7th Circuit Upholds Dismissal of Price-Fixing Case Against Major Wireless Carriers
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a class-action lawsuit against the four major national wireless carriers alleging they colluded to fix prices for text messaging services. The case is Aircraft Check…
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Services Co. et al. v. Verizon Wireless et al. “It is of course difficult to prove illegal collusion without witnesses to an agreement” and there are none in this case, Judge Richard Posner wrote for the panel that heard the case. It is also reasonable to expect that competing firms will closely track the pricing and other market behavior of their competitors, he said Thursday. “The plaintiffs have presented circumstantial evidence consistent with an inference of collusion, but that evidence is equally consistent with independent parallel behavior,” Posner wrote. Lawyers need to be careful about invoking the term collusion without being precise, he said. “Tacit collusion, also known as conscious parallelism, does not violate section 1 of the Sherman Act,” he said. “Collusion is illegal only when based on agreement. Agreement can be proved by circumstantial evidence, and the plaintiffs were permitted to conduct and did conduct full pretrial discovery of such evidence. Yet their search failed to find sufficient evidence of express collusion to make a prima facie case.”