No, its not. This is quite obvious from the time of the documents (The January 15 document you point to could not, even without looking at its content, be a response to the settlement the FCC just announced with Smart City.)
If you actually read the content of the thing you say is "Smart City's response", its Smart City's response comments in support of a petition filed by Marriot [0]seeking to have the FCC repudiate the principle that formed part of the basis for the judgement against Marriot and Smart City.
But note that even in that response, Smart City does not take the position that the actions for which it was being investigated, which it admitted to in the Consent Decree and claims to have discontinued when it learned of the investigation in 2014, should be permitted, instead taking a position that de-authentication should be allowed when based on specific objective measures indicating a threat to networks, whereas what they were doing (by their own admission) before, and were fined for, was indiscriminating sending de-authentication packets shut down WiFi access points that they did not control.
> What, time didn't exist before today's decision?
Time did, and part of time is that responses don't occur before the thing they respond to.
> It was a response - just to an earlier round of the same debate
Its not even that; its a response in a parallel but tangentially related proceeding that started after the complaint on which the current Consent Decree was filed, addressed a different issue, and was never resolved because the party that filed it (Marriott) later withdrew it.
And Smart City's response in that proceeding essentially argues that the FCC can and should prohibit the conduct which Smart City admitted to in the consent decree, though it argues that the prohibition should be based on a different legal foundation than the one cited in the Marriott and now Smart City consent decrees.
(It also argues that the FCC should not prohibit a different, more targeted practice of de-authing that is actually based on more specific objective indicia of a threat to an existing network, which no FCC enforcement action as yet has targeted.)
No, its not. This is quite obvious from the time of the documents (The January 15 document you point to could not, even without looking at its content, be a response to the settlement the FCC just announced with Smart City.)
If you actually read the content of the thing you say is "Smart City's response", its Smart City's response comments in support of a petition filed by Marriot [0]seeking to have the FCC repudiate the principle that formed part of the basis for the judgement against Marriot and Smart City.
But note that even in that response, Smart City does not take the position that the actions for which it was being investigated, which it admitted to in the Consent Decree and claims to have discontinued when it learned of the investigation in 2014, should be permitted, instead taking a position that de-authentication should be allowed when based on specific objective measures indicating a threat to networks, whereas what they were doing (by their own admission) before, and were fined for, was indiscriminating sending de-authentication packets shut down WiFi access points that they did not control.
[0] which Marriott withdrew later the same month as the Smart City response was filed; the FCC file on that petition is http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/proceeding/view?name=RM-11737