U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit quotes Crandall in United States Telecom Association v. Federal Communications Commission decision

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the FCC to reconsider rules that now require Bells to "unbundle" and rent individual parts of their local-phone networks to their smaller competitors at heavily discounted rates. The rules have been at the heart of the FCC's attempts to introduce competition into the nation's local-phone market by allowing the upstarts to use the Bells' networks without having to spend the enormous amounts of money required to build their own.

The appeals court also struck down an FCC rule that allowed the upstarts to rent space on the Bells' phone lines to offer high-speed digital-subscriber line, or DSL, service alongside the Bells' voice offerings. The regulation was very important to DSL providers such as Covad Communications Group Inc. because it allowed the small companies to provide service to existing Bell customers without requiring the consumers to maintain a second phone line.

The court cited Criterion chairman and co-founder Robert Crandall to support the proposition that a large percentage of telephone service is charged below cost, which suggests that market-specific variations should be considered when applying the impairment standard of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

Download Decision