• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 25, 2007

Verizon Wireless this week agreed to pay $1 million to settle an investigation by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo about the company's practice of cutting off consumers who made "excessive" use of their supposedly unlimited Web access plans.

The settlement came after a nine-month probe into Verizon's marketing of its $59.99 a month NationalAccess and BroadbandAccess plans, which promised unlimited service, but didn't adequately disclose that downloading movies or playing games was prohibited. Between September 2004 and April, the company also terminated 13,000 people who it thought used the service too heavily, according to Cuomo.

Details of the settlement come very shortly after revelations of other questionable conduct by Internet access providers. Consider, in the last several weeks, it's come to light that Comcast slows down traffic to peer-to-peer sites, and that Verizon Wireless briefly refused to allow the abortion rights group Naral Pro-Choice America to send text messages to supporters (a decision that the company quickly reversed after a story appeared in The New York Times).

These moves indicate that Internet access providers feel free to restrict users' ability to use the Web to a far greater extent than, for instance, traditional telephone lines. Of course, when it comes to traditional telephone lines, access providers are considered common carriers and subject to a host of regulations.

But even Web service providers are still subject to false advertising claims -- as Cuomo's office proved in extracting this settlement. Perhaps Comcast's delaying traffic and Verizon Wireless's temporary refusal to deliver certain text messages could also form the basis of a false advertising case. After all, if companies like Comcast entice people to purchase Web access by offering them broadband access, and then secretly degrade service to certain sites, consumers have every reason to claim they were misled about what they signed up for.