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The FCC should ignore a Department of Justice filing (http://bit.ly/16S6zag), which suggested that the commission limit spectrum ownership in the interest of competition, the Phoenix Center said in a new paper. “While the DOJ’s ex parte is long on self-promotion about its purported expertise regarding the economics of mobile wireless markets, the DOJ’s pleading is remarkably short on substance,” said study co-author and Phoenix Center President Lawrence Spiwak. “The FCC should accord the DOJ’s pleading little probative weight.” DOJ’s “notion of ‘foreclosure value’ is not a sufficient justification for rigging the auction,” the paper said (http://bit.ly/10J4zBb). “The efficiency of an auction’s outcome should instead be based on relative ‘use value,’ and there are good reasons to suspect the use value of larger carriers exceeds that of smaller carriers. Economic theory therefore suggests the presumption should be in favor of non-interference.” DOJ’s filing is also “inconsistent with its own depiction of the mobile wireless market, where firms ... face spectrum exhaust, and realize a type of economies of scale in the use of spectrum,” the paper said. “Published research shows that under such conditions, spectrum exhaust turns the standard antitrust analysis on its head -- namely, that more competitors may, in fact, lead to higher prices and lower quality."