Court Refuses To Dismiss AT&T Throttling Case

Taco Cowboy sends news that a federal judge has shot down AT&T's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the company deceived customers by throttling their mobile data speeds. The suit was filed by the Federal Trade Commission after it found AT&T was charging customers for "unlimited" data plans, but then throttling their bandwidth once certain thresholds were reached. AT&T tried to have the suit thrown out by saying the FTC was exceeding its authority. Judge Edward Chen disagrees (PDF), saying jurisdiction for their conduct had not yet passed to the Federal Communications Commission when it occurred. The throttling affected "at least 3.5 million customers."

Comments

Re:DantheMan

[Tablizer]

Indeed! We are almost forced to use them due to various circumstances. They play billing games with surprise fees all the time. They fart fees. And their telemarketers keep calling us and won't get the clue that we don't want to talk to them.

Competition is sorely needed in telecom. Oligopolies suck rotting eggs. I think I'd rather have "commie" gov't services than the current batch of clowns we have to choose from. Socialists have fewer telemarketers, at least, and they are too lethargic to add so many new and creative fees.

Re:Outside their authority?

[Trepidity]

As I read it (but this is getting into some nitty-gritty agency-jurisdiction law I might misunderstand), the jurisdictional argument is about what "common carrier" status does for oversight. Telecommunications law gives the FCC exclusive authority to regulate common carriers, because they aren't quite normal market participants, but instead more like a regulated utility with special requirements that apply to them. So the FCC is tasked with drawing up those rules and overseeing them, and the FTC doesn't oversee them the way it would oversee other market participants.

Mobile data did not used to be classified as a common-carrier service, but was reclassified recently (3 weeks ago, in fact). The court found: 1. The fact that AT&T provides a common-carrier mobile service doesn't mean that it automatically is immune from FTC jurisdiction in any mobile-related case. Instead it needs to show that the specific conduct in dispute is related to its provision of common-carrier telecommunications services, and therefore exclusively within FCC jurisdiction; 2. The specific conduct at issue here happened before the reclassification as common carrier, so the FTC properly has jurisdiction.