In November 2011, AT&T Mobility agreed to pay $67.5 million in fines and penalties to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over violations of wireless customer privacy rules.
On July 14, 2012, AT&T announced it will stop promoting Facebook Credits on its smart phones starting July 19. AT&T said its customers will still be able to access Facebook and its many best-known apps, however.
AT&T Mobility has come under fire by net neutrality advocates for using deep packet inspection to block BitTorrent traffic on their network. The company has stopped blocking peer-to-peer traffic since 2009, but blocking P2P protocols such as BitTorrent remains in place on the AT&T 3G and 4G LTE networks. AT&T is the only major US carrier to block BitTorrent traffic on their mobile data networks.
In an FCC report published in May 2012, AT&T was criticized by the commission for providing a “track record of market conduct” of violating net neutrality principles. AT&T was singled out as the worst network in terms of complaints by customers. AT&T was also criticized for imposing “limits on usage” and “excessive fees”.
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In April 2012, AT&T announced it would stop selling the Apple iPhone family of smartphones to customers who use its older and slower 2G wireless network. This move has attracted criticism from some groups, including Free Press and Public Knowledge. Free Press research director S. Derek Turner said that “AT&T’s decision to block an entire class of phones is deeply disturbing” and goes against the grain of net neutrality principles, which are that Internet service providers should not favor one type of content over another. Turner said that AT&T is guilty of “steering” consumers toward its own high-speed 3G network.
AT&T is the first major U.S. mobile service provider to introduce a data connection charge, in March 2008. AT&T Mobility was among the first companies to introduce a mobile advertising service in 2009. In October 2009, AT&T was one of the most aggressive mobile operators in combating illegal file sharing and launched a program similar to The Pirate Bay’s “Pirate SMS” service allowing customers to identify unauthorized file sharing on their phones using an email address or phone number supplied by copyright holders.