Christine Varney, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust in the Obama Administration, has started an investigation into the exclusive contracts that AT&T and Verizon hold with phone manufacturers. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, the federal government must investigate any organization suspected of holding a monopoly.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
Among the areas the Justice Department could explore is whether wireless carriers are hurting smaller competitors by locking up popular phones through exclusive agreements with handset makers."
Donald Russel, who was a Department of Justice attorney under the Clinton Administration, says it is unlikely this investigation will materialize into a lawsuit.
While media attention has always been given to the partnership between Apple and AT&T, adding government attention to the mix may cause Apple to seriously consider bringing the iPhone to other carriers, whether it turns into a lawsuit or not.
Allowing the iPhone to move to even just Verizon, would please many iPhone users or would-be users who are unhappy with AT&T's service.
At the World Wide Developer's Conference 2009, where this year's iPhone 3GS model was introduced, iPhone fans worldwide cheered when they heard the third model of iPhone would be able to send MMS messages; MMS messages have been available on most phones for a while now, and were notably missed on the first two iPhone models. Smiles were soon turned upside down when users found out that AT&T, who holds the exclusive contract in the U.S. for iPhones, would not be supporting MMS messaging until an undisclosed time later in the summer. Coupled with dropped calls and poor 3G service in some areas, many iPhone users are eagerly awaiting the day they can try out a different service without having to jailbreak or unlock their iPhone.
Comments
Yawn. This isn't anti-trust when consumers know ahead of time that what they want is only available through one channel. Manufacturers have every right to have exclusivity deals with retailers. Phones are just the target because they're expensive. Anti-trust is breaking up Ma-Bell, not whining because AT&T has one phone when other carriers have competitive phones. It's not "anti-competitive" if EVERYONE IS STILL COMPETING.
The government would do well to investigate why telecoms charge so much for services that other countries pay much less for, why they charge people erroneously because of dollars and cents, and why they allow companies broken up by the Fed to reform just decades later.
Wah, wah. Anyone that thinks the iPhone is the best thing since sliced bread has never used a Japanese phone. Everyone needs to get perspective before complaining about how bad things are within the US market; the US market pales in comparison to the EU and JP markets.
I agree I mean it's like having s lawsuit because you can't get a whopper at mcdonald's. We know what were getting there is no monopoly here at all
Also if they get their way and allow other carriers to use iPhone for instance, the only larger carrier that will be able to use it is T-Mobile because of technology constraints. In addition T-Mobile does not provide 3G on the exact same bands as AT&T. T-Mobile runs 3G i believe on the 1700 and/or 2100 MHz band, AT&T does not use 2100. iPhone users on that network would likely only be able to use EDGE
Huh?
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