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AT&T Defeats Class Action In Unlimited Data Throttling Case (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes from an Ars Technica article: Customers who sued ATT over its practice of throttling unlimited data plans will not be able to pursue a class-action lawsuit against the company. ATT argued that the customers could not only have their complaints heard individually in arbitration, and Judge Edward Chen of US District Court in Northern California has sided with the cellular company. Chen accepted ATT's argument, noting that the Supreme Court previously upheld ATT's arbitration provision in a 2011 decision. In the 2011 case, ATT Mobility v. Concepcion, the Supreme Court found that the Federal Arbitration Act preempted a California state law that limited the power of companies to force customers into arbitration. [Chen's ruling granting ATT's motion to compel arbitration was issued on February 29 and highlighted in a MediaPost article Friday.] "Plaintiffs argue that the Concepcion Court never addressed the specific issues now raised -- i.e., that enforcement of the arbitration agreements would violate their rights as protected by the Petition Clause of the First Amendment," Chen wrote. "Because there is no state action in the instant case, Plaintiffs lack a viable First Amendment challenge to the arbitration agreements. As Plaintiffs have not challenged the arbitration agreements on any other bases, the Court grants ATT's motion to compel arbitration."
ATT is still being punished by the FCC and FTC. Ars Technica writes, "The FCC last year proposed a $100 million fine to punish ATT for throttling the wireless Internet connections of customers with unlimited data plans without adequately notifying the customers about the reduced speeds. Separately, the FTC sued ATT in an attempt to gain millions of dollars worth of refunds for customers who paid for unlimited data and had their speeds throttled."
ATT is still being punished by the FCC and FTC. Ars Technica writes, "The FCC last year proposed a $100 million fine to punish ATT for throttling the wireless Internet connections of customers with unlimited data plans without adequately notifying the customers about the reduced speeds. Separately, the FTC sued ATT in an attempt to gain millions of dollars worth of refunds for customers who paid for unlimited data and had their speeds throttled."
The Federal Arbitration Act was originally intended only for use between corporate entities, unfortunately it is being used more and more by crooked unscrupulous companies to force people to give up their rights for judicial relief. This has being enforced by several key bad decisions by the Supreme Court. Senate bill S2506 the "Restoring Statutory Rights Act" is supposed to restore some of these rights. Unfortunately it will probably not pass in a usable form due to corrupt corporate owned politicians (again, allowed by a bad decision by the Supreme Court).
Class action is also used for cases where individually there's no point to really suing to recover the small amount of money. For instance, when computer monitor makers started labelling screen size to include the plastic borders. People who joined the lawsuit got a pittance, a coupon for a few tens of dollars I think, but on the other hand the monitor makers also started telling the truth in their advertisements.
Was this a waste of time, or did it actually cause a change? AT&T case is similar, the product they advertised is not what was delivered. The difference is that AT&T has learned how to remove rights from their customers through arbitration agreements. Essentially any contract with AT&T can be broken by them with no recourse. Arbitration does not mean you get to resolve a dispute, it is not "small claims court, lite-version". Arbitration means that whoever has the most money will win.
I used to work for AT&T awhile ago.
AT&T entered into agreements with customers (corporate and state customers in my case) knowing full well that what they were agreeing by contract was going to end up in legal action afterward either because they didn't intend to adhere to the contract or because they knew they were shafting the customer (an example is selling an entire MPLS network to the State of Texas knowing full well that they had only a single MPLS device in the entire state and they were just going to use existing circuits to back-haul all the sites to the one MPLS device).
They do what they can get away with up front and let the lawyers handle it afterward...and they build the whole thing into their business model so that the legal costs and penalties are risk managed out for each project.
I think this is a shitty way to treat your customers but I guess it's probably done by most companies today as a matter of course.
Posting this as AC to avoid potential repercussions from AT&T.