Everyone has an opinion about AT&T's $39 billion buyout of T-Mobile. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps calls it "a huge transaction. It’s a paradigm-altering transaction, as far as the world of wireless goes." A pair of Stanford economists suggest that the "anticompetitive effects appear to be plausible." And small wireless operator MetroPCS thinks the deal will be good for its business—but only because AT&T could take T-Mobile's cheap voice and data plans off the table.

The FCC and the Department of Justice will both vet the deal over the next year, and Copps made it clear that it's going to be a hard sell for him.

In an interview to air this Sunday on C-Span (and excerpted in Politico), Copps pointed to the recently approved Comcast/NBC Universal megamerger as the sort of market concentration he opposes—and he believes AT&T's T-Mobile buyout could be even worse.

"You will remember in the Comcast merger, I said at the outset it would have been a very steep climb for me," he said. "I ended up voting against it. This is maybe an even steeper climb from the standpoint of a lot of power and a lot of influence given to one company in a world where two companies are going to control, like, 80 percent of the spectrum. I would hope that my colleagues, in looking at this transaction in the months ahead, will be asking themselves some pretty serious questions about what residue of competition will be left if this merger is approved."

A pair of economists from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Roger Noll and Gregory Rosston, provide a helpful overview of the competition issues (PDF) sure to surround the deal. What "residue of competition" will remain? According to Noll and Rosston, "Superficially, the proposed acquisition appears to run seriously afoul of the merger policy of the antitrust enforcement agencies."

They note that market concentration in wireless, as commonly measured by something called the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index (HHI), already sits at the threshold where regulators pay close attention to consolidation. If the AT&T buyout goes through, the HHI will increase significantly, and "these numbers probably understate the effective concentration in the industry" because data is less competitive than voice service and because many small operators are really just reselling another service (often Sprint's).

Though "the justifications for the acquisition do not seem particularly strong," Noll and Rosston believe the deal could still be approved.

That's fine with MetroPCS, a smaller operator who would move into the number four spot nationally if T-Mobile disappears. In an interview with Connected Planet, the company's CEO talked about the great opportunities the deal could bring to his company, largely because MetroPCS caters to the same "value" customers T-Mobile served.

Whether companies like MetroPCS can really compete with the remaining three major players remains to be seen. With a minute 2.6 percent share of the US market, the company is substantially smaller than T-Mobile, which was already the smallest of the big national carriers.

As for a larger competitor like Sprint, its stance is clear: it wants the deal blocked. It won't have to do much to convince Commissioner Copps.