AT&T is facing a complaint alleging that it discriminates against poor people by providing fast service in wealthier communities and speeds as low as 1.5Mbps in low-income neighborhoods.

The formal complaint filed today with the Federal Communications Commission says that AT&T is violating the Communications Act's prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination. That ban is part of Title II, which is best known as the authority used by the FCC to impose net neutrality rules. But as we've explained before, Title II also contains important consumer protections that go beyond net neutrality, such as a ban on discrimination in rates, practices, and offerings of services.

"This complaint, brought by Joanne Elkins, Hattie Lanfair, and Rachelle Lee, three African-American, low-income residents of Cleveland, Ohio alleges that AT&T’s offerings of high-speed broadband service violate the Communications Act’s prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination," the complaint says.

AT&T is not immune to the ban on discrimination "merely because its discrimination is based on investment decisions," the complaint also says.

Title II authority on chopping block

The FCC's Republican leadership has proposed removing the commission's Title II authority from broadband. But the complaint regarding AT&T's current behavior "should not be dismissed based on a future regulatory decision," the complaint says. The Cleveland residents also argue that the FCC can take action against AT&T under its Section 706 authority to promote broadband deployment. But unlike Title II, Section 706 doesn't explicitly ban discrimination.

A press release further describes the complainants' broadband problems:

[T]he women receive slow speeds at a rate as low as 1.5Mbps downstream or less, although they pay AT&T for high-speed access; meanwhile residents in wealthier and predominantly white areas have gotten premium, upgradable high-speed broadband access at bullet speed comparatively. As a result of the ineffectual and substandard quality level of speed, the women’s children cannot access homework sites, [and] their home security system[s] that rely on broadband connectivity [are] rendered useless.

Evidence of discrimination

The complaint's allegations are based partly on a study we wrote about in March. The study by advocacy groups analyzed FCC data and alleged that "AT&T has systematically discriminated against lower-income Cleveland neighborhoods in its deployment of home Internet and video technologies over the past decade." (Another study found a similar pattern in California.)

In Cleveland, AT&T has withheld its fiber-to-the-node infrastructure from "the overwhelming majority of census blocks with individual poverty rates above 35 percent," the complaint said. The study cited in the complaint is titled, "AT&T’s Digital Redlining of Cleveland," and it was written by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and a Cleveland-based group called Connect Your Community.

The complainants and AT&T have held settlement talks, but the two sides have not come to an agreement. "Defendant does not acknowledge its obligation to serve Complainants; therefore parties are sufficiently far apart that we seek Commission intervention in this dispute," the complaint says.

AT&T offered to deploy a 5G wireless service but not faster wired Internet, the complaint said.

Formal complaints to the FCC like this one require a filing fee of $225 and kick off a court-like proceeding in which the parties appear before the commission and file numerous documents to address legal issues. The complainants asked the FCC for monetary damages and an injunction prohibiting AT&T from continuing to engage in "discriminatory and anticompetitive conduct and practices."

We contacted AT&T about the complaint and will update this story if we get a response. After the "Digital Redlining" study was released in March, AT&T defended its network investment in Cleveland but did not dispute any of the advocacy groups' specific findings.

UPDATE: AT&T responded with a statement from Joan Marsh, executive vice president of regulatory and state external affairs, who said, "We do not redline. Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is unparalleled. Our investment decisions are based on the cost of deployment and demand for our services and are of course fully compliant with the requirements of the Communications Act. We will vigorously defend the complaint filed today.”