The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened a claims process Thursday for former AT&T customers who had their data throttled to receive compensation, according to a release.
The FTC said customers who had an unlimited data plan between 2011 and 2015 may be eligible for a refund from the $7 million remaining in a fund created to settle data throttling allegations from the wireless provider.
In 2019, the FTC required AT&T to provide $60 million in refunds for failing to tell customers that their unlimited data plan would be throttled after users reached a certain amount of data usage in a given month.
According to the FTC, some customers experienced data speeds so slow that internet browsing and video streaming became difficult or nearly impossible.
The money AT&T paid the FTC went into a fund that the provider used to provide partial refunds to customers who had throttled data plans.
But AT&T has yet to reach everyone eligible for a refund, so the FTC is using the funds to provide partial refunds to customers meeting specific criteria.
Eligible people must be former AT&T customers who have yet to receive a check or credit from AT&T and had an unlimited data plan that was noticeably throttled between Oct. 1, 2011 and June 30, 2015. Customers have until May 23, 2023 to submit a claim.
Data throttling for unlimited data plans is not uncommon. Most unlimited plans come with some sort of deprioritization in the fine print, meaning that after a certain amount of usage, a user’s account is subject to slowdowns when the network is busy.
But AT&T didn’t disclose this to customers, not even in the fine print. AT&T and T-Mobile rolled out fully unlimited plans in 2021, but only to their top-tier data plan holders.
Other companies, like Verizon, still use deprioritization in unlimited data plans.
Sign up to receive the Daily Dot’s Internet Insider newsletter for urgent news from the frontline of online.
Source: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/att-data-throttle-payout-ftc/