Hosted Payload S2.E1: Caroline Van Wie/Working Girl
The Fifth Circuit on April 17 vacated a $57 million FCC forfeiture against AT&T, ruling the agency violated the company’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial under the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in SEC v. Jarkesy. ...more
On April 17th, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an FCC penalty violates the Seventh Amendment based on the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in SEC v. Jarkesy. The Seventh Amendment provides for the...more
As more organizations across industry sectors store personal data with cloud storage vendors— including the three largest vendors in the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—federal...more
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a $13 million settlement with AT&T that concluded an investigation into a third-party data breach that exposed AT&T customer data. This is the latest in a series...more
AT&T Inc. announced in a July 12, 2024, SEC filing that hackers stole a cache of six months’ worth of mobile phone customer data, illegally downloading the records from a workspace account at the cloud-service provider...more
The FCC continues to take a more active role in privacy with its enforcement of the customer propriety network information (“CPNI”) regulations. Recently, the FCC released Forfeiture Orders against the three largest mobile...more
On April 29, 2024, the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) announced that it had fined the nation’s largest wireless carriers a total of $196 million for violating consumer data privacy rights. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile...more
On January 30, 2024, AT&T announced a new feature aimed at reducing the number of unsolicited telemarketing calls delivered to its subscribers. AT&T is teaming up with TransUnion, a credit reporting company, to roll out this...more
On September 21, 2021, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued the latest single in its anthology of decisions regulating the relationship between incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) and electric utilities,...more
On September 3, 2020, the Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ) released a Merger Remedies Manual, updating its 2004 Policy Guide to Merger Remedies. (DOJ’s 2011 Policy Guide to Merger Remedies was withdrawn by DOJ...more
A federal district court judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., dismissed the complaint in a case filed by Genius, a platform that lets users share and annotate lyrics, holding that the plaintiff’s claims were preempted by copyright law....more
In recent years, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) has been a major source of potential liability for companies that send marketing text messages. ...more
The Seventh Circuit has recently joined the Second, Third, Sixth and Eleventh Circuits in adopting a narrow interpretation of Automatic Telephone Dialing System (ATDS) under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”), one...more
Paul Singer and the Elliott Mgmt crew have a new target in their sights: Twitter’s founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey. Singer’s Elliott fund has amassed a “significant stake” in the company—perhaps as much as a billion—and is...more
After a long road that included questions over the scope of FTC and FCC jurisdiction, AT&T finally settled one of two cases challenging the unlimited data plans it offered to consumers. On Tuesday, November 5, 2019 the...more
Bloomberg is reporting that Walgreens Boots is weighing a potential deal “to take the company private in what could become the largest leveraged buyout in history.” PE firms like KKR are apparently in the mix to assist in the...more
In a Public Notice released October 7, 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced the status of the 39 short-form applications for Auction 103, which is scheduled to begin on December 10, 2019. ...more
On October 22, 2016, AT&T announced its $108 billion proposed acquisition of Time Warner. After a year-plus investigation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed suit to enjoin the merger, alleging that the transaction would...more
On 27 February 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously in an en banc decision that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may bring enforcement actions against AT&T and other telecommunications...more
AT&T has dropped plans to sell the Mate 10—the newest smartphone from China’s Huawei Technologies—just before the partnership was to be announced. AT&T gave no reasons for its abrupt reversal, but lawmakers have recently...more
DealBook’s Common Sense column takes a look at the AT&T/Time Warner deal and the “battle lines” forming for an “epic” antitrust battle, in spite of the vertical nature of the merger (the companies don’t compete in any...more
According to several news outlets, the Department of Justice has called on AT&T and Time Warner to sell DirectTV or Turner Broadcasting, which includes CNN, in order to gain approval of AT&T's $84.5 billion acquisition of...more
In late February, the Texas Court of Appeals issued an opinion resolving an eight-year dispute concerning municipal pole attachment fees charged to AT&T and Time Warner Cable (TWC) by CPS Energy (CPS), an electric utility...more
The tech industry’s divide over “net neutrality” deepened when the FCC voted this past Thursday to suspend key Obama-era net neutrality requirements for broadband internet service providers (“ISPs”). The FCC’s net neutrality...more
In an Order released December 30, 2016, the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau granted appeals of a 2015 USAC decision that denied E-rate funding to the Sweetwater consortium of Tennessee school districts for funding years...more