas Shaxson is a cofounder of the Balanced Economy Project, an anti-monopoly organisation
