CCIA Welcomes FTC Lawsuit Against AT&T

The Computer & Communications Industry Association applauded the FTC’s lawsuit against AT&T for allegedly deceiving millions of its unlimited data plan users and throttling their data plans, said a CCIA news release Wednesday. The FTC Tuesday announced the lawsuit, which AT&T called “baseless” (see 1410280047). AT&T “failed to adequately disclose the specifics of the company’s policy of throttling data once customers reached higher levels of data usage over a month,” said CCIA CEO Ed Black. A Tuesday study released by the Measurement Lab Consortium (M-Labs) said the “problem of interfering with Internet traffic is even more widespread,” noted CCIA. M-Lab’s “analysis of connections between networks concluded that what Internet users assumed were technical problems connecting to Netflix or other content sites were really the result of pressure exerted by the subscriber’s Internet Access Provider,” said CCIA. Customers of major ISPs “experienced dramatically poor performance” when connecting to core Internet transit infrastructure, said the study (see 1410280036). Black said that it's "increasingly clear that a few powerful companies in this area continue to abuse their customers when they think they can get away with it, and continue to push for the weakest rules possible to allow them to discriminate and manipulate the services they provide."