Tag Archives: AT&T

Featured, Politics, Technology, US

FCC reclassifies the internet, approves net neutrality rules

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The Federal Communications Commission has just approved their plan for net neutrality, which also reclassifies broadband Internet as a public utility.

Under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, the reclassification of the internet as a public utility allows the FCC to place regulations on Internet service providers (ISPs) such as Comcast and Verizon. These regulations would mandate these service providers to transmit all Internet content at the same speed, regardless of what interests are involved, according to Newsweek.

According to engadget, the FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, said, “It [the internet] is our printing press; it is our town square; it is our individual soap box and our shared platform for opportunity… That is why open internet policies matter. That is why I support network neutrality.”

Net neutrality, also known as open Internet, is an idea which says all Internet networks and content are equally available to all legal content generators, according to USA Today. Therefore, a practice called “paid prioritization” which results in ISPs showing preference towards companies who pay more for higher transmission speed of content, would be illegal.

The new reclassification also affects wireless data providers. The new plan places similar regulations on phone companies as those placed on other ISPs.

However, some people have spoken out against the new net neutrality plan.

Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president-external and legislative affairs, said, “What doesn’t make sense, and has never made sense, is to take a regulatory framework developed for Ma Bell in the 1930s and make her great grandchildren, with technologies and options undreamed of eighty years ago, live under it.”

Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai said, according to FOX News, the plan represents a shift of power to allow the government to control the internet. Pai also warned the new plan would result in intended and unintended consequences, such as rate regulations. “The order explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes… Read my lips: More new taxes are coming. It’s just a matter of when.”

The FCC has said the new regulations will be posted online soon and will be published in the Federal Register. The new regulations will also go into affect 60 days after their publication.

Business, Disclosure, Politics, Technology, US

The U.S. Government Sues AT&T

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WASHINGTON, DC, October 29, 2014 – On Tuesday, officials with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued AT&T, America’s second largest cellular provider, for allegedly misleading customers by selling them “unlimited” data plans that were then “throttled” by the company by slowing internet speeds of customers who consumed an excess of data past a certain point.

The FTC claims AT&T has used this practice since 2011 and estimates that it has affected over 3.5 million customers on at least 25 million occasions.

Customers experienced these data slow downs an average of 12 days a month and in some cases internet speeds were cut up to 90%. The FTC reportedly received thousands of complaints about the practice.

FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez stated, “AT&T promised its customers ‘unlimited’ data, and in many instances, it has failed to deliver on that promise. The issue here is simple: ‘unlimited’ means unlimited.”

According to the FTC’s complaint, AT&T emphasized the unlimited amount of data available to consumers who signed up for their unlimited plans. When these unlimited plan consumers renewed their contracts the company failed to inform them of the throttling program. Customers who later attempted to cancel their contracts after experiencing the throttling were charged early termination fees, often amounting to several hundred dollars.

Ramirez stated, “They stopped providing the service that customers understood they had purchased when they entered into their contract. Customers would be subject to an early termination fee if they wanted to get out of their existing contract.”

In a statement AT&T’s general counsel Wayne Watts called the FTC’s complaint “baseless” and stated, “We have been completely transparent with customers since the very beginning. We informed all unlimited data-plan customers via bill notices and a national press release that resulted in nearly 2,000 news stories, well before the program was implemented.”

Watts also stated, “ It’s baffling as to why the FTC would choose to take this action against a company that, like all major wireless providers, manages its network resources to provide the best possible service to all customers, and does it in a way that is fully transparent and consistent with the law and our contracts.”

However, the FTC found in its investigation that AT&T was aware consumers found the throttling practice inconsistent with the promise of unlimited data. According to the FTC’s complaint, AT&T received over 190,000 customer calls complaining about the throttling practice. Consumers in AT&T focus groups strongly objected to the practice and felt “unlimited should mean unlimited.”

After the findings of the focus group, AT&T’s own researchers urged the company’s marketers to change their verbiage, cautioning that “saying less is more” when selling related services.

The FTC worked closely with the Federal Communications Commission on this issue. The FTC voted 5-0 authorizing the staff to file the complaint. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division.

The official complaint charges state that, “AT&T violated the FTC Act by changing the terms of customers’ unlimited data plans while those customers were still under contract, and by failing to adequately disclose the nature of the throttling program to consumers who renewed their unlimited data plans.”

 

Follow Michael Lotfi on Facebook & Twitter.

 

Technology, US

AT&T Hacker Sends Government An Invoice For Time Spent In Prison

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Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker charged with accessing personal data of over 100,000 AT&T iPad subscribers who recently had his conviction overturned, published a letter on Tuesday addressed to the New Jersey District Court, the FBI, and Department Of Justice requesting compensation for the time he’s spent in prison.

Auernheimer, an internet security expert who is also known as “weev” in several online communities, was convicted in 2012 of identity theft and unauthorized access to computers. In 2010, Auernheimer’s web security group Goatse Security had discovered a security vulnerability on AT&T’s website that allowed people to acquire the e-mail addresses and ICC-ID of iPad users.

