Court Dismissed Antitrust Suit Accusing Wireless Carriers of Rigging 3GPP Standards

In Corr Wireless Communications, LLC et al. v. AT&T Inc. et al., Northern District of Mississippi Judge Sharion Aycock dismissed allegations that AT&T Inc., Motorola Mobility Inc., and Qualcomm Inc. conspired to push smaller wireless carriers, like Cellular South Inc., out of the market.  The suit claimed that AT&T and the others rigged the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards by purposefully separating its own swath of spectrum licenses from its smaller competitors’, and then made sure the two were incompatible.  As a result, most phones that worked on AT&T dominant national network, didn’t work on smaller, competing networks, like Cellular South’s.  Defendants moved to dismiss Cellular South’s complaint, arguing that the case failed to show how AT&T had somehow manipulated the 3GPP meetings.  The court agreed with defendants and dismissed the suit, holding that the case failed to meet the factual pleading standards established by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bell Atlantic v. Twombly ruling.  The court criticized Cellular South’s reliance on the larger companies’ motives as evidence that they manipulated the standards-setting process, holding that accusations of a motive do not establish a Sherman Act violation, and plaintiffs did not provide any factual allegations to plausibly show the existence of an agreement.

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