AT&T: Justice Dept. lawsuit against DirecTV based on ‘industry chatter,’ should be rejected

AT&T, which now owns DirecTV, urged a federal judge to reject the Justice Department’s lawsuit against its DirecTV business, arguing that the lawsuit relies on “only a handful of episodic, separate contacts” comprising nothing more than “industry chatter.” The Department of Justice’s claims are based on “nothing more than industry chatter about high-visibility topics, and cannot be sufficient to plausibly allege an ongoing reciprocal agreement to share competitively sensitive information,” AT&T said in its filing.

Specifically, AT&T said that Judge Michael Fitzgerald should shelve the antitrust charges by the Department of Justice. The company said the government’s lawsuit doesn’t “allege any traditional theory of antitrust liability” and is based on “narrow and generalized allegations of ‘information sharing.’” “Never before has a court found an antitrust violation for the mere sharing of non-price information of the type alleged here, especially when based on such threadbare allegations of an agreement,” continued AT&T in its recent filing, arguing that none of the conversations at issue in the case involved exchanging competitive price information.