By Mary Strimel (January 11, 2018, 5:41 PM EST) -- The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division is pushing back strenuously against the decision of U.S. District Judge David Sam to apply the rule of reason to the conduct of heir location service providers who allocated customers between them. Under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, offenses such as horizontal price-fixing, bid rigging, and horizontal customer allocation are typically held per se illegal and other violations are evaluated under the rule of reason. In United States v. Kemp & Associates et al.,[1] the Utah federal court surprised the antitrust community by ruling that the DOJ's customer allocation charges did not describe per se illegal conduct. Under long-standing policy, the DOJ does not criminally prosecute rule of reason cases, so this amounted to a dismissal. After the initial ruling and at the parties' request, the court also ruled on the defendants' statute of limitations motion, holding that the prosecution was time-barred....