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Charter has appealed a contempo loss in the New York Supreme Court. That ruling established that Lease could face a lawsuit from the land of New York. The original lawsuit was filed by Eric Schneiderman against Charter and its Time Warner Cable subsidiary, Spectrum, and alleged that Charter had been advert cyberspace speeds it could not evangelize.

The original lawsuit declared that Lease had been running a racket against its own customers for years. Nosotros're all familiar with the "up to" speeds that ISPs typically list, and there's similar general consumer understanding that performance can and will vary over fourth dimension. What set Charter's instance autonomously is that information technology sold customers plans that functionally crave DOCSIS 3.0 modems, all the same shipped hardware that only supported DOCSIS 1.0 or 2.0. In that location'south a divergence, legally, between telling people "You may run into speeds upwardly to X" and selling them hardware that literally tin can't evangelize anything like the promised operation. Charging customers a rental fee for the privilege of hardware that tin't provide the speeds the company claims it can offer was just the icing on this particular block.

Spectrum-TWC-PromisedSpeed

The more performance you paid for, the less of that performance you got (in percentage terms)

Charter's electric current defense boils downward to this: The FCC defines broadband and the FCC's Measuring Broadband America (MBA) report lists Charter equally 1 of the amend Isp's. Because Charter depended solely on FCC-mandated tests to determine whether information technology met legal requirements for performance, Lease cannot exist held liable for its poor functioning. It'southward also manifestly argued the demise of net neutrality means it cannot be held liable for failure to provide the service it promised.

What Lease is attempting to debate is that because the FCC sets given broadband standards, it (Charter) can simply exist measured or evaluated against those standards. Only this is a misread of the FCC's own policy, which explicitly does not preempt land law when it comes to evaluations of fraud or consumer protections.

But Charter doesn't appear to accept a leg to stand on here. Information technology sold some 640,000 New York Country subscribers plans that promised performance their modems literally couldn't access. The original lawsuit notes that it took other deportment to limit customer performance equally well. To quote:

Spectrum-TWC managed its cable network in a way that did non deliver the promised Internet speeds over whatever blazon of connection. It cutting corners by packing besides many subscribers in the same service group, which resulted in slower speeds for subscribers, especially during top hours. Information technology also failed to add more channels for each service group, which similarly resulted in slower speeds for subscribers.

Fraud is withal fraud, whether internet neutrality is dead for practiced or not. And in this case, the prove all points in the same direction. Charter / TWC / Spectrum allegedly defrauded its customers in New York Land, and it's almost certainly going to face a lawsuit over those allegations. You tin read Charter'south entreatment here; hat-tip to Ars Technica for spotting it.