# Verizon **Verizon Communications** is one of the three national U.S. wireless carriers, alongside [[AT&T]] and T-Mobile, and the largest descendant of the Bell System outside AT&T itself. The vault tracks it for four reasons: it is the clearest example of how the [[AT&T Breakup]] recombined; its records were the first exhibit of the [[Snowden Revelations]]; it was the plaintiff that struck down the first federal [[Net Neutrality]] rules; and in 2025 it bought FCC approval of a merger by dropping its DEI program for Chairman [[Brendan Carr]]. ## From Bell Atlantic to Verizon Bell Atlantic was one of the seven regional Bell companies created on January 1, 1984. It acquired NYNEX in 1997, merged with GTE in June 2000 and took the Verizon name, then bought MCI (closed January 2006). In 2013 it agreed to buy Vodafone's 45% stake in Verizon Wireless for $130 billion. Its AOL (2015) and Yahoo (2017) media detour ended with a $5 billion sale to [[Apollo Global Management]] in 2021. The lineage also gave antitrust two doctrine-narrowing cases, [[Verizon v. Trinko]] (2004, no general duty to deal with rivals) and [[Bell Atlantic v. Twombly]] (2007, a higher bar for pleading conspiracy), both load-bearing in the [[Consumer Welfare Standard]] era. ## Surveillance On June 5, 2013, *The Guardian* published a [[FISA Court]] order directing Verizon Business Network Services to give the [[NSA]], daily, the call-detail records of all calls on its network, including purely domestic ones: numbers, time and duration, not content. The order rested on Section 215 of the [[USA PATRIOT Act]] and was the first document published from [[Edward Snowden]]'s archive. Earlier suits against Verizon and AT&T over [[Stellar Wind]] cooperation had been ended by the 2008 [[FISA Amendments Act]]'s retroactive immunity. See [[NSA and the Telecommunications Industry]]. ## Net neutrality In *Verizon v. FCC* (D.C. Circuit, January 14, 2014), Verizon won vacatur of the anti-blocking and anti-discrimination rules in the FCC's 2010 Open Internet Order. The court held the agency could not impose common-carrier duties on a service it had not classified as telecommunications, while upholding its general broadband authority and the transparency rule. The FCC responded in February 2015 by reclassifying broadband under Title II. [[Ajit Pai]], a former Verizon associate general counsel, led the 2017 repeal. ## Frontier and the DEI condition | Date | Event | |---|---| | Sept 2024 | Verizon announces a roughly $20 billion deal for Frontier Communications | | May 2025 | In a letter to Carr, Verizon commits to eliminate DEI roles, drop diversity hiring targets and strip DEI language from training and recruiting; the [[FCC]] approves the deal days later | | Oct 6, 2025 | The board replaces CEO Hans Vestberg with lead director Dan Schulman, former CEO of [[PayPal]] | | Nov 20, 2025 | Schulman announces cuts of more than 13,000 jobs, with a $1.6–1.8 billion severance charge | | Jan 20, 2026 | Frontier closes: about $9.8 billion in cash plus about $12.9 billion of assumed debt, taking Verizon to roughly 30 million fiber passings | | July 16, 2026 | Verizon says it will sell 274 company-owned stores and cut about 500 more corporate jobs | The DEI pledge is the Carr template: merger review used as leverage over corporate policy (see [[DEI]]). ## Spectrum and Starlink Verizon's network also carries the resold mobile services of [[Comcast]] and Charter. In August 2026, with Starlink at 12 million subscribers, [[SpaceX]] moved to press AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile over direct-to-device spectrum, a fight decided at Carr's FCC (see [[SpaceX Watch Log]]). ## See Also - [[AT&T]] · [[AT&T Breakup]] · [[Verizon v. Trinko]] · [[Net Neutrality]] - [[Snowden Revelations]] · [[Upstream Collection]] · [[FISA Amendments Act]] - [[Brendan Carr]] · [[FCC]] · [[Starlink]] · [[SpaceX]] · [[Comcast]] · [[Monopoly]]