摘要：Mobile telecommunications businesses are undergoing an unprecedented period of mergers which may result in a national network for Personal Communications Services. All of these transactions require the approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is in the process of issuing thousands of local, regional, and nationwide licenses. The FCC grants the licenses under "the public interest" standard of the Communications Act of 1934, which requires an analysis of each proposed merger's effect on competition. The Author begins his description of the analytic framework used by the FCC by describing its variables. Part I describes the "product market," which must be defined and established for each party to a proposed merger. Generally, the boundaries of these markets are determined by the interchangeability of use and demand for the product and its substitutes. The Author provides four general rules for defining product markets and provides a description of cases in which these rules were employed. The Author then provides an alternative, more precise method of defining a product market which is found in merger guidelines published by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. The Author concludes this section by applying the classic rules and the alternative definitions to determine a product market in a hypothetical mobile services merger. Part II deals with the "geographic market," the area of effective competition. The Author begins by providing the definition of geographic market found in case law. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission also publish recommended guidelines containing a more precise definition of a geographic market. Both the case law definition and the federal guidelines definition are then applied to a hypothetical mobile services merger to determine the resulting geographic market. The Author concludes this discussion of the analytic framework by discussing the differences in horizontal, vertical, and conglomerate mergers. A horizontal merger is between companies performing similar functions; a vertical merger is the acquisition of one company which buys the product sold by the acquiring company or which sells the product bought by the acquiring company; and a conglomerate merger is one that falls under neither of these headings. Once the Author details all of the variables of the framework—the product market, the geographic market, and the classification as vertical, horizontal, or conglomerate—he describes the actual analytic framework used in a typical horizontal merger. This framework has two parts: determining the degree of "concentration," the amount of
关键词：Mergers; Mobile Telecommunications Services; Horizontal Mergers; Vertical Mergers; Conglomerate Mergers; Federal Communications Commission; FCC; Herfindahl- Hirschman Index; HHI; Competition
