That's what Oregon SoS Kate Brown claimed in a recent letter to the FCC that was ghost-written by a Comcast representative. After all, their "service" is Comcastic! And don't you dare try to disconnect from them:
Like many phone companies and ISPs, Comcast makes it frighteningly difficult to cancel an account. The company retains an army of retention specialists whose sole job is to keep you from signing off. Last year, the journalist Ryan Block recorded a Kafkaesque conversation he had with a Comcast retention specialist from hell.
But sometimes, even federal bureaucrats manage to get something right, as we see with yesterday's settlement between the FTC and TracFone:
Federal regulators are cracking down on mobile service providers that advertise “unlimited” data plans only to reduce the speed of data transmission if customers reach a certain limit on their data use. Slowed data speeds can make it difficult for mobile device users to browse the web or watch streaming videos.
On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced that TracFone Wireless, the largest prepaid mobile provider in the United States, had agreed to pay $40 million to settle agency charges that it deceived consumers by unfairly engaging in the practice, known as “throttling.”
The FTC is continuing to work on a similar case involving AT&T, which has also engaged in throttling while promising unlimited data plans. The problem, here, isn't that it interferes with streaming video - which the article stupidly cites as a concern - the problem is that it slows transmission of plain old data. That impedes your ability to access public information records, among other things.
Fortunately, I don't rely on phones to do that, but throttling, if permitted, would rapidly expand to other spheres.
