Angry customer sues Time Warner over forced cable box rental

Angry customer sues Time Warner over forced cable box rental

Cable companies shouldn't force subscribers into renting cable boxes when they could just purchase one outright and save money, a new lawsuit alleges. Kansas native Matthew Meeds has filed what he hopes will become a class-action lawsuit against Time Warner Cable and parent company Time Warner over what he considers to be an illegal tying arrangement that violates antitrust laws and hurts customers.



...attorney John Edgar likened Time Warner's behavior to the days when AT&T used to require customers to rent phones from the company instead of using their own equipment. "I think it's very similar to the cases brought back in those days, where slowly but surely, the courts whittled away at that kind of protectionist activity by AT&T," Edgar told the paper. "I think the same thing is present here. You have a lot of companies out there manufacturing these boxes, and there's nothing necessarily proprietary about them."

Indeed, it has now been 40 years since the FCC ruled that AT&T could not force customers to rent specific handsets directly from the company as long as other devices don't harm the phone system, and the landmark case has been used frequently to shape modern FCC rulings.