Senate Eliminated Broadband Consumer Privacy Protections Today

Earlier today, the Senate voted 50-48 to repeal rules meant to protect broadband consumers’ privacy from being collected and sold by requires Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The rules, passed last October in the final months of the Obama administration, required ISPs to do two simple things:

  • allow users to opt-out of collecting consumer data
  • require ISPs to opt-in to the collecting of more sensitive data, such as financial information and browsing history

This still has to pass the House and get signed by the President, but if you’re expecting either to block passage of this repeal, I have a bridge to sell you.

With the Senate passing the repeal, those rules protecting your privacy are now history. Your ISP can collect and market any information they have about you or can gather through sniffing your broadband connection. Of course, in an ideal world, you could switch to another ISP, which might not do this collecting. But because of the great expense required to enter the broadband market, there is no true ISP competition. Hell, even a well-heeled company like Google couldn’t penetrate this market. Online privacy is basically toast.

As an armchair political observer, two things stick out:

  1. Is this against the Senate’s own rules? Repealing these rules was because Congress passed and the President ratified the “Congressional Review Act.” The Act’s aim is to allow Congress to repeal any rules that had passed in the last months of the Obama administration with a simple majority, which the Republicans currently have in both chambers. Accordingly, repealing broadband privacy protection rules needed just a simple majority, rather than the filibuster-proof sixty-plus votes required to pass new legislation. I wonder if someone could argue that repealing old laws requires the passage of a new law. Isn’t that how it worked with Prohibition: repealing the 18th Amendment required passing the 21st Amendment?

  2. Since when is privacy a partisan issue? Except for the legislators who are in the pockets of the telecom industry, I don’t see how this is a partisan issue, where fifty Republicans supported it and forty-eight democrats opposed it. I can’t imagine how even the most right-wing fascist would be in favor of this, much less entertain the idea of a left-wing extremist consenting to corporations harvesting selling our consumer data. Like globalization, free trade, and income inequality, these are issues that bind the left and the right together more than it divides them. I thought only corporate fat cats and their lap dogs favor this kind of stuff.

Perhaps it’s time to consider tunneling all your traffic through a VPN to protect your privacy, although that is not a very practical solution.

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