A federal district court judge entered eight orders against an " intertwined web" of Florida-based individuals and companies, settling charges they "bombarded" consumers with illegal robocalls about credit card services, said the FTC in a Monday news release. The FTC and the state attorney general's office initially filed a 2015 complaint (see 1506290049) with District Court in Orlando. They alleged defendants doing business as Payless Solutions illegally pitched thousands of consumers nationwide, including seniors, with a credit card interest rate reduction program. Instead, the defendants charged consumers up front $300 to $4,999 without providing services in return, the agency said. Over the past year, the commission unanimously approved seven proposed orders that were filed with the court, which in May also approved a default judgment against three of the defendants. The orders "permanently" ban most of the defendants from robocalling, telemarketing and providing debt relief services, except for the three not charged with robocalling, the agency said. The stipulated orders have monetary judgments totaling nearly $6 million, but will be either completely or partially suspended based on defendants' inability to pay, said the FTC. "If they are later found to have misrepresented their financial condition, the entire amount of the respective judgment will become due." The Better Business Bureau said on its website that Payless Solutions "appears" no longer to be in business.

Prolonged reviews of telecom facilities by the Missouri State Historic Preservation Office are often the fault of those seeking clearance, the SHPO told the FCC. “Many projects that come to the Missouri SHPO for review are missing information regarding previous investigations, sites, and resources within the APEs [areas of potential effect],” the office said in a filing in docket 17-79. “At least fifty percent of projects submitted to our office for review are missing information regarding buildings previously identified as eligible or listed in the National Register, archaeological sites, or previous cultural resource investigations with in the APEs. Sometimes … multiple submissions from the consultant are necessary to get a report that is complete.”

A federal district judge in California approved default judgments against Aaron Michael Jones and nine companies the FTC alleged earlier this year blasted consumers with billions of illegal telemarketing robocalls, the agency said Friday. “The FTC estimates that in making the illegal robocalls, Jones and the companies he controlled called numbers listed on the Do Not Call (DNC) Registry at a rate of more than 100 million per year.” The court orders permanently ban Jones and the companies from all telemarketing activities, “including initiating robocalls, calling numbers on the DNC Registry, and selling data lists containing consumers’ phone numbers and other information,” the FTC said in a news release. Jones was ordered to pay a $2.7 million fine. Jones couldn't be reached for comment.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against DOJ to get records about any FBI use of Best Buy employees and other U.S. computer repair facility informants to do warrantless searches of customers’ computers. The FBI denied EFF's FOIA request for such information, saying bureau policy is not to discuss existence or lack thereof of records about something of investigatory interest, the group said Wednesday in a complaint for injunctive relief to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (case 1:17-cv-01039). But the group said it didn't seek documents about Best Buy itself, as the FBI apparently believed. "The records request aims to shed light on how the FBI co-opts Best Buy repair technicians in criminal investigations, and whether the computer searches they conducted were in effect government searches," said an EFF news release. "Court records in a child pornography case against a California man who sent his computer to Best Buy for repair showed a long, close relationship between company technicians and the FBI, according to media reports." Best Buy, where Geek Squad staff apparently cooperated with the government, and DOJ didn't comment Thursday.

The typical house, with 10 or more connected devices, is stressing the home network, which needs to be “faster, smarter and flexible enough” to be upgraded without disrupting infrastructure, Dan Artusi, general manager of Intel’s Connected Home division, blogged. The challenge is that using a singular connectivity hub doesn’t always provide consistent, reliable connectivity to every corner of a home because Wi-Fi degrades the farther a connected device is from the gateway, Artusi wrote. The company's Home Wi-Fi Development Kit can be used by ISPs to meet some challenges, he said Tuesday.

The U.S. had an average internet connection speed in Q1 of 18.7 Mbps, among the top 10 countries, Akamai reported Wednesday. The U.S. average connection speed increased year-over-year and was up 8.8 percent over Q4, when it was 14th-highest at 17.2 Mbps. South Korea had the highest average speed in Q1 at 28.6 Mbps, Norway No. 2 at 23.5 Mbps, Sweden No. 3 at 22.5 Mbps and Hong Kong No. 4 at 21.9 Mbps. The global average peak speeds in Q1 stood at 44.6 Mbps, with Singapore registering the highest at 184.5 Mbps. The U.S. ranked No. 16 for average peak speed for the quarter at 86.5 Mbps. Global adoption of connection speeds of at least 25 Mbps rose to 12 percent for Q1, with the U.S. having 38 percent adoption of that minimum speed, Akamai said.

A recent court ruling supports the FCC rationale for proposing to return broadband internet access service to a Title I regulatory classification, said Seth Cooper, Free State Foundation senior fellow, in a Monday blog post. He said the FCC 2015 broadband reclassification as a Title II telecom service reached its "strained result" by excluding "Internet access service" from the 1996 Telecom Act's definition of a Title I "information service." A May 8 ruling by Judge Susan Richard Nelson of the U.S. District Court for Minnesota "recognized that an offering’s performance of one function listed under Title I -- transforming -- sufficed to render it an 'information service,'" Cooper wrote, referring to Charter Advanced Services v. Lange, (Case No. 15-cv-3935). The ruling also "emphasized that the information service definition is keyed to the provision of the 'capability' of performing certain functions -- regardless of whether those functions are actually performed in every instance," Cooper wrote. "In Charter Advanced Services v. Lange, it was 'the capability to convert calls' between Internet Protocol (IP) and Time Division Mutiplexing (TDM) that brought Charter Advanced within the meaning of Title I."

FCC staff certified the Perkins School for the Blind as administrator of its $10 million annual National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program ("iCanConnect") in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia. A Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau public notice Monday in docket 10-210 also said the Colorado Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing was certified for Colorado and the Connecticut Tech Act Project for Connecticut. The certifications take effect July 1, said the PN, which noted the bureau would continue to make certification announcements on a rolling basis after reviewing applications and supplemental materials. The Perkins school applied for certification for 22 states and territories, the most of any applicant (see 1704260029).

That FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Mike O'Rielly are backing an appellate court panel decision declaring the junk fax rule unlawful (see 1703310018) means intervenors seeking an en banc rehearing can't show extraordinary circumstances that would warrant granting their request (see 1705010061), said the class-action defendant petitioners. In a response (in Pacer) Friday in U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the defendant petitioners said the panel decision was "a routine application" of the Chevron standard and in line with prior Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit Court decisions. Counsel for intervenors didn't comment Monday.

Comments are due July 3 on the FCC illegal robocalls NPRM and notice of inquiry, the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said Thursday after the item appeared in Wednesday’s Federal Register. Replies are due July 31, said a public notice. The FCC released the robocall items in March (see 1703240046).