Why would Google have to step into the telcom market if the AT&T T-Mobile merger goes through?
Two reasons,
1.) Closed walled gardens. Both att and verizon want to make a walled garden just like the iphone is today. Verizon is going to do it with the vcast, separate market, separate pricing for apps, and separate apps. This will make it so they can get around the fcc ruling on the spectrum sale and get around the fcc ruling on roaming.
2.) Verizon and ATT will do tiered pricing. Google, facebook, netflix, and the thousand other sites require an unlimited and unrestricted internet. With 80% of the population forced into tiered pricing, they will be force to either be part of the walled garden, and when they do venture out of the garden, they will be on a short leash.
Making people pick and choose on where they will spend their 5 gb of data, will simply destroy the new markets that google/youtube, facebook/games, netflix/movies, and pandora/music have to offer.
4g services, like wimax and lte, are the future. Wimax can deliver the same speeds to your house as fiber, for a fraction of the cost.
Verizon, att, and comcast want to charge the people the choose to go outside "the wall" and the company's that want inside the wall. When you add up the total cost of "playing ball" with the simple fact of buying your own network, it becomes clear that you will need to buy your own network.
Look at it like this. You head for the mall, only to find when you get to the door, you are allowed only to visit 3 shops, well more likely get only 250 steps into the mall, unless the shop you want to visit is owned by the toll booth. Every store you pass by will have something you want to buy, but since you are limited to only 3 shops you get what you have to get, and use the toll booth operator for everything else. Everyone, regardless of how good the prices are or quality are subjected to limitation by an 3rd party that has their own interest in mind.
Sprint will not survive the next few years anyway, and has national coverage, so it makes the perfect buy out choice. If google does not buy out a national wireless carrier, they will take a revenue hit of billions of dollars over the next few years, as with the rest of the internet's big powered money houses.
You can not have competition at a market, when the only door has a toll booth for both the buyer and the marketer, and everyone that pass through it, pays a different price. Google will need to buy the toll booth, or suffer.