The Bush Administration gave a boost to what's left of the Baby Bells when the Solicitor General and the FCC announced they would not challenge an appeals court decision that knocked down the parts of the 1996 Telcom Act that gave rivals access to the Bells' networks at reduced rates. Chances are that the Supreme Court won't take a look at this on their own.
NYT link. WaPo link.
The Bells -- Verizon, SBC, BellSouth, and Qwest -- have always maintained that cheap access to their networks by rivals discourages them from making expensive upgrades to those networks, a point which has some merit but should probably be addressed by a compromise rather than this solution, which allows the Bells to immediately raise the fees they charge to competitors for local and DSL service, and therefore raise all those phone bills for us Americans.
Wait, did I say "immediately"?
Before the decision, rivals of the Bells said they had told the administration that if it did not side with them in the dispute they intended to run television advertisements in swing political states accusing the White House of being responsible for higher telephone rates. For their part, the Bell companies pledged not to raise rates before the election in November.
That explicit quid pro quo was not in the story's lede, in case you were wondering.