Court case

Huawei is suing the Federal Communications Commission for choking off its sales in the United States, the latest in the besieged company’s widening efforts to hit back at regulators and critics across the globe. The FCC voted in November to bar American telecommunications companies from using federal subsidies to buy equipment from Huawei and another Chinese supplier, ZTE. Washington considers both firms to be national security risks. “The FCC claims that Huawei is a security threat.

In late October, the Supreme Court quietly declined to review Lipschultz v. Charter Advanced Services, an Eighth Circuit decision that preempted state regulation of fixed Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) service. While concurring in the denial of certiorari, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to challenge the underlying theory of federal preemption, noting that “it is doubtful whether a federal policy — let alone a policy of nonregulation — is" sufficient to establish conflict preemption.

The telecommunications industry lost and consumers won in a Connecticut Superior Court decision that gives cities and towns the right to use existing utility infrastructure within their borders to create municipal networks that deliver cheap, fast internet service to homes and businesses.

The Federal Communications Commission is seeking full-court review of a three-judge panel decision vacating its broadcast media ownership deregulation decision. The FCC filed a petition for review, arguing that the three-judge panel decision imposed burdens beyond those allowed in the Administrative Procedure Act, second-guessed the FCC to the point that it undermined congressional intent, and breaks with higher-court and sister-court pr

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.