Several cable companies, including Comcast, Brighthouse, and Time Warner Cable have filed a complaint with the FCC about Verizon’s “retention marketing” practices. First reported in Multichannel News, the cable operators claim that Verizon is using their knowledge of number porting requests to target customers who have already committed to switch phone service to cable competitors. Such a practice is against FCC rules. Carriers are only permitted to try to win customers back after they have switched, not try to convince them not to go once they have begun the process. FCC rules state that a carrier can’t use a porting request to try to influence a customer’s decision to switch carriers. Maybe this is a little payback to Verizon for their current and future patent lawsuits against cable companies over VoIP technology. The battle over VoIP is sure to get more complicated as competitors use a variety of regulatory and legal tactics to try to slow each other’s progress down.
