WIRELESS ANTITRUST EXPERT WITNESS CONSULTING, TESTIMONY AND REPORTS

Wireless antitrust expert witnesses are taking on an ever-bigger part in legal matters, noting that the telecommunications industry has seen several high-profile cases and merger reviews in recent years. Areas where the telecom space’s best known and top wireless antitrust expert witness practitioners play range from allegations around coordinated behavior and equipment exclusion to vertical integration concerns.

1. Putting things in context – Contractors examine factors like consumer substitution patterns between wireless providers, the extent of regional variation in competition, and whether to include enterprise and government sectors.
2. Market concentration and coordinated effects – The highly concentrated nature of wireless markets has raised repeated concerns around coordinated pricing, parallel accommodating conduct, and whether mergers may enhance mutual interdependence and likelihood of coordination.
3. Unilateral pricing effects from mergers – For proposed mergers and acquisitions, wireless antitrust expert witnesses rigorously model whether the combined firm would have an increased incentive to unilaterally raise prices or degrade quality due to reduced competition and lessening of capacity constraints.
4. Vertical foreclosure and prioritization concerns – As telecom carriers have pursued vertical integration into areas like content, equipment, and mobile video, professionals analyze the potential for input foreclosure, prioritization discrimination, and raising rivals’ costs.
5. Spectrum holdings and accumulation – Spectrum licenses are essential inputs, leading to scrutiny from any given wireless antitrust expert witness around spectrum auctions, concentration measures, and whether any carriers have foreclosed or impeded rivals’ access through excessive accumulation practices.
6. Exclusivity deals and handset exclusion – There have been claims that certain exclusivity arrangements between carriers and handset makers, restricting which devices can fully access a network, amount to anticompetitive foreclosure tactics. Pros evaluate these effects.
7. Infrastructure access policies – With the buildout of 5G and 6G networks, some argue more regulatory intervention ensuring reasonable access to physical infrastructure like poles, ducts, and towers is needed to lower barriers for new wireless entrants and facilities-based competition.

The complexities around capacity constraints, spectrum allocation policies, vertical integration incentives, and the highly concentrated nature of national telecom markets raise many unique issues at the intersection of antitrust and telecommunications regulation. And so wireless antitrust expert witness providers on the economic and engineering sides offer analytical insights for courts and regulators.