(credit: Aurich Lawson) The Department of Justice today sued DirecTV and its owner, AT&T, saying the satellite TV company colluded with competitors during contentious negotiations to broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers games. Dodgers games have been blacked out in much of Los Angeles because pay-TV providers have been unwilling to pay the price demanded by SportsNet LA, the Dodgers channel operated by the baseball franchise and Time Warner Cable. But the DOJ’s antitrust division placed the blame for this situation on AT&T and DirecTV. In a complaint  filed in US District Court in California, it alleges that DirecTV was a “ringleader” in a coordinated scheme with cable companies Cox and Charter, according to a  DOJ announcement . “Dodgers fans were denied a fair, competitive process when DirecTV orchestrated a series of information exchanges with direct competitors that ultimately made consumers less likely to be able to watch their hometown team,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Sallet said in the DOJ announcement. The lack of a competitive negotiation process is especially bad for consumers in a market like cable television, where customers have “only a handful of choices,” he said. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US gov’t sues AT&T/DirecTV, calls it “ringleader” of collusion scheme

Once again, large swaths of the Internet in the United States were affected by a major morning network outage today. This time, it was the Tier 1 network service provider Level 3 Communications that was at the center of the problem, which disrupted parts of the Internet’s backbone. But for the moment, it does not appear that the outage was triggered by a denial of service attack or other network attack, like the attack on DNS provider Dyn on October 21 . In a statement sent to the media, Nikki Wheeler, Level 3’s senior director of communications, wrote, “Our technical team is looking into this issue to determine the cause. Our priority is to ensure the reliability of our network and services. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.” A Level 3 spokesperson confirmed that the company’s networks had been restored to normal function by 1600 Greenwich Mean Time (noon US Eastern Time) but said that no other information was available yet. The outage had no major impact on major streaming services that use Level 3, including Netflix and the HBO Go mobile application. But it did affect some customers’ voice and Internet services. Level 3 suffered another brief outage a month ago, caused by a human error. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Level 3 drops its packets for hours, causing Internet traffic jam