Republicans took the first step toward reversing the Federal Communication Commission’s internet privacy rules today, with 25 senators introducing legislation that would reverse the rules and forbid the commission from passing anything similar to them in the future.
The privacy rules were introduced last year as an addendum of sorts to the 2015 net neutrality order. That order required the FCC to take over enforcement of privacy protection from the Federal Trade Commission, but the FCC needed to pass clear rules in order to effectively do that.
The FCC’s rules mostly align with the FTC’s privacy framework, but they differ in two key ways: the FCC makes internet providers protect your web browsing history, and the FCC has much more leeway to actually enforce its rules.
Of course, neither of those distinctions are things that internet providers like. So they’ve been fighting to overturn them.
For the most part, Republicans just want to see the FCC scale back its rules to more closely match the FTC’s. At a minimum, that’ll mean letting internet providers share your web browsing history so that they can make more ad money.
It’s not clear how quickly Republicans intend to move on this, but, one way or another, these privacy rules are probably going down. Republicans can move forward with this legislation, which would require a majority vote in both houses and a signature from the president. Or they could wait around for the FCC to kill the rules on its own — commission chairman Ajit Pai has already indicated his plans to do that.
In Congress, Republicans are relying on the Congressional Review Act to reverse the rules. The act allows recently enacted rules to be reviewed and reversed by a new Congress, and it’s getting thrown around regularly as a way for Republicans to quickly undo many Obama administration actions from last year.
The big question, if the privacy rules are overturned by Congress, is what the FCC will do next. The law would prevent the FCC from passing any rules that are “substantially the same” as the ones overturned, but it’s not clear what’ll qualify as different enough to clear that bar, especially since the changes Republicans are pushing for aren’t very dramatic.
At the very least, Republicans have made it clear what they want the FCC to pass. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published earlier this month, Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who authored the resolution introduced today, said he wanted to scrap the current privacy rules “in the hope that [the FCC] would follow the FTC’s successful sensitivity-based framework.”
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I keep reminding myself that the reason why Republicans keep coming up with such awful ideas/laws/bills/proposals that hurt people and/or put people in danger is because they’re simply not representing the interests of the people.
AKA Capitalism
This is good news for the EU US Privacy Shield because it will disappear if the Republicans succeed with this and other mechanism and all big cloud providers are forced to make sure the date of their European users are staying in Europe.
#SilverLinings
This is where I hope our dysfunctional legislature fail to get this through both houses of congress, than again its Republicans so they might just do it because they like wantonly exercising power
What happens when you allow a legislature to be controlled by a minority of the population.
Is it nice in your little safe space? I sure hope this election cycle was a nice reality check. All those legislators didn’t get in their position by magic, people voted them in their office. Minorities are still in the minority if they don’t participate in politics. Seriously if all these asshat Republicans aren’t voted out in the midterm elections then America truly is lost. It one thing to complain the government is corrupt and another when you don’t even do the one thing that can boot them from office.
I don’t even know if people in my area, Southern California – LA County, even knew there was an election today lol. Yes, I voted
I see stuff like this and seriously wonder how people can rationalize voting for these clowns.
It happens because the people that vote for the GOP vote for them based on God-Guns-Gays, and nothing else. The rest of the issues – healthcare, legal protections and regulations, the environment – they clearly don’t give a crap about until it’s a Democratic Congress/President, and then they’ll wax polemic on Facebook about the evils of what the D team is doing to privacy, personal finances, etc., or explain why the GOP needs to rob them of their freedoms but the big bad Ds for some reason won’t let them.
As long as their team won they will sell out their own principles and overlook some of the worst partisan congressional excesses in history because A) it means they got to feel good about winning an election, and B) they enjoy getting back at fellow citizens they find to be "elitist" when all they really are is educated and not bigoted.
You do the same things you claim they do. You realize how prejudiced you are by calling all the GOP supporters bigoted?
We need to stop attacking each other and realize both parties are keeping us down. They want to divide us and are succeeding.
It’s Republicans that are screwing things up. Put blame where it belongs.
Both parties screw up plenty. I think you missed my point. He called all GOP supporters bigoted, which is a very bigoted statement.
Considering who the GOP supporters just elected for president, I don’t think it’s all that wrong.
Also, yes both parties screw up, but one party has been much better at governing than the other party. Republicans have governed like crap and Democrats have had to clean up their mess.
Stated correctly and succinctly. Nobody forced GOP voters to elect incompetent malcontents. Clearly that’s the kind of person the average GOP voter thinks deserves to hold high office, so don’t expect me to respect their point of view when they clearly don’t respect their own vaunted "values, let alone the rights of others to even have a differing opinion. The GOP as a whole represents clinical projection, yet daily they become the very thing they claim to be fighting against.
Abjectly blind, false equivalency. Explain how the Dems, objectively speaking, have been anywhere near as bad as the GOP as we comment here with Republican state houses passing bills barring the right of protest, deporting green card holders, banning Muslims, etc.
