Court case

A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explored what would happen if the Federal Communications Commission's fee collection to support telecommunications subsidies were overturned, as they dissected the legality of giving the Federal Communications Commission and the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) power to levy the fees.

Tech firms are warning the Supreme Court that weakening liability protections for online speech could put all types of service providers — including those operating offline — at risk of costly, business-wrecking litigation. Companies and parties to the suits made early filings and statements in 

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong opened an investigation into Altice USA’s Optimum internet service after hundreds of consumers alleged the operator failed to deliver promised speeds. The probe comes shortly after Tong’s office inked a $60 million settlement deal with Frontier Communications over consumer complaints about its marketing practices. Tong’s office said it received nearly 500 complaints against Altice over the past five years.

Twitter faces a mass of forces abroad and in Washington that aim to compel the company to obey privacy rules, speech limits and other regulations as Elon Musk remakes the service. Musk's word is law inside Twitter now, but his disdain for rules will encounter tough pushback from governments around the world — just as the company has lost most of the people who managed its relationships with regulators and legislators. Twitter's biggest challenges lie abroad, particularly in Europe, which has been steadily tightening tech regulations for years.

When AT&T’s bold megadeal to buy Time Warner was announced in October 2016, combining AT&T’s broadband and wireless networks with Time Warner content, many analysts and investors cheered. They loved the promise of cutting out the cable middleman and delivering entertainment directly to people’s TVs, laptops, and phones. With Hillary Clinton seemingly poised to be the next president, the regulatory landscape looked favorable.

Each quarter, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) determines the Universal Service Fund (USF) surcharge that is placed on customers’ telecommunications bills. The surcharge is calculated by estimating the cost of the agency’s various universal service programs, divided by the industry’s anticipated telecommunications revenue. As those programs have grown, and that revenue has shrunk, the surcharge has risen from 3 percent in 1998 to a whopping 33 percent in 2021.

Google agreed to a record $391.5 million privacy settlement with a 40-state coalition of attorneys general for charges that it misled users into thinking they had turned off location tracking in their account settings even as the company continued collecting that information. Under the settlement, Google will also make its location tracking disclosures clearer starting in 2023. The attorneys general said that the agreement was the biggest internet privacy settlement by US states.

The Federal Communications Commission, which has responsibility for protecting Americans from potential radiation hazards generated by wireless transmitters and cellphones, has repeatedly sided with the telecommunications industry in denying the possibility of virtually any human harm.

US District Court Judge Daniel Domenico in Colorado, a Trump appointee, has thrown out a lawsuit accusing Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) of violating the First Amendment by blocking a constituent on Twitter. judge Domenico essentially ruled that Rep Boebert was free to block people at will from her @laurenboebert account because it is “held out and operated as a personal and campaign account.” The judge said in his ruling that the block wasn't done by the government, because the Twitter account wasn't an official government account.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld the chapter 11 restructuring of Windstream Holdings Inc., finding bondholder complaints about the debt-cutting plan moot because reversing it would mean unwinding transactions that have already taken place. The court backed Windstream's 2020 restructuring, which put Elliott Management Corp. and other senior creditors in control of the business while wiping out junior bondholders owed roughly $2.4 billion.