An ICC-ID is an identifier similar to a serial number that is used to authenticate the SIM card in a user’s iPad to the AT&T network. According to Wired, Auernheimer and his associate/co-defendant Daniel Spitler found that the security flaw was fairly simple to exploit:

The iPad was released by Apple in April 2010. AT&T provided internet access for some iPad owners through its 3G wireless network, but customers had to provide AT&T with personal data when opening their accounts, including their e-mail address. AT&T linked the user’s e-mail address to the ICC-ID, and each time the user accessed the AT&T website, the site recognized the ICC-ID and displayed the user’s e-mail address. Auernheimer and Spitler discovered that the site would leak e-mail addresses to anyone who provided it with a ICC-ID. So the two wrote a script – which they dubbed the “iPad 3G Account Slurper” — to mimic the behavior of numerous iPads contacting the web site in order to harvest the e-mail addresses of iPad users.

Auernheimer and Spitler ended up acquiring the CC-ID and e-mail addresses of as many as 120,000 AT&T subscribers, including Diane Sawyer of ABC News, studio executive Harvey Weinstein, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Auernheimer brought the discovery to the press ahead of AT&T, and he and Spitler were arrested and charged for violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Spitler pleaded guilty while Auernheimer underwent a trial. After Auernheimer’s conviction he was sentenced to 41 months in jail followed by 3 years of probation and an order to pay $73,000 in restitution to AT&T. Auernheimer appealed his conviction, arguing that the information he’d accessed was “freely available” due to AT&T’s negligence in securing its site. In an interview with CNET, he said that he exposed the flaw because “we serve the public and the reason we went public with this is because people have a right to know.”

However, Auernheimer had his conviction vacated in April on a technicality. He was tried and convicted in New Jersey, but the US Court of Appeals ruled that he had been tried in the wrong state.

Now Auernheimer is seeking restitution for the time he’s spent in prison. In his letter, Auernheimer described his discontent with his arrest, trial and conviction. “I have, over the course of 3 years, been made the victim of a criminal conspiracy by those in the federal government. This was a conspiracy of sedition and treason, perpetrated with violence by a limited number of federal agents to deprive me of my constitutional rights to a fair trial and unlawfully put me in prison,” he wrote.

Auernheimer is invoicing the government at a rate of 1 Bitcoin per hour totaling 28,296 Bitcoins, worth about $13 million in US dollars. “I do not accept United States dollars, as it is the preferred currency of criminal organizations such as the FBI, DOJ, ATF, and Federal Reserve and I do not assist criminal racketeering enterprises,” Auernheimer wrote. The letter in its entirety is available below.

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Opinion, Politics

LOTFI: Obama administration moves to virtually kill the internet?

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WASHINGTON, April 30, 2014– Reports have been circulating that the Obama administration is trying to destroy the internet by killing off net-neutrality. In order to see if the claims check out, you need to meet Tom Wheeler. Just who is Tom Wheeler? If you credit Kathleen Sebelius with the death of the American healthcare system, you could soon credit Wheeler with the death of the internet, or at the very least, as we know it to be now. The Obama administration’s supposed plan is an innate result of crony corporatism and could well be their next big lie.

In November, 2013, President Obama appointed Wheeler to head-up the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). First, never mind that Wheeler raised more than $700,000 for Obama’s two elections.

Second, never mind that 2007 presidential candidate Obama made a solemn promise to protect internet neutrality while visiting Google headquarters in California.

“We have to ensure free and open exchange of information. That starts with an open internet. I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality. Because once providers start to privilege some applications or websites over others then the smaller voices get squeezed out and we all lose. The internet is perhaps the most open network in history, and we have to keep it that way.”

That promise is starting to sound a lot like Obama’s, “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan.” You know, the promise that won PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year.  Considering the current moves, the administration’s audacity to leave this net-neutrality campaign video posted on their official YouTube account is astonishingly insulting to proponents of net-neutrality.

Finally, never mind that Wheeler is a former cable and internet lobbyist giant. You know, one of those lobbyists that candidate Obama swore to never hire if he was elected. For decades, Wheeler is credited with lobbying for “deregulation” of the industry.

Is it not peculiar Obama would tap a man, the very man that supposedly wanted to deregulate the cable and internet industry, to lead the massive federal bureaucracy that regulates that very industry?

It’s not as strange as one may think. Two types of “small government” lobbyists exist. One truly wants the government out of everything. The other uses the government to deregulate his own business, while simultaneously lobbying for regulation or unfair disadvantages on competitors, which is often done under the guise consumer protectionism, or blatant corporate protectionism [Enter Wheeler].

So, what is net-neutrality or “open internet”?  In layman’s terms, net-neutrality is actually a government regulation pressed on internet service providers (ISPs). The regulation seeks to ensure that all ISPs enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and do so without favoring or blocking particular websites and products.

When approached from an economic vantage point, net-neutrality, in its most basic definition, actually inhibits the ISP free-market.

In most cases, those in favor of small government and free-markets would likely champion such deregulation. Meanwhile, those in favor of market regulation point to fears of censorship.

