Court case

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg oversaw plans to consolidate the social network's power and control competitors by treating its users' data as a bargaining chip. Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook users' data — including information about friends, relationships and photos — as leverage over the companies it partnered with.

AT&T Mobility, LLC, will pay $60 million to settle litigation with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that the wireless provider misled millions of its smartphone customers by charging them for “unlimited” data plans while reducing their data speeds.

The Texas-led antitrust investigation into Google has already spilled into court, after the company told a judge that two experts retained by the states raise serious “confidentiality” concerns given their past work with rivals, such as News Corp.

Telecom providers expect to save millions of dollars thanks to a new Texas state law that cuts fees. But a coalition of nearly 50 TX cities, who will be on the losing end of that revenue, worry those discounts won’t be passed on to their residents. So they’re suing. For years, telecom providers paid two separate fees to run cable and phone lines through city-owned strips of land, know as rights-of-way. Companies were required to pay both fees, even if it took only one line to deliver the two services.

The US Supreme court has declined to overturn two lower court rulings that MN was preempted from regulating Charter Communications’s interconnected voice-over-internet protocol telephone service because the courts were convinced the operator had made the case for why it was an information service, not a telecommunications service, even though the Federal Communications Commission has yet to classify interconnected VoIP either way. That sounds like it would buttress the FCC’s assertion it can pre-empt state efforts to reregulate internet access, which the agency has definitely classified as

House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr.

The D.C. Circuit issued its long-awaited decision in Mozilla v. Federal Communications Commission.  The court affirmed the Federal Communications Commission’s Restoring Internet Freedom (RIF) Order, identifying some flaws in the agency’s reasoning but finding the agency could likely correct those errors on remand without vacatur. Though largely expected given the Supreme Court’s precedent in Brand X, the decision is nonetheless a sweeping victory for the FCC and judicial validation of Chairman Ajit Pai’s light-touch regulatory framework for the broadband industry.

Opponents of the T-Mobile-Sprint merger are piling on the deal in the hopes of convincing a judge the Justice Department’s settlement isn’t good enough. The DOJ’s agreement with the wireless companies has to receive final sign-off from Judge Timothy Kelly of the DC District Court, and critics want to make it a tough decision. Historically, the federal court review of a merger settlement has been an uneventful affair.

In a new filing, a group of seven economists and antitrust experts say a court should reject the Department of Justice’s proposed solution for the T-Mobile/Sprint transaction, calling it “doom[ed] ... to failure” and “a remedy that does not meet the standard of restoring the competition currently provided by Sprint.” For at least the next seven years, anyone buying service from Dish will just be getting rebranded T-Mobile service, and that’s not actual competition.

The seemingly interminable wait for the Court’s decision in Mozilla v. FCC is finally at an end. In its 186-page decision, the Court described how it considered economic concepts, arguments, and expert reports. It upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s 2018 Order but rejected its claimed preemption authority. As we have learned, the net neutrality debates will never die, but they may now change venue.