With the U.S. Senate conducting hearings on anti-competitive behavior in the cellular industry, AT&T has decided to open their individual defense with an email from one of their attorneys to a Senator.

In an email to Senator Herb Kohl, sent Wednesday, an AT&T lawyer defended the AT&T iPhone exclusive, saying that the deal was not anti-competitive. The email also makes the claim that the exclusive smartphone deals common in the industry actually improve the competitive nature of the marketplace. More on that clouded reasoning later.

Kohl, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter Monday complaining about industry practices to both FCC chairman Julius Genachowski and Christine Varney, assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice. The Senator wants both the FCC and the DoJ to investigate exclusive handset arrangements, as well as a number of other anticompetitive practices in the cellular industry.

AT&T senior vice president of external and legislative affairs James Cicconi opened his reply to the charges by saying, “The popularity of the iPhone and its innovative features and applications … has provoked an unprecedented competitive reaction.” Later in the same email to Senator Kohl, he said:

Exclusive handsets have provided U.S. consumers the most advanced devices in the world at distinctly affordable rates. By allowing a carrier and a manufacturer to share the enormous risks and costs of bringing an inventive but unproven new device to market, exclusive arrangements both quicken the pace of technological advancement and incentivize the carrier to offer even greater handset subsidies to its customers.

Cicconi went on to suggest that without an exclusive deal, the iPhone would have been more expensive than it is today and probably would have appeared in Europe, Japan, or China before it debuted in the United States, according to a PCMag story. He closed the email by saying, “Prohibiting exclusive handset arrangements, then, would not engender competition, it would degrade it.”

Therefore, Mr. Cicconi is saying that the best way to insure competitive behavior in the marketplace is through a group of parallel monopolies. Only a person who has taken a class onLegal Ethics, which have nothing to do with ethics as the rest of us understand it, could support such twisted reasoning. Mr. Cicconi’s sole interest lies in sticking it to the consumer and inflating the bank accounts of AT&T and, of course, Mr. Cicconi.

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Entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 2:35 pm under International, Legal, Opinion, iPhone.  Print This Post

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