A federal judge in Northern Virginia ruled that a foreign company cannot sue MasterCard and Visa for violations of antitrust laws simply because high-ranking lawmakers in 2010 and 2011 successfully urged them to cut off the flow of money to Wikileaks.
Alexandria District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee last week said allegations made by DataCell, an Icelandic tech firm, had no standing under the Sherman Act because the companies did not move in concert to restrain marketplace competition.
Lee ruled that the conspiracy described by the plaintiffs had hinged on the actions of high-ranking legislators–former senator and then Senate Homeland Security Committee chair Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), and then-House Homeland Security Committee chair and current Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.). He noted that “the federal government is exempt from antitrust litigation.”
Lee also said that DataCell could not establish any kind of legitimate injury under the Sherman Act and derided its allegation of a restraint on “the market place [sic] of ideas.”
“If the products in DataCell’s market are ideas, then the antitrust laws cannot help DataCell,” Lee wrote. “Congress created antitrust laws to protect free market competition, not to protect the free exchange of ideas.”
“If the products in DataCell’s market are classified State Department documents, then the antitrust laws are an even poorer fit,” he also said, adding later that “Not wanting their companies associated with terrorism seems a far more likely explanation for Defendants’ conduct than a conspiracy to restrain trade.”
DataCell had originally filed its lawsuit late last year.
In the summer of 2013, while Edward Snowden was in Hong Kong, the company’s founder, Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson, offered to fly the NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower to Iceland.
Read Judge Lee’s ruling here, courtesy of Courthouse News.
