Five years and two FCCs later, FTC settles data throttling case against AT&T

13 September 2019 by Steve Blum
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The slow motion network neutrality enforcement ping pong match between the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission resulted in a data throttling settlement with AT&T, according to a story by Bevin Fletcher in FierceWireless. The details haven’t been released yet, but if approved by FTC commissioners it would end a dispute over how AT&T manages – throttles – the bandwidth consumed by millions of customers with grandfathered unlimited data plans.

AT&T’s mobile data throttling isn’t limited to legacy all-you-can-eat customers, at least according to research published last year, but the FTC’s enforcement action is limited to legacy data plans that are no longer offered.

The dispute tracks with the history of net neutrality regulation. It began in 2014 with a consumer rights lawsuit filed by the FTC against AT&T, when there were no federal rules in effect regarding net neutrality. When the Obama-era FCC declared broadband to be a common carrier service, AT&T’s response was to claim the FTC no longer had jurisdiction…

The agency said AT&T had been throttling speeds since 2011, and in some cases customers’ data speeds were reduced by nearly 90%. AT&T previously said it has been “completely transparent" with customers since starting its unlimited data throttling practices in 2011.

AT&T’s website currently discloses that for unlimited plans “AT&T may temporarily slow data speeds when the network is busy.”

AT&T had also argued the FTC lacked authority under the then-imposed net neutrality regulations enforced by the FCC, which in 2015 reclassified internet service providers as common carrier telecommunications service providers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act.

Then the Trump administration’s FCC reversed that ruling, saying that broadband isn’t a common carrier service, but instead it’s an information service that’s overseen by the FTC. That reversal led to the pending settlement.