By now AT&T's total disregard for privacy and wiretap laws in their cooperation with the government's warrantless wiretap program is fairly well established. As numerous NSA and AT&T whistleblowers have illustrated, the company dumps all voice and data from any carrier that touches their network directly into the lap of the NSA -- with no warrants or transparency and only marginal government oversight. While Verizon and Sprint also did this, AT&T went the extra patriotic mile, even advising the FBI on how to break surveillance law, even in some cases acting, quite illegally, as intelligence analysts.

The coziness between carriers and government was made very clear when Uncle Sam re-wrote the law specifically to protect the phone companies from charges they repeatedly and willfully broke it.

With that as background, it's not surprising to see new data from the Electronic Privacy Information Center this week emerge showing that the government promises total immunity to any corporation that helps them spy on U.S. citizens.Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has now set up a system whereby "2511 letters" make violations of wiretap laws magically disappear:Needless to say, all of this exists on very shaky ground, and the government will need to re-write the law to ensure none of this rather disgusting behavior (if you respect liberty and privacy or even the rule of law) is challenged.

Wilson, North Carolina is the home of a municipal fiber deployment named Greenlight that has offered symmetrical 100 Mbps connections since 2009, and is now poised to offer locals speeds up to 1 Gbps. The deployment has been a favorite target for incumbent providers for years; Time Warner Cable has a long history of using misleading push polls to confuse locals, and both writing and lobbying for state-level laws aimed at preventing other "Wilsons" from sprouting up.

It has been interesting to watch the responses of the two companies impacted most by Google Fiber's deployments: AT&T and Time Warner Cable. Both companies have fought competition tooth and nail over the years, and now that they're finally staring a little bit of it in the face, their responses have very much matched their corporate character.

AT&T appears poised to begin offering new U-Verse speed tiers that should offer a belated speed increase for bandwidth-hungry users. Earlier this year AT&T promised users they'd eventually see 75-100 Mbps using line bonding, though the company was somewhat murky on deployment time -- or upstream speeds.

For years the music and film industries have been pushing to have broadband users disconnected from the Internet as the final penalty after repeated warnings for copyright violations. Those efforts have run into repeated problems not only thanks to heavy resistance from ISPs unwilling to lose paying customers but in the courts, where the lifetime or year-long loss of broadband is seen as excessive punishment.

For years the cable industry insisted that they imposed usage caps because network congestion made them necessary. You'll recall that Time Warner Cable insisted that if they weren't allowed to impose caps and overages the Internet would face "brown outs." Cable operators also paid countless think tanks, consultants and fauxcademics to spin scary yarns about a looming network congestion "exaflood," only averted if cable operators were allowed to raise rates, impose caps, eliminate regulation or (insert pretty much anything here).

On the heels of dropping Ovation, Time Warner Cable has now dropped Current TV from the company's channel lineup. The cable operator, alongside other pay TV operators like Verizon, has stated that since broadcasters are being so aggressive in retransmission licensing and ESPN programming costs keep soaring -- cable outfits will be dropping poorer performing networks.

After Time Warner Cable took a public relations beating for pushing low caps and high per byte overages on consumers back in 2009, the company has been stepping very carefully in what is quite obviously their relentless desire to charge consumers broadband overages. Early this year their metered billing option returned to a few tiny markets as a voluntary option named "Internet Essentials."

The company promises users a $5 discount off their bill if they sign up for the plan, which features a 5 GB cap and $1 per gigabyte overages.

ESPN has dramatically expanded the volume of ESPN content available to Xbox 360 owners via broadband, though you'll still need a traditional cable account to view any of it. According to a Microsoft blog post, Xbox live Gold members can now access all ESPN live programming, including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPNU, Buzzer Beater and Goal Line.

HBO's HBO Go broadband streaming service is currently only available to customers who not only have a cable subscription, but also only to those whose ISPs have struck an arrangement with HBO. And while Netflix says they assume that such a standalone offering is inevitable for HBO, HBO has repeatedly insisted such an offering isn't sustainable (read: we don't want to lose the huge subsidies we get from cable operators).

