Comcast pays state fine, appeals federal sanction
Comcast is to pay $150,000 to the state of Florida for breaching rules on bandwidth management. But it has confirmed that, as expected, it will appeal against the recent FCC ruling that it breached federal guidelines.
The Florida case involved Comcast threatening to cut off the 1,000 users who consumed the most bandwidth. That may not seem like a big deal considering the company has 14 million users in the state, but it fell foul of the rules by failing to tell users exactly how much downloading would put them into the affected group.
The state government also argued that Comcast was guilty of misleading advertising back in 2003-4 when it advertised “unlimited” internet service. Attorney General Bill McCollum (pictured) ruled that consumers seeing such ads would reasonably interpret that as meaning there were no data limits; the broadband industry has sometimes argued the term only applies to the time spent on-line.
The $150,000 payment is a negotiated figure to settle the investigation, with $50,000 paying for the government costs in this specific investigation and the rest a ‘punishment’ fine which will go into the pot for the state’s future pro-consumer work. Comcast is also barred from cutting off users without giving details of the data allowance, which it has now set at 250GB a month.
Meanwhile Comcast has formally appealed against the Federal Communications Commissions ruling that it broke ‘net neutrality’ guidelines by slowing down access for users of peer-to-peer programs. The appeal filing is relatively brief and generalised, though it appears Comcast lawyers will argue that FCC guidelines aren’t legally enforceable as they’ve never been through the traditional scrutiny of Congressional lawmaking.
Ironically the Associated Press reports that Congress is unlikely to pass many laws on internet technology in coming months. Instead it seems more likely to put pressure on firms by holding hearings and lodging complaints with the FCC.
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