I wish folks would stop referring to this change in terms of "Web history" or "search history."
First, the Web is just one of the many, many services delivered over the Internet. At this very moment, I'm streaming a radio program on my Roku, nothing to do with the Web, really. I did not follow a hyperlink to start listening to this stream. I subscribe to a VOIP service. Lots of folks use the Internet to effect multiplayer games. Although the Web might be a lot of people's Internet activity, there are lots and lots of other Internet uses. I'd also like folks to stop using the phrase "TCP/IP" because there is soooo much more than TCP which goes over IP, but that's a whole other matter.
Next, saying "Web history" will no doubt cause many people to think the ISP somehow reaches into your computer, phone, tablet, or whatever and retrieves the database which your browser(s) maintain(s), and nothing could be further from the truth. Saying "search history" implies the ISP can "see" everything transiting their network, which really all they know is the metadata of the IP address to which packets have been sent or from which packets have been received. If, like Google Search, the data have been encrypted, that's ALL they know, they do NOT know the search terms. In fact, until recently, Google Voice used the domain www dot google dot com (with /voice or /voice/m as the path), so to the casual observer an access might look like a "search" but it isn't. (Recently it has been changed to voice dot google dot com, unless you're using the "legacy" version.)
With greater and greater application of encryption, especially through efforts like HTTPS Everywhere and Let's Encrypt,
at best an ISP has only metadata about IP addresses with which a customer exchanges packets. If they want to go through the trouble of DPI, they might also have the contents of DNS queries and replies. (Or, of course, they might log the recursive queries sent to their own caches provided for their customers, but a lot of customers would be using OpenDNS, Google Public DNS, their own recursing cache, etc.)
Besides, these regulations have only been in effect for how long? 6 months or something like that?
(CORRECTION: DGrossman
informs us the regulations
never went into effect.)