The pending merger of AT&T and Time Warner has attracted a significant amount of attention, for precisely the wrong reasons. Politics have apparently intruded on a transaction that until recently was considered relatively uncontroversial.

Combining AT&T, which distributes digital content over its wireless networks, with a news and entertainment provider like Time Warner is what economists and antitrust experts consider a classic vertical merger. Because the companies don’t compete, their combining would not alter the competitive landscape in either the telecommunications or entertainment industries.

For more than 40 years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, the courts have not blocked a vertical integration like this one.

Typically more problematic for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division are horizontal mergers, where two competitors in the same industry seek to combine. But this past summer the Trump administration waved through the horizontal merger of the giant retailer Amazon, already active in food sales, with a leading upscale grocer, Whole Foods. To now block a vertical integration of AT&T and Time Warner would indicate an inexcusably scattershot approach to antitrust decisions that would create enormous uncertainties for the broader business community and shake public confidence in the rule of law that underpins our democracy.