FCC boss Julius Genachowski has been busy lately paying lip service to Silicon Valley, most recently telling a bunch of Silicon Valley conference attendees that caps were something we should be "concerned" about, after telling cable companies just a few months earlier he thought caps and overages are nifty and innovative. Speaking again to Silicon Valley folks yesterday at a speech at Vox Media headquarters, Genachowski hashed out his muddy position a little further, again insisting he was "concerned" about caps -- sort of -- maybe:

After Time Warner Cable took a public relations beating for pushing low caps and high per byte overages on consumers back in 2009, the company has been stepping very carefully in what is quite obviously their relentless desire to charge consumers broadband overages. Early this year their metered billing option returned to a few tiny markets as a voluntary option named "Internet Essentials," which provides a dubious $5 in "savings" if you agree to a 5GB cap with $1 per gigabyte overages. As part of this launch, the company has claimed they're interested in having a "dialogue" with users about the new pricing option, but as Stop the Cap notes, the website that Time Warner Cable is using for this supposed "conversation" appears to have been censoring all public comments on the new plan. Despite caps and overages being hugely unpopular, just one user comment has been posted to the site (it's not even on topic). Perhaps users can contribute their (polite) thoughts to the supposed conversation and let us know if Time Warner Cable publishes them?

Like other smaller competitors and consumer advocates, Sprint is worried that Verizon's new massive marketing and spectrum deal with the cable industry and the cable industry's new Wi-Fi sharing arrangement are collectively anti-competitive nightmare in the making, with the involved companies trying even less hard than they do now to compete on the landline and wireless front. In a new filing with the FCC, Sprint pushes for several new conditions on the deal, which is currently being reviewed by regulators.

Last December Verizon announced that in addition to buying $3.6 billion in spectrum from the cable industry, they'd soon be partnering with them as well -- Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox and Bright House all agreeing to bundled Verizon Wireless services with their triple plays. The deal has taken significant heat from consumer advocates for its potential erosion of competition; particularly of the landline variety in smaller markets where competition barely exists as it is.

Back in January TiVO got AT&T to pay out $215 million for DVR-related patent violations, or roughly $59.72 for each of AT&T's 3.6 million U-Verse TV subscribers. This was after Dish was forced to pay out nearly twice that amount. TiVO's now setting their sights elsewhere, and have sued both Time Warner Cable and Motorola for patent infringement. According to Forbes, there's three patents in question, all covering some facet of time-shifting capabilities.TiVO's also busy cutting prices on TiVO subscriptions in the hopes of appealing to cable customers who are tried of monthly DVR rate hikes like the kind being imposed by Verizon FiOS.

A new survey by Altman Vilandrie & Co. found that just 3.7 percent of the 1,000 Americans surveyed have "cut the cord" or cancelled their pay subscription TV service. However, the same study also found that 20% of those surveyed are now saving additional cable costs wherever they can as they consume more Internet video. For heavy TV watchers Internet video certainly is no replacement (in large part because legacy industries work tirelessly to keep it that way), though 20% of those under 44 say have "seriously considered" cutting the cord. Right now it appears that cable VOD is taking the biggest punch, with a recent study noting VOD accounts for 1% of all video viewing. As noted this morning, cable VoIP subscriptions may be the next to suffer.

Just about two years ago the FCC introduced our first ever national broadband plan. While designed to appear comprehensive and ambitious, I noted at the time that beyond the chocolate-flavored exterior lay a very hollow project.

In December Verizon, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Bright House announced a massive deal that not only involved the sale of $3.6 billion in cable industry spectrum to Verizon, but also gave the telco the right to bundle their wireless service with the cable triple play. It's an interesting deal that, taken alongside Verizon's new residential LTE service, poses some interesting problems for both satellite broadband providers and smaller telcos.

• Comcast CEO offers sneak peek at X1 service [fiercecable.com]
• Time Warner Cable closes its $3 billion acquisition of Insight Communications [multichannel.com]
• Record Labels Threaten the Open Internet, isoHunt Tells Court [torrentfreak.com]
• Cablevision rate freeze is bad news for Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable [fiercecable.com]
• Wireless carriers are getting left behind, and it's their own fault [fiercewireless.com]
• UK ISP Be admits iPlayer traffic has overloaded and crippled its network, no fix until April [theregister.co.uk]
• What Happens When You Get ‘Throttled’? [pcworld.com]
• Senator will end his block on the current nominees for FCC Commissioner, if the FCC provides the documents related to LightSquared to the House Energy & Commerce Committee [fmqb.com]
• Comcast Ready to Mine for VoD Gold [lightreading.com]
• Apple, Google and Microsoft 'unlikely' to adopt key GSMA privacy rules [pcadvisor.co.uk]
• Constitutional Showdown Voided: Feds Decrypt Laptop Without Defendant’s Help [wired.com]
• Home Installation - You're doing it wrong: Comcast van crashes into house, causes major damage [fiercecable.com]