Professional and college football fans across the country recently found themselves caught in the middle of an increasingly pitched struggle between the providers of sports programming and video distribution platforms. In a Super Bowl XLII preview, the New England Patriots sought to complete a perfect regular season against the New York Giants on Th e NFL Network and two national broadcast channels in the first multicast of an NFL game since Super Bowl I in 1967. Appalachian State’s historic victory over Michigan was carried on the fledgling Big Ten Network, but the spectacle at the “Big House” was not available to Comcast or Time Warner customers....

The last “war” fought over Voice over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”) occurred in 2003-2004, when the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission decided that Vonage’s VoIP telephony service seemed a lot like traditional circuitswitched service (it “quacked like a duck”), and so was subject to state agency regulation. A federal district court in Minnesota disagreed, holding that federal law preempts state regulation, because VoIP is an information service.” In 2004, the FCC weighed in with its own Vonage Order, declaring that VoIP providers do not need to abide by a Byzantine set of regulations by fifty-one state commissions. Two years later, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court’s decision. State agencies lost, and VoIP providers won—or so it seemed....

This is the first issue following our twenty-fifth anniversary. Audio and video from the 25th National Lawyers Convention is online. In addition, we are pleased to announce that the transcripts of nearly all of the panel debates will be published in various law reviews this coming year, including The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Texas Review of Law and Policy, The William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review, The New York Journal of Law and Liberty, Ave Maria Law Review, Hofstra Law Review, Regent University Law Review, The Southern New England Roundtable Symposium Law Journal, The SMU Technology Law Review, The University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review, and The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. Publication details appear on the individual webpage for each panel in our new Multimedia Archive. Consequently, we will not be publishing the transcripts as an issue of Engage this year; our next issue will be in June.

The telecom mess has gotten messier. Thanks to the ingenious efforts of enterprising class action lawyers, a split has emerged among three federal courts of appeals, further complicating the legal swamp created by the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The divergence occurs on the road where that statute intersects with the antitrust laws. And it involves this question: do allegations of inadequate performance of duties imposed by the 1996 Act—specifically duties that compel cooperation with competitors—state an antitrust claim?