US Supreme Court rules for Verizon in anti-trust action

The original complaint filed in 2002 alleged that US ILECs (Bell Atlantic, which merged with GTE 2000 to form Verizon Communications) as well as several other large telephone companies restrained competition for CLECs and ISPs in two fundamental ways. They deliberately "engaged in parallel conduct" in their respective service areas to inhibit the growth of CLECs, including making unfair access agreements to their networks, providing inferior connections to networks, overcharging, and billing in ways designed to sabotage the CLECs' relations with their own customers. Secondly, the complaint charged that ILECs' had a "compelling common motivatio[n]" to thwart the competition, which naturally led them to form a conspiracy. The conspiracy point at the heart of the lawsuit was held as more theory than reality according to Court's opinion delivered by Associate Justice David H. Souter.