• Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, July 7, 2009 10:28 AM

The U.S. Department of Justice, which essentially lay dormant on antitrust matters during the Bush administration, is looking into whether large telecoms are abusing their market power at the expense of smaller carriers, Amol Sharma reports.

Antitrust chief Christine Varney wants to reassert the government's role in policing monopolistic and anti-competitive practices by powerful companies but, as an attorney who once worked on the department's telecom antitrust task force points out, "investigations don't necessarily lead to court cases."

Questions have been raised about such deals as AT&T's exclusive right to provide service for Apple's iPhone in the U.S., and that might be one area that is drawing scrutiny, observers say. (The largest telecoms -- AT&T and Verizon -- respond that limiting exclusive deals would hurt innovation.) Another area drawing attention may be whether telecom carriers are restricting the types of services that other companies, such as Skype, can offer on their networks.

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