A Federal judge dismissed DirecTV’s antitrust lawsuit accusing Nexstar Media Group, Mission Broadcasting and White Knight Broadcasting of conspiring to boost retransmission consent fees.
Senior Judge Kevin Castel of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said in his decision that DirecTV did not have standing under antitrust law because it did not enter into an agreement with Mission or White Knight which would have required it to pay “supercompetitive” fees.
“This ruling sets a dangerous precedent that a victim of price-fixing needs to pay the inflated price before it can make a claim in court," a DirecTV spokesman said.
Nexstar operates stations for Mission and White Knight. In 2022 DirecTV decided not to renew its retrans agreements with Mission and White Night, which resulted in nearly 1 million DirecTV subscribers being blacked out from receiving the stations’ signals via satellite, according to the judge’s decision.
While DirecTV's allegations that the defendant engaged in a price fixing conspiracy were supported and it was able to identify a an actual injury in loss of profits resulting from the blackouts, according to the decision, it is also required to be able to show that the injury was the type of injury antitrust laws were intended to prevent.
“Here, Plaintiff’s injury—lost profits resulting from the blackouts—does not flow from that which makes Defendants’ acts unlawful because DirecTV does not allege that it paid anticompetitive rates but instead made the unilateral decision to abandon [retrans] negotiations,'' the judge wrote in his decision. “Its losses therefore flow from its own choice to exit the market.”
He added that DirecTV is not a competitor with the defendant, but instead a buyer, which makes a difference under antitrust laws.
“Because ‘DirecTV has refused Defendants’ supracompetitive, price-fixed demands,’ it cannot show that its lost profits flow from that which makes defendants’ price-fixing illegal. As such, it has failed to show that it suffered “a special kind of antitrust injury,” according to the opinion.
The judge also declined to exercise jurisdiction over DirecTV’s claims under state laws.
