With the fate of the $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T in Washington’s hands, all the big tech players are moving their pawns. And now the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group that includes Google, Microsoft, eBay, Yahoo and Facebook, has come out against the deal.

The argument is what’s to be expected: this merger will be bad for competition, and therefore bad for innovation and consumers. Regardless of the merits, what’s going on here is that the companies in the “application layer” of the web don’t want the companies who own the pipes, whether they’re mobile or internet, to gain too much power.