Internet Library of Law
and Court Decisions

Billing - Internet Library of Law and Court Decisions - Updated January 21, 2001

Court holds that the FTC is likely to succeed on its claim that defendants' practice of billing telephone line subscribers for international telephone calls made from their telephone lines for the purpose of viewing pornographic web sites violates Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Commission Act ("FTC Act"). Such violation occurs because the line subscribers are billed even if they neither visited the websites in question nor authorized anyone to do so. The court enjoined defendants from continuing to utilize such billing practices to collect for visits to pornographic web sites unless either (i) the line subscriber receiving the bill has entered into a verifiable agreement authorizing such billing, or (ii) the bill expressly states that the line subscriber is not obligated to pay the bill unless he has personally agreed or authorized another to agree to pay for the services in question and provides the line subscriber with a convenient method to cancel the bill if such is not the case.