136
Opinion of the Court
petitors that may inhibit the competitive vitality of rivals"); 11 H. Hovenkamp, Antitrust Law ¶ 1901e, pp. 189-190 (1998). This Court emphasized in Klor's that the agreement at issue was
"not a case of a single trader refusing to deal with another, nor even of a manufacturer and a dealer agreeing to an exclusive distributorship. Alleged in this complaint is a wide combination consisting of manufacturers, distributors and a retailer." 359 U. S., at 212-213 (foot-note omitted).
This Court subsequently pointed out specifically that Klor's was a case involving not simply a "vertical" agreement between supplier and customer, but a case that also involved a "horizontal" agreement among competitors. See Business Electronics, 485 U. S., at 734. And in doing so, the Court held that a "vertical restraint is not illegal per se unless it includes some agreement on price or price levels." Id., at 735-736. This precedent makes the per se rule inapplicable, for the case before us concerns only a vertical agreement and a vertical restraint, a restraint that takes the form of depriving a supplier of a potential customer. See 11 Hovenkamp, supra, ¶ 1902d, at 198.
We have not found any special feature of this case that could distinguish it from the precedent we have just discussed. We concede Discon's claim that the petitioners' behavior hurt consumers by raising telephone service rates. But that consumer injury naturally flowed not so much from a less competitive market for removal services, as from the exercise of market power that is lawfully in the hands of a monopolist, namely, New York Telephone, combined with a deception worked upon the regulatory agency that prevented the agency from controlling New York Telephone's exercise of its monopoly power.
To apply the per se rule here—where the buyer's decision, though not made for competitive reasons, composes
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