Justice Department Brings Enforcement Action Against Centurylink

The Department of Justice announced that CenturyLink has agreed to settle allegations that CenturyLink violated the court-ordered Final Judgment designed to prevent anticompetitive effects arising from its acquisition of Level 3 Communications. Despite provisions in the Final Judgment barring CenturyLink from soliciting customers that switched to the buyer of the divestiture assets, CenturyLink failed to comply, initiating contact on over 70 occasions over more than a year with former Level 3 customers who elected to switch to the divestiture buyer in the Boise City-Nampa, Idaho MSA (Boise MSA).  CenturyLink does not deny the United States’ allegations and has agreed to the Amended Final Judgment. As part of the settlement, CenturyLink has agreed to:

• extend the non-solicitation period by two years for the Boise MSA;
• the appointment of an independent monitoring trustee; and
• pay the United States to defray the costs of the department’s investigation of CenturyLink’s violations of the court order.