It’s far from clear that Sprint Corp will ever win regulatory approval for its alliance with France Telecom and Deutsche Bundespost Telekom, and while British Telecommunications Plc may not make much headway with the knee-jerk protectionists in Brussels with its quite reasonable claim that while Sprint has a telephony licence in the UK, neither it or its partner MCI Communications Corp is allowed to have one in France or Germany, the folks in Washington, who are extremely supportive of AT&T Corp’s adventures on the international stage, are likely to dig their heels in and insist on degrees of reciprocity that will prove unacceptable in Paris and Bonn; investors took that view and Sprint’s shares fell $2.75 to $37.125 after the announcement.
