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by lintroller 2638 days ago
Why was Charter Communications excluded?

Edit: Both CenturyLink and Cox were also exluded.

4 comments

The companies named offer digital advertising services. The issue in question is if they used customer data for advertising purposes.
That is crazy, Charter is the second largest ISP in the US.
Charter has no advertising service as far as I know?
You seem surprised. Why is that?
Except for Comcast as xfinity, they are all closely associated with cellular providers or are cellular providers.
It was launched last year so it isn't a major player yet but Charter does have a cellular product.

https://mobile.spectrum.com/

Comcast / Xfinity is also a mobile provider: https://www.xfinity.com/mobile/
I hadn't realized, well there's the connection at least.
To be fair they use Verizon towers for their cellphone service
They also leverage their 'network' of wifi hotspots (which are just all the home routers they give to cable customers). Either way I imagine they route all the traffic through a gateway on their network so are likely to have just as much opportunity to collect data and/or modify traffic as the tower operator would.
That's a good question, but I have a hunch and am willing to bet that by sheer coincidence they will focus particularly on the smallest of the seven named.