A few years back, we noted that Verizon -- who has a history of misleading ads itself -- had sued Time Warner Cable for a series of ads that implied that Verizon's FiOS fiber-to-the-home offering was just "catching up" to TWC's own "fiber" offering. Of course, that was blatantly misleading. Time Warner uses fiber within its network but not to the home, which is the whole selling point of FiOS. There have been numerous disputes over this and TWC always comes out on the losing end. The latest, from the National Advertising Review Board (NARB), once again found that TWC's claims were clearly misleading. TWC's response is to petulantly claim that it can no longer accurately describe its own network and this will make it harder to "distinguish their service in areas where their competitors have indisputably inferior products."

Hogwash. TWC can still accurately describe its network and, if it actually is facing off against "indisputably inferior products," it can continue to highlight the specific differences in bandwidth or whatever other metrics that accurately portray the difference. What it cannot do -- and what it clearly had done for a while -- is pretend that its use of fiber deep within the network is, in any way, comparable to Verizon installing fiber all the way to someone's home.