Cite as: 540 U. S. 398 (2004)
Syllabus
claims that satisfy established antitrust standards, but does not create new claims that go beyond those standards. Pp. 405-407. (b) The activity of which respondent complains does not violate preexisting antitrust standards. The leading case imposing § 2 liability for refusal to deal with competitors is Aspen Skiing Co. v. Aspen Highlands Skiing Corp., 472 U. S. 585, in which the Court concluded that the defendant's termination of a voluntary agreement with the plaintiff suggested a willingness to forsake short-term profits to achieve an anticompetitive end. Aspen is at or near the outer boundary of § 2 liability, and the present case does not fit within the limited exception it recognized. Because the complaint does not allege that Verizon ever engaged in a voluntary course of dealing with its rivals, its prior conduct sheds no light upon whether its lapses from the legally compelled dealing were anticompetitive. Moreover, the Aspen defendant turned down its competitor's proposal to sell at its own retail price, suggesting a calculation that its future monopoly retail price would be higher, whereas Verizon's reluctance to interconnect at the cost-based rate of compensation available under § 251(c)(3) is uninformative. More fundamentally, the Aspen defendant refused to provide its competitor with a product it already sold at retail, whereas here the unbundled elements offered pursuant to § 251(c)(3) are not available to the public, but are provided to rivals under compulsion and at considerable expense. The Court's conclusion would not change even if it considered to be established law the "essential facilities" doctrine crafted by some lower courts. The indispensable requirement for invoking that doctrine is the unavailability of access to the "essential facilities"; where access exists, as it does here by virtue of the 1996 Act, the doctrine serves no purpose. Pp. 407-411. (c) Traditional antitrust principles do not justify adding the present case to the few existing exceptions from the proposition that there is no duty to aid competitors. Antitrust analysis must always be attuned to the particular structure and circumstances of the industry at issue. When there exists a regulatory structure designed to deter and remedy anticompetitive harm, the additional benefit to competition provided by antitrust enforcement will tend to be small, and it will be less plausible that the antitrust laws contemplate such additional scrutiny. Here Verizon was subject to oversight by the FCC and the PSC, both of which agencies responded to the OSS failure raised in respondent's complaint by imposing fines and other burdens on Verizon. Against the slight benefits of antitrust intervention here must be weighed a realistic assessment of its costs. Allegations of violations of § 251(c)(3) duties are both technical and extremely numerous, and hence difficult for antitrust courts to evaluate. Applying § 2's requirements to this regime can readily result in "false positive" mistaken inferences that chill the very
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