If You're Going To Accuse Telcos Of Antitrust Conspiracy, It Helps To Have Some Proof
from the just-saying dept
The Supreme Court has come out with a somewhat unsurprising ruling on a lawsuit filed against the Baby Bell telcos. The lawsuit claimed that the telcos violated antitrust law by failing to offer competing local phone service and internet access in the territories of the other Baby Bells, following the Telecom Act of 1996 that allowed them to do so. There have been many people who assumed that it suggested some sort of collusion between the firms not to go into each other's turf, but the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the telcos for the fairly easy to understand reason that there wasn't nearly enough evidence showing that there was any sort of conspiracy going on. In other words, there may have been collusion, but anyone bringing such a suit has the burden of actually proving it, rather than just insisting that there must have been collusion.
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So it seems as if though the Supreme Court ruled that it was just a big old coincidence that the Bells all acted together in this manner. I wonder if they would apply the same logic to a case involving an alleged conspiracy if the accused actors were not large corporations ideologically aligned with the court majority.
Consider this scenario: A group of armed persons burst into a bank and various members of the group do things like tie people up and so forth. Then they each go to a teller and order the teller to to fill a bag with money. After the bags are filled they all leave the bank at the same time but flee in different cars. During the robbery none of them speaks to each other. Later they are all apprehended boarding the same flight to the same South American destination with the stolen loot in their suitcases. Further investigation reveals that they all knew each other and had been seen together in public at various times and phone records indicated that then had been in contact with each other but none of the conversations had been recorded.
Now according to Justice Souter's twisted logic these persons could not be convicted of conspiracy just on the evidence that they all knew each other and acted together in parallel. After all, it could have just been a big old coincidence. Somehow I suspect the court would flip-flop and suddenly toss out Souter's logic.
Note also that this was not a unanimous decision and some of the justices did not buy the majority's logic here.
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