Let’s say you learned a customer was switching to a competitor. You’d try to change their minds, right?

Well, Verizon can’t do that, judging by an order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The court, in upholding an FCC ruling against the telecom, stated on Tuesday that Verizon cannot try to retain a customer once it has a received a request to “port,” or transfer the person’s number to another provider.

“The information that a competitor has just won the customer over, which is vital to the timing of Verizon’s retention marketing, is proprietary information that the competitor discloses only because it must do so in order to effect the number port,” it wrote. And this intelligence cannot be used for marketing.

Get it? Verizon can try to win those customers back with a better offer after the port is completed. But not before.

This may sound like a strange issue to someone outside the telecom business. But great sums of money obviously were spent litigating it.

The flap started when three cable companies that provide voice services over Internet Protocol—Bright House Networks, Comcast and Time Warner Cable—filed a complaint against Verizon with the FCC, alleging violation of the Telecommunications Act.

The appeals court noted that Verizon “used information provided by the LSR process to contact defecting customers and offer them various incentives to stay…all before the number port is completed.”

What’s the purpose of this restriction? To “assure the losing carrier’s neutral role” in the porting process, the court said, referring to arguments by the FCC.

The parties agreed that Verizon did not delay porting so it could retain customers, the court said. But the combining of marketing with the porting process has “introduced unnecessary errors,” it continued.

“The FCC’s basic determination was to eliminate the apparent conflict of interest, compelling Verizon to focus first on completing the result of another carrier’s successful marketing before engaging in its own,” it explained.

In saying this, the appeals court rejected First Amendment issues raised by Verizon.

The decision means that consumers “will have less information available when choosing between different competitors,” Reuters quoted a Verizon spokesperson as saying.

Don’t get the wrong idea. This isn’t about “slamming,” or practices like that. It’s about marketing, pure and simple.

If nothing else, it means that Verizon will have to work harder to reclaim defectors.

Let’s say you learned a customer was switching to a competitor. You’d try to change their minds, right?

Well, Verizon can’t do that, judging by an order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The court, in upholding an FCC ruling against the telecom, stated on Tuesday that Verizon cannot try to retain a customer once it has a received a request to “port,” or transfer the person’s number to another provider.

“The information that a competitor has just won the customer over, which is vital to the timing of Verizon’s retention marketing, is proprietary information that the competitor discloses only because it must do so in order to effect the number port,” it wrote. And this intelligence cannot be used for marketing.

Get it? Verizon can try to win those customers back with a better offer after the port is completed. But not before.

This may sound like a strange issue to someone outside the telecom business. But great sums of money obviously were spent litigating it.

The flap started when three cable companies that provide voice services over Internet Protocol—Bright House Networks, Comcast and Time Warner Cable—filed a complaint against Verizon with the FCC, alleging violation of the Telecommunications Act.

The appeals court noted that Verizon “used information provided by the LSR process to contact defecting customers and offer them various incentives to stay…all before the number port is completed.”

What’s the purpose of this restriction? To “assure the losing carrier’s neutral role” in the porting process, the court said, referring to arguments by the FCC.

The parties agreed that Verizon did not delay porting so it could retain customers, the court said. But the combining of marketing with the porting process has “introduced unnecessary errors,” it continued.

“The FCC’s basic determination was to eliminate the apparent conflict of interest, compelling Verizon to focus first on completing the result of another carrier’s successful marketing before engaging in its own,” it explained.

In saying this, the appeals court rejected First Amendment issues raised by Verizon.

The decision means that consumers “will have less information available when choosing between different competitors,” Reuters quoted a Verizon spokesperson as saying.

Don’t get the wrong idea. This isn’t about “slamming,” or practices like that. It’s about marketing, pure and simple.

If nothing else, it means that Verizon will have to work harder to reclaim defectors.