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Charter can charge Netflix and other online video streaming services for network interconnection despite a merger condition prohibiting the practice, a federal appeals court ruled today.
The ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturns two merger conditions that the Obama administration imposed on Charter when it bought Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016. The FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai did not defend the merits of the merger conditions in court, paving the way for today's ruling. The case was decided in a 2-1 vote by a panel of three DC Circuit judges.
[...] The case turned largely on the question of whether the consumers who sued had standing to challenge the conditions. Even if other factors besides interconnection contributed to the price increases, "the subscribers need not show that prohibiting paid interconnection agreements caused the entirety of the price increases, or even that it caused price increases of some specific amount," judges wrote. "For standing purposes, even a small financial injury is enough, and the consumers have shown a substantial likelihood that their bills are higher because of the prohibition on paid interconnection agreements."
[...] Charter told the FCC in a filing that it doesn't "currently" plan to impose data caps or charge video providers for interconnection, but the company wants the prohibitions lifted because they "put Charter at a competitive disadvantage" and "forc[e] Charter to run its network based on arbitrary merger conditions instead of market conditions." Charter's filing also claimed that broadband plans with data caps are "often popular" with consumers.
[...] Wood [VP of policy at consumer-advocacy group Free Press] pointed to a Free Press filing to the FCC that he said shows "Charter was delivering better value and getting better financial results for itself than any other big wired ISP. So the notion that either Charter or its customers have suffered from the conditions is a joke, as is any claim by the litigants that unconditioned mergers and monopolies are somehow better for people."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hash14 on Tuesday August 18 2020, @12:41AM (3 children)
"We don't like these rules anymore, can we just not follow them now?" Wow, then maybe you shouldn't have merged at all then. If the merger conditions are so bad, then why not break up so you don't you just break the company back into its original pieces? Why not just never have agreed to them in the first place?
This shameless hypocrisy is what you get when you create a society with only pigs^Wbusiness people at the top.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2020, @03:11AM (1 child)
The problem here is that they expected the conditions to be ignored when they agreed to them. In all fairness, that's been how that's been dealt with in the US for decades now. The judiciary is mostly stocked with judges that will ignore the ramifications of their decisions while masturbating over the legal theories. They're nearly as bad as the politicians that appoint them. The only reason that they're nearly as bad is that they occasionally buck the intention of their being placed on the bench and come up with the odd good ruling every once in a long, long, extremely long while.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday August 18 2020, @04:36AM
That's basically the purpose of the judiciary: to serve as a check against the legislative and executive branches doing stupid or corrupt things. The fact that judges aren't all replaced every election is part of this mechanism; it's like a long feedback loop in control system theory. But they are replaced occasionally, as they retire or die or move to new jobs, and new ones are selected by the current crop of politicians. So when they're aligned with the current leaders, you get rulings that back up the current administration, instead of bucking it, as you frequently get when the judges were selected by the opposing party in an earlier election cycle.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 18 2020, @10:37AM