Jon Brodkin

AT&T's decision to prevent Time Warner-owned shows from streaming on Netflix and other non-AT&T services reduced the company's quarterly revenue by $1.2 billion, a sacrifice that AT&T is making to give its planned HBO Max service more exclusive content.

After deciding to shut New York and Alaska out of the new Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has made another change that could reduce or eliminate funding available for broadband providers in other US states.

Comcast reduced capital spending on its cable division in 2019, devoting less money to network extensions and improvements despite a series of government favors that were supposed to accelerate broadband expansions.

A new US law prohibits broadband and TV providers from charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers have provided themselves. A government spending bill approved by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in Dec includes new requirements for television and broadband providers. A new "consumer right to accurate equipment charges" prohibits the companies from charging customers for "covered equipment provided by the consumer." Covered equipment is defined as "equipment (such as a router) employed on the premises of a person...

US Telecom -- a lobbying group with members including AT&T, Verizon, and Frontier -- is fighting against higher Internet speeds in a US subsidy program for rural areas without good broadband access. The Federal Communications Commission's plan for the next version of its rural-broadband fund sets 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload as the "baseline" tier. Internet service providers seem to be onboard with that baseline level for the planned Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is reviewing the pending sale of the .org domain manager from a nonprofit to a private equity firm and says it could try to block the transfer. The .org domain is managed by the Public Internet Registry (PIR), which is a subsidiary of the Internet Society, a nonprofit.

CenturyLink has agreed to pay a $6.1 million penalty after Washington state regulators found that the company failed to disclose fees that raised actual prices well above the advertised rates. CenturyLink must also stop charging a so-called "Internet Cost Recovery Fee" in the state, although customers may end up paying the fee until their contracts expire unless they take action to switch plans. CenturyLink charged its Internet Cost Recovery Fee to 650,000 Washingtonians. The attorney general's office said that "CenturyLink is required to...

T-Mobile announced that it has launched "America's first nationwide 5G network," but T-Mobile's definition of "nationwide" doesn't include about 40% of the US population. "America gets its first nationwide 5G network today, covering more than 200 million people and more than 1 million square miles," T-Mobile's announcement said. The US Census Bureau estimates the population to be more than 330 million people.

The Federal Communications Commission's extremely hands-off approach to broadband-customer complaints has alarmed Rep Mike Quigley (D-IL). Rep Quigley wrote a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in Aug after learning of a Frontier customer who was forced to pay a $10-per-month rental fee for a router despite buying his own router. It turns out that the FCC hasn't proactively forwarded any broadband-billing complaints to the Federal Trade Commission despite the agencies' working agreement. But Chairman Pai's initial response to Rep Quigley didn't reveal that tidbit.

Mozilla is urging Congress to reject the broadband industry's lobbying campaign against encrypted DNS in Firefox and Chrome. The Internet providers' fight against this privacy feature raises questions about how they use broadband customers' Web-browsing data, Mozilla wrote in a letter sent to the chairs and ranking members of three House of Representatives committees.