You cannot escape the fact that the GOP controls most everything outside of a few state houses right now. The history being written right now is on them, not the Dems.
That’s all the GOP has done for the last 20 years. As bad as the Dems are, they are nothing compared to the GOP, objectively speaking. You can throw things like the Iraq War vote and a few other things at me, but face facts: under Dems MORE people had their rights expanded, generally speaking. The GOP can’t wait to reduce freedoms for as many people as possible, AS WE SPEAK. There IS a difference. The Dems don’t have to be the solution, but I’d rather have them in control of government than anyone else right now, because some of them actually give a crap how well government runs.
What I said is true. God-Guns-Gays plays well with conservative voters. If it didn’t, GOP candidates wouldn’t constantly bang these 3 drums and consistently win in areas traditionally religious regions. Just as an example, I have zero conservative contacts on Facebook posting insightful conservative critiques from Andrew Sullivan, David Frum, or William F. Buckley. What they ARE posting about is God-Guns-Gays when they aren’t making snide protestor memes or reposting conspiracy garbage that can be traced back to Breitbart or WorldNetDaily. Oh, and abortion, I forgot.
I love when people throw around the word bigot while obviously fitting the definition themselves. But you know…Buzz words are cool and people like to use them.
Definition of bigot:
a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices
Ah yes, my senator Jeff Flake, purveyor of telephone "town halls" because he knows this is a red state, and doesn’t want to face the voters that don’t like how he’s helping throw away rights.
Hopefully this will lead to private VPNs becoming more popular. That will both counter what they are trying to do and add to their growing problem of people ‘going dark’
This is great news, the ISPs can finally track our usage to target ads .. oh wait, everyone is using https so they can only see what domains you visit.
https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https/metrics/?hl=en
You say finally like this resolution actually changes anything. It doesn’t. This resolution is designed to kill regulations that have not yet taken effect.
Serious question – how is this supposed to be a good thing? How has it been argued that this is protecting the people in some way? Seems like it would need some serious intellectual gymnastics.
- ISPs make make money because they can sell your information
- Companies buy who that information can use it to persuade more people to buy their profits
- ISPs and Companies feed back their happiness in increased profits to the government in teh form of lobbying and donations
Oh, you mean a good thing for the people? When did GOP ever do that?
This needs to be fought actively. I’m so sick of people trying to mess with the net. It’s freedom is one of the reasons it exploded and took off. The innovation has been second to none and now they want to restrict it, take away privacy. Ugh. STOP THE MADNESS!
Why can’t I have a major party that is just sane.
You do have a major party that is sane even if they aren’t perfect and do some stupid things. Unfortunately you just voted them out of office and installed generic conservative Republicans. We saw how this worked out with Bush, I’m sure it will end similar with Trump and the Democrats will once again be called in to clean up the mess.
I voted no such thing. I voted for Gary Johnson and I don’t agree that the Democrats are any better. Both have major issues they are majorly wrong on. I don’t really like either one. I will admit I lean closer to the GOP but that is lessening day by day especially with this recent takeover of the party by nutjobs (many ironically enough who were one part of the democratic base, the blue-collar workers or reagan democrats).
Oh geez Gary Johnson? You are even more clueless than I thought. It’s impossible to look at the last 2 decades of governance and decide that the GOP is on par with the Democrats when it comes to governing. Unless you are just a conservative Republican who doesn’t want to admit it.
Libertarians always say they have a problem with the GOP until the question of Democrats comes up, and suddenly the Dems are the root of all the problems.
No they are both a problem. I think most libertarians, like myself, value economics very highly and we tend to agree more with the GOP on that than the DNC, therefore you may think that we support the GOP more… When in reality we wish for other options.
If you value economics then you would realize that economy under deomcrats has outperformed the economy under republicans. But of course you don’t. You are just a conservative that doesn’t want to be tarred with the label.
Sigh of course you probably think presidents have a major effect on the economy or don’t realize the GOP controlled the house (which deal with the budget) for 6 of Clinton’s 8 years. Or that the recession early in Bush’s presidency actually started in the final quater of Clinton’s presidency, or that any major legislation has a lag factor so the previous administrations policies often aren’t in full effect until the next one.
The economy is not as simple as, OMG GDP looks good during this presidents time, they RULE! sigh…
As soon as somebody leaks some powerful Republican’s use of Grindr, internet privacy will suddenly seem like a good idea again.
Exhibit #72,108,800 that Republicans don’t give a *#@!? about human beings.
But but but they said both parties were the same. They said it didn’t matter who i voted for. But But…Jill Stein protest vote…but Bernie or Bust.
yeah! We got bust!!! Well done people.
(note: i’m not actually talking about you)
I am disheartened by this news, would like to see it overturned. But wouldn’t this be illegal for ISPs to do as the would violate the COPPA act unless they verified that the person browsing was over 13 years old. I hope COPPA can simply be used to sue all ISPs that do this.
The FTC has what is called a "Sensitivity based Framework". What exactly is that?