To paraphrase Charles Dickens, the Supreme Court’s decision in Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinka, LLP1 (hereinafter Trinka) was the most sweeping of decisions, and it was the least sweeping of decisions. Although some see the Trinka case as a watershed event in which U.S. monopolization law as embodied in section 2 of the Sherman Act was significantly rolled back, the truth is that Trinka is largely a restatement of the status quo ante of monopolization doctrine. The case is limited to a procedural niche unique to the experimental competition-inducing regulatory statute under which it arose, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (TCA),2 and because of this the substantive effect of the decision in a broader antitrust context promises to be quite modest.
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