The Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into potential coordination by AT&T, Verizon and a telecommunications standards organization to hinder consumers from easily switching wireless carriers, according to six people with knowledge of the inquiry. In February, the Justice Department issued demands to AT&T, Verizon and the G.S.M.A., a mobile industry standards-setting group, for information on potential collusion to thwart a technology known as eSIM, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential.

After suffering cyberharassment, one California woman has to pay to keep her stalker from contacting her. Discussing consumers' legal rights, M. O’Neal, who asked to keep her full name private for safety purposes, shared with the Northern California Record how she must pay $5 per month to block her cyberstalker, a small-business owner she met once when having a gift custom-made for her father, through her Verizon Wireless service.

Verizon is currently the only major carrier that doesn’t lock its iPhones and other smartphones upon purchase, but that is now set to change this spring. Reported by CNET, Verizon shared today that it will begin locking phones it sells starting sometime this spring. The carrier curiously says this move is an attempt to reduce theft and fraud.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai probably thought he was adhering to the stand-up comedian’s precept to “know the room” when he launched himself on a jokey, self-deprecating speech last week, complete with a videotaped comedy skit. After all, he was appearing as the featured speaker at the annual dinner of the Federal Communications Bar Assn. That’s a group of which he was once a member, as an in-house Washington attorney for the big telecommunications firm Verizon.

Protestors across the nation rallied in support for network neutrality on Thursday, a week before the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to take a historic vote rolling back network neutrality regulations. Protestors say those regulations, which were enacted by the Obama FCC in 2015, are crucial for protecting an open Internet.

Protesters gathered in front of Verizon stores around the US on Thursday in a last-ditch effort to save Obama-era net neutrality rules. The protests were organized by several advocacy groups, including Fight for the Future, in the hope of pressuring Republicans in Congress to stop the FCC from rolling back the controversial rules adopted in 2015 under President Barack Obama.

Last week, Verizon was caught and subsequently admitted to throttling all video traffic on its network. And today, the company is finally addressing the potential net neutrality issue. In a statement to Broadcasting & Cable, Verizon said that its actions represented “reasonable network management,” which is an exception carved out under the 2015 net neutrality rules. "Video optimization is a non-discriminatory network management practice designed to ensure a high quality customer experience for all customers accessing the shared resources of our wireless network,” a spokesperson said.

The Federal Communications Commission took aim at a signature Obama-era regulation Tuesday, unveiling a plan that would give Internet providers broad powers to determine what websites and online services their customers see and use. Under the agency’s proposal, providers of high-speed Internet services, such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T, would be able to block websites they do not like and charge Web companies for speedier delivery of their content.

Enough is enough. It's time for the Internet to fight back. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to vote on its plan to kill net neutrality on December 14. People from across the political spectrum are outraged, so we’re planning to protest at Verizon retail stores across the country on December 7, one week before the vote and at the peak of the busy Holiday shopping season. We'll demand that our members of Congress take action to stop Verizon's puppet FCC from killing net neutrality.

The hurricanes that hurt Comcast Corp. and Charter Communications Inc. have passed, but investors are still waiting for the storm clouds over the cable industry to lift. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable operator, posted the biggest loss in cable-TV customers in three years, while No. 2 provider Charter reported a drop that was almost four times what analysts had expected.

For an added fee, your smartphone won’t be limited to 720p video when using mobile data.

Verizon opened an internal investigation on Thursday after discovering that a man wore company gear while marching at the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend. CEO Lowell McAdam will personally oversee the probe, he said in a companywide email that marks his first public comments on the controversy.

Imagine if you took every single gripe you've had with Verizon over the past five years — the time it blocked Nexus 7 tablets for five months; the time it forced you to pay $20 per month for tethering; the time it tried to make you use a mobile wallet app called "ISIS" — and finally put your foot down. For a year, you spend free moments holed up in library stacks, speaking with experts, and researching and writing a sprawling legal complaint about the company's many, many misdeeds.

Yesterday, we reported that Verizon Wireless appeared to be throttling Netflix traffic, — and today, the company seems to have come clean. In a statement provided to Ars Technica and The Verge, Verizon implicitly admitted to capping the traffic, blaming the issue on a temporary video optimization test. “We've been doing network testing over the past few days to optimize the performance of video applications on our network," a Verizon Wireless spokesperson said. “The testing should be completed shortly. The customer video experience was not affected.”

Verizon Wireless users over at Reddit have been complaining this week that the company has started throttling their connections to Netflix without informing them of the change. To be clear the throttling is less than you'll see in many instances, with users saying their speeds on Verizon Wireless are capped at around 10 Mbps when both streaming Netflix content -- or running Netflix's simple Fast.com speedtest.

The names, addresses and phone numbers of millions of Verizon customers were publicly exposed online by one of the company's vendors. In some cases, security pins were also exposed by Nice Systems, a Verizon vendor, according to software security firm UpGuard, which uncovered the leak.

A study by Maplight indicates that for every one comment submitted to the FCC on net neutrality (and there have been roughly 5 million so far), the telecom industry has spent $100 in lobbying to crush the open internet. The group found that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) have spent $572 million on attempts to influence the FCC and other government agencies since 2008.

Verizon continues to boot heavy users on the company's "unlimited" wireless data plans off of the Verizon network. Users over at Howard Forums (hat tip, BGR) note that the target appears to be largely rural customers on partner carriers of Verizon's LTE in rural America program (LTEiRA), which provides smaller rural carriers spectrum and technology access in exchange for extending Verizon's cellular reach in these markets.

Lies and hyperbole are certainly no strangers to either side of the net neutrality debate, but as the FCC moves to kill net neutrality -- net neutrality opponents have taken things to an entirely new level. FCC boss Ajit Pai's speech last week unveiling the move was utterly packed with claims that had already been painstakingly debunked over the last decade (read: lies), from the absurd claim that gutting consumer protections would somehow help consumers in the Comcast era, to the similarly untrue claim that net neutrality killed broadband investment.

A U.S. appeals court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s so-called net neutrality rule barring internet service providers from slowing or blocking rivals’ content. The court’s ruling last year was a triumph for companies such as Netflix Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. It was a substantial setback for AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., which lost the opportunity to slow or even block the transmission of disfavored content.