Court case

AT&T's mandatory-arbitration clause is unenforceable in a class-action case over AT&T's throttling of unlimited data, a panel of US appeals court judges ruled. The nearly five-year-old case has gone through twists and turns, with AT&T's forced-arbitration clause initially being upheld in March 2016.

The FCC got it wrong when it repealed net neutrality. The decision put the agency on the wrong side of history, the American public, and the law. And the courts agreed. That’s why they sent back to this agency key pieces regarding how the rollback of net neutrality protections impacted public safety, low income Americans, and broadband infrastructure. Today, the FCC is seeking comment on how best to move forward. My advice? The American public should raise their voices and let Washington know how important an open internet is for every piece of our civic and commercial lives.

In Mozilla Corp. v. FCC,  the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the vast majority of the Federal Communications Commission’s 2017 decision to end net neutrality protections. However, the court also remanded three discrete issues for further consideration by the FCC. On February 6, 2020, the D.C. Circuit denied all pending petitions for rehearing, and the Court issued its mandate on February 18, 2020. With this Public Notice, the Wireline Competition Bureau seeks to refresh the record regarding the issues remanded to the FCC by the Mozilla Court.

A federal judge has ruled in favor of Sprint and T-Mobile’s $26 billion merger. 

Judge Victor Marrero of the United States District Court in Manhattan ruled in favor of T-Mobile’s takeover of Sprint in a deal that would further concentrate corporate ownership of technology, combining the nation’s third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers and creating a new telecommunications giant to take on AT&T and Verizon. The decision concluded an unusual suit filed in June by attorneys general from 13 states and the District of Columbia. The challenge was brought after regulators at the Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission approved the deal.

Just how fast Americans can access 5G wireless service depends, in large part, on how effectively the guts of the network — namely, hundreds of thousands of bulky antennas — are placed in cities.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a legal challenge from Public Knowledge, The Greenlining Institute and other groups to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s 2017 rollback of certain Obama-era requirements for phone companies angling to transition off of legacy copper networks. “This is a victory for American consumers, who will benefit from faster fiber deployment and the increased availability of next-generation services,” Chairman Pai said. He has touted the deregulation as critical for allowing the transition to more advanced, IP-based networks.

T-Mobile’s attempt to buy Sprint and close the deal faced another setback when US District Judge Timothy Kelly extended his Tunney Act review of the Department of Justice settlement into mid-February. He said he would consider friend-of-the-court briefs on the proposed transaction. The briefs must be limited to 20 pages and filed by January 24, with the parties responding by February 7. “We had initially expected this routine review to end in mid-November.

Almost six months after Facebook agreed to a $5 billion settlement of privacy violations, the issue is anything but settled. The deal with the Federal Trade Commission announced in July to settle allegations that Facebook broke its promises to protect users’ privacy is still under review by a federal judge, who has been weighing objections from opponents who believe the deal is inadequate.

States suing to block T-Mobile's proposed acquisition of Sprint urged the federal judge overseeing the landmark antitrust trial not to defer to the Trump administration’s approval of the $26.5 billion deal. Lawyers for NY and CA, which are leading the lawsuit for the states, said in a filing late Jan 8 that the deal’s approval by the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t carry any special weight and should be ignored by the judge.