As most had expected, the House of Representatives today voted 215 to 205 to kill privacy rules protecting US broadband subscribers. If you're interested in a little thing called public accountability, you can find a breakdown of which Representatives voted for the measure here. The rules, approved by the FCC last fall, were slated to take effect this month.
But thanks to relentless lobbying by the broadband and marketing industries, the GOP quickly rushed to dismantle the rules at ISP request. The effort involved using the Congressional Review Act, which only lets Congress kill recently passed regulations, but prevents the regulator in question from implementing the same regulations down the road.
The rules would have required that ISPs transparently disclose private data collection and sales, while requiring ISPs have consumers opt in to the collection of more private financial or browsing history data.
Today's vote came after the Senate voted 50-48 last week to kille the rules. The vote to dismantle the rules is seen as one of the more brazen examples of pay-to-play politics in recent memory. It's a massive win for giant ISPs; especially those like AT&T and Verizon that are pushing hard into the Millennial advertising business.
The FCC pursued broadband privacy rules after companies like Verizon got caught covertly modifying packets to track users around the internet, and companies like AT&T and Comcast began exploring forcing users to pay more for privacy. Other ISPs, like CableOne, have crowed about using financial data to provide poor customers with even worse customer service.
But thanks to incumbent campaign contributions, it was apparently an easy trick for ISP lobbyists to convince lawmakers that the rules were "burdensome regulations" and not necessary consumer protections. ISP lobbyists had told many Representatives that this was just a power grab by the FCC, and the FTC has ample authority to police consumer privacy issues (it wasn't, and it doesn't). In fact, most ISPs have already made it clear they intent to use the common carrier exemptions carved out by AT&T lobbyists to dodge FTC oversight anyway.
I guarantee it you won't find anybody in your district who wants this bill passed. -Rep. Michael Capuao |
Few backers of the bill were willing to vocally give their support to the measure for obvious reasons. The most entertaining part of the day's vote was when House Representative Michael Capuano took to the house floor to openly mock Republicans who supported the effort.
"Go out in the street!" begged the lawmaker (video here). "Please, leave Capitol Hill for five minutes -- go anywhere you want -- find three people in the street who think it's ok. And you can explain to them "ROIs, and the company has to make progress, and we have to make money." You'll lose that argument every single time, as you should. And I guarantee it you won't find anybody in your district who wants this bill passed."
ISPs had spent months arguing that the privacy protections would "hamper innovation" and would somehow "confuse" consumers. It's not a coincidence that companies like AT&T and Verizon are looking to increasingly enter the advertising business via acquisitions of Time Warner, AOL, or Yahoo. ISPs had argued that it was unfair to saddle them with specific regulation not faced by the likes of Google, intentionally ignoring that in broadband, the lack of competition often makes voting with your wallet against bad privacy policy impossible.
Now, with limited competition and ever-shrinking regulatory oversight, there's arguably little to prevent ISPs from doing whatever they'd like with your personal information, including selling it to companies that may wind up using it against you. And no,
just getting a VPN isn't going to be enough to help consumers tackle the consumer privacy issues to come. Next up for giant ISPs and their Congressional allies: killing net neutrality, and eroding FCC and FTC oversight of giant broadband providers even further.