Stop it, AT&T.

It appears that AT&T is finally going to allow its customers to unlock the iPhone starting on Sunday. There has to be a catch, right?

Yep. If you’re currently in a two year contract with them, you won’t be able to until after the contract’s up. By then, you’ll probably have purchased a new iPhone. In other words, this changes very little.

Oh well, back to jailbreaking if you want to use it overseas without paying their insane roaming rates, it looks like.

AT&T can’t catch a break. Now it seems that the DoJ has filed another lawsuit against the telecom giant. Turns out that AT&T isn’t doing enough to combat fraud over the Telecommunications Relay Service (aka the teletype system for the deaf).

The United States alleges that AT&T violated the False Claims Act by facilitating and seeking federal payment for IP Relay calls by international callers who were ineligible for the service and sought to use it for fraudulent purposes. The complaint alleges that, out of fears that fraudulent call volume would drop after the registration deadline, AT&T knowingly adopted a non-compliant registration system that did not verify whether the user was located within the United States. The complaint further contends that AT&T continued to employ this system even with the knowledge that it facilitated use of IP Relay by fraudulent foreign callers, which accounted for up to 95 percent of AT&T’s call volume. The government’s complaint alleges that AT&T improperly billed the TRS Fund for reimbursement of these calls and received millions of dollars in federal payments as a result.

Heh. As Ron Paul would put it, “don’t steal–the government hates competition”.. But yeah, if DoJ proves this in court, AT&T is screwed.

AT&T is coming out with a way for developers to pay for the data usage of customers.

Heh. Not sure how I feel about this.

Hell. Yes.

Heh. Now that AT&T withdrew their application from the FCC’s consideration, the judge hearing the DoJ’s lawsuit against AT&T is considering dropping the lawsuit as well. This means that the T-Mobile deal is dead if this happens:

Lawyers for AT&T and T-Mobile, saying the government’s suit against them had turned into their best hope to complete the transaction, urged U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle in Washington to keep the case on track for a Feb. 13 trial. The U.S. argued the case may be moot after AT&T withdrew its merger application at the Federal Communications Commission.

A decision to dismiss or delay the Justice Department’s case would put the deal all but out of reach for AT&T. The company’s strategy for regulatory approval rests on winning a favorable court decision it could use at the FCC to argue that the transaction isn’t anticompetitive. Without such a ruling, AT&T has no chance of getting the deal done, T-Mobile’s lawyer, George Cary, told Huvelle at a hearing yesterday.

Excellent.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

It looks like AT&T is withdrawing the T-Mobile deal from FCC consideration. Turns out that the FCC wanted to hold an administrative hearing on the whole thing, which definitely was not what AT&T wanted to have happen. A failure at the hearing would make the DoJ case against the deal that much harder to defend, and vice versa.

A good strategic move for AT&T, sure. But they may just be fighting the inevitable.

Looks like the judge in the Sprint vs. AT&T lawsuit has some doubts about Sprint’s standing in the case:

Sprint Nextel lost a bid on Monday to get access to masses of AT&T documents that it had hoped to use in its lawsuit aimed at stopping AT&T’s $39 billion acquisition of discount rival T-Mobile.

…

Huvelle, who is hearing both the private antitrust case and the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit to stop the deal, challenged Sprint’s standing at least once during the hearing.

“You don’t stand in the shoes of the consumer or the Department of Justice,” she said.

A setback, definitely.