AT&T has settled a series of class actions suits over claims that their customers were billed for services they did not agree to purchase.

The agreement paves the way for AT&T Mobility customers to receive refunds for unauthorized services from D2C companies which appeared on their bills.

You can read more about the outcome of the case here and here.

The case could influence the outcome of similar US lawsuits currently pending for Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile and could have long-term implications for the entire mobile content industry, requiring higher standards of consumer protection.

The whole issue could have been avoided if AT&T and each of the other operators had retained their core competency and forced the use of their existing state-of-the-art user authentication and payment authorization mechanisms for all transactions - even off-portal.

We recognize that this can be tricky when dealing with aggregators and other third parties.

There is a solution, though.

Using “Federation” and other online identity management concepts, a new commercial model is available that enables operators to use their existing secure authentication and authorization infrastructure for both off-portal transactions as well as off-off-portal transactions from the open web.

With ISPs, banks, and major content names already signed on to this model, there are significant market references validating this approach. The mobile industry can gain from this as well.

The model is called OneTouch Online Purchasing, and you can find out more here.