Marriott to Pay $600K to Resolve WiFi-Blocking Investigation
fcc.gov
fcc.gov
Also, Marriott's response at http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/marriott-internation... and http://news.marriott.com/2014/10/marriott-internationals-sta....
In summary, this was specific to one single property in Nashville, Tennessee; however, the ruling appears to be specifically against Marriott (it's unclear whether it applies to all the franchise locations, though).
They were basically sending de-auth packets for any foreign hotspots; something that's very easy to do; you can send these http://bxr.su/o/net80211/ieee80211.h#IEEE80211_FC0_SUBTYPE_D... via OpenBSD's hostapd (see http://mdoc.su/o/hostapd.conf.5). There's even a way to cycle through all the channels from 1 to 14 (`hopper` keyword), sending these `deauth` packets to everyone; I've tried it as a test years ago --- it works (I think Reyk had a talk about it years back, which was what spiked my interest back then).
Allegedly, as per DSLR, some such `deauth` feature was available as an option in some Cisco equipment (which, allegedly, has since been removed from newer versions of said equipment).