For example, an ISP like Comcast could limit its end-user subscribers’ ability to access BenSwann.com if it wanted to increase traffic (revenue) to a news website the company owned (MSNBC), or it could begin downgrading BenSwann.com’s connection quality if a friendly competitor like TheBlaze.com was willing to pay higher fees to knock out the competition.

The question we must ask is as follows: Does this deregulation actually move towards a more free marketplace? In this case, probably not. These corporatist giants have used the government to secure no bid contracts, geographical subscriber exclusivity and more. The companies are now formed into a government sponsored quasi-monopoly. This is corporatism- not free-market capitalism.

Last January, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC could not regulate net-neutrality. According to the Court plurality, the FCC lacked “regulatory jurisdiction” under the provided framework. Appellant Verizon seems to win the day. Net-neutrality is dead.

However, the Court left a loophole by stating that the FCC could rewrite the rules under a more acceptable framework.

“I intend to accept that invitation by proposing rules that will meet the court’s test for preventing improper blocking of and discrimination among Internet traffic, ensuring genuine transparency in how Internet Service Providers manage traffic, and enhancing competition,” Wheeler said in a statement. “Preserving the Internet as an open platform for innovation and expression while providing certainty and predictability in the marketplace is an important responsibility of this agency.”

But wait, isn’t Wheeler against net-neutrality and in favor of helping his old employers out? That’s what many headlines are reporting, and here is where things get confusing.

If one was to read the Verizon v. FCC case, it seems as though the FCC was trying to protect net-neutrality all along, and the Court ruled in favor of the corporations instead. Obama’s promise upheld. Right? After all, the administration can’t necessarily control what the Court says.

However, the Court gave the FCC the go-ahead to write rules under a new framework. Rather than continue and try to protect net-neutrality, reports now insinuate that the administration will re-write the rules to instead favor the giant ISPs Wheeler lobbied on behalf of for decades.

It is possible that the Verizon v. FCC case was a test case. Many such cases have been brought forth throughout the history of the federal judiciary. The goal of a test case is to figure out just what will be tolerated and in what way. Sometimes we know immediately whether or not a case is a test. However, it sometimes takes decades until such cases are exposed. In most all cases, the federal Court system now creates new tests, frameworks, and alternative ways for which a law or rule could be considered constitutional, or in this instance, within regulatory jurisdiction. This is one way the Court illegally legislates from the bench. The goal of such a test case could have been to get the Court to define ways to incorporate corporate protectionism into the FCC rules. Of course, at this time, this is only speculation. However, it would help to explain what happened next.

According to multiple reports, the FCC is playing a game of Orwellian semantics. While the commission maintains it is protecting net-neutrality, the reports show the new rules could kill net-neutrality by allowing ISPs to create a “fast lane internet”. The possibility of fast lane internet being incorporated into the new FCC rules validates the concerns of net-neutrality proponents.

Although the Court has already ruled that the FCC could not enforce net-neutrality, it seems as though Wheeler’s FCC is now attempting to use the Court’s new framework to write such protection into the actual FCC rules. This could allow ISPs an added layer of protection by throwing the weight of federal regulation on top of the Court’s ruling.

The new rules won’t be fully released until mid-May. For now, all is speculation.

Meanwhile, to fill in the gaps while we wait for new rules to be fully released, one should follow the money.

COMCAST

Brian Roberts, Comcast CEO, is good friends with Obama. He is regularly invited to the White House and has been golfing with Obama. In fact, Roberts even served on Obama’s jobs council. Comcast Vice President David Cohen has raised more than $2.2 million for Obama’s elections since 2007. Since 2008, Comcast has spent more than $91.2 million lobbying the government. Of course, it probably doesn’t hurt that Comcast is the parent company of the hard left-leaning Obama mouthpiece known as NBC Universal which operates the MSNBC cable news station.

TIME WARNER CABLE (TWC)

In 2008, TWC donated $618k to Obama’s election. In 2012, they donated $422k.  Since 2008, TWC has spent more than $25.5 million lobbying the government.

VERIZON

In 2008, Verizon donated more than $218k to Obama’s campaign. In 2012, Verizon donated $224k to Obama’s reelection campaign. Since 2008, Verizon has spent more than $97 million lobbying the government.

AT&T

In total, At&T has given Obama more than $484k for his two elections. The company has spent more than $30 million lobbying the government since 2008.

COX ENTERPRISES 

In 2008, Cox donated $64k to Obama’s campaign. In 2012, the group donated more than $47k. Since 2008, the group has spent more than $28 million lobbying the government.

Together, these five companies represent the top five ISPs in the country. They also represent Obama’s top donors. With Wheeler driving the FCC and Obama’s top campaign donors pulling the puppet strings, it is hard to imagine the administration actually fighting to maintain net-neutrality.

Government sanctioned neutrality is parallel to government sanctioned equality. Backlash and economic dead weight loss are the byproducts of such interference. With the ensuing death of net-neutrality, many are asking a similar question. Will it kill the internet? Doubtful. However, the government sponsored ISP quasi monopoly makes it too soon to tell.

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