Don't Facebook, et. al. do this already? Don't most people spend most of their time on Facebook anyway? ISPs just want a cut of the action.
This is very different from a service provider collecting and selling information about communications between third parties.
A service provider, on the other hand, is in a position that has absolutely no legitimate claim on the contents of communications between third parties.
Postal services are not expected to rifle through the contents of their customer's packages. Phone companies are not expected to record people's phone calls (or even reveal who's calling who). There is no reason why data communication providers should be allowed to do these things.
We should strongly push for real legislation that bars these companies from collecting browsing metadata from users, regardless of what service they're providing.
I would argue that as postal services can not force you to give up you a privacy with the contract terms (you are entering into a contract by sending a mail), so should not Facebok or ISP.
Of course, it is an first level intermediate, and ISP are second level, but still an intermediate.
> "Privacy rules for ISPs are important and necessary, but it is obvious that the more substantial privacy threats for consumers are not the ISPs," the advocacy group said. The bigger threat is posed by "the largest email, search, and social media companies."
By which they're obviously referring to Google and Facebook without naming them. CTIA, the mobile broadband lobbying group, cited this statement in their argument:
"even a prominent privacy advocacy organization asserted that it is 'obvious that the more substantial threats for consumers are not ISPs,' but rather other large edge providers."
I think that, while "large edge providers" may presently collect user information, there is greater potential for ISPs if left unchecked and harder for users to avoid.
Either way, I think you hit the nail on the head with this statement: "there is greater potential for ISPs if left unchecked and harder for users to avoid."
The CTIA's logic here can be reduced to "they do it so we want to do it too", seemingly framed within their long-time disposition of not considering themselves the "dumb pipes" that they are. Giving residential ISP's access to use this information, combined with what they already have on file for accounting purposes, is a situation just ripe for abuse. The article then goes on to say "What's less clear is whether the FCC will have any authority over ISPs' privacy practices after the rules are eliminated" - so there there may very well be no recourse whatsoever through either the FCC or FTC if or when widespread abuse were to occur. And of course, that's not even to start the age-old discussion about how & where the data is stored (plaintext on an insecure FTP server), who has access to it (all employees & contractors), etc.
I am confident that this change from the FCC will only serve to screw over individual people at the gain of large corporations.
Asterisk what?
At least you have some idea of what you're doing with FB; someone may switch from FB to private browsing mode in a browser to look something up.
(And FB should be subject to additional privacy rules as well, that just happens not to be within scope of this particular FTC action).