New Rules ‘Sufficient’ to Bar ‘Anticompetitive Self-Dealing’ Inside GSMA, Says DOJ 

DOJ “presently has no intention” to mount an antitrust challenge to the GSM Association’s newly “promulgated” Remote SIM Provisioning (RSP) specification for embedded SIMs (eSIMs), as long as they're based on revised and improved standard-setting procedures, it told GSMA in a business review letter Wednesday. GSMA requested the letter in July. GSMA's new standards practices, called AA.35, are "meant to allay competition concerns by yielding standards that limit the design of RSP and eSIMs only to the extent it would be beneficial to the diverse group of interested parties in the mobile wireless industry,” said DOJ. The department over a two-year investigation "developed significant concerns" that GSMA’s process for fashioning the previous RSP spec was “deeply flawed and enabled competitors to coordinate anticompetitively,” it said. GSMA practices gave its mobile network operator members “certain privileges not available to other members and participants, “allowing that single interest group to exercise undue influence in the standard-setting process,” said DOJ. Those practices amounted to “an agreement among competitors to limit options available in the market in such a way as to benefit the incumbent operator members by reducing their competitive pressures,” it said. The department believes AA.35 has “sufficient protections to minimize the chances of anticompetitive self-dealing inside the GSMA, it said. DOJ will “closely observe” how the new procedures are “applied,” and whether they succeed “in promoting interoperability without marginalizing non-operators’ ability to represent their interests in preserving the maximum freedom to respond to consumer demand for innovation,” it said. DOJ's letter "agreed" that AA.35 industry standards "benefit consumers by helping technologies work together at lower costs," said the association Wednesday. "GSMA standards are always voluntary and reflect an industry consensus." DOJ's investigation "reviewed millions of documents covering a multi-year and complex process to establish common standards for eSIM technologies," it said. Wednesday's letter is "conclusive that the agency found no violation of antitrust laws,” it said. GSMA will release the new eSIM standards "within months, it said.