Republicans didn’t just strip away Internet privacy rights
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The leading "No," makes it clear that it's denying that Republicans took away rights; without it, the "just" suggests it's saying Republicans did more than "just" take away privacy rights.
The underlying problem is, of course, the English language. "just" can mean either "immediately prior" (just now) or "merely" (just a friend).
But in 2015, the FCC decided to treat the Internet like a public utility, taking away the FTC’s ability to police the privacy practices of broadband providers.
The decision to treat it like a public utility had almost nothing to do with privacy or "policing the privacy practices of broadband providers" and almost everything to do with rekindling the war on Net Neutrality.[1].
This move -- like pretty much everything else this administration is doing -- was done to appease and strengthen oligopoly power. It will ultimately hurt small upstarts in the "ISP /broadband delivery" category[2] (who vehemently opposed the stripping of this legislation), and it will make it orders of magnitude harder for small upstarts whose business may only benefit or scale with "neutral" access to the internet.
In oligopoly situations there are few, if any, choices available to switch to when said provider oversteps is bounds and decides to just start charging everybody more based on the kind of traffic they request... "because it can". Everything to do with everything on the Internet is going to get astoundingly more expensive very soon.
Pai does not understand small business. And it's worth noting that this is probably because he worked for Verizon as an attorney. Though despite his government appointment, he does not seem to have switched his mindset away from that to the best interests of the American people in mind with his policy agendas.
[1] [https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/2015021... [2] http://bgr.com/2017/04/03/twc-charter-merger-fcc-rules-ajit-...]
This is a lie and Pai knows it; the case that spurred the FCC privacy action ruled that even in non-commit carrier activities, common carriers couldn't be regulated by the FTC, which meant many large ISPs—all the telcos like AT&T and Verizon—were completely outside of FTC jurisdiction even when acting as ISPs even without the Open Internet Order from 2015.
The FTC has no authority to regulate many ISPs, and an FTC privacy regulation that applied only to ISPs that aren't also telcos would've pointless. The FCC is the only agency with authority to issue privacy regulations that treat the whole ISP field the same, with or without the Open Internet Order, and Ajit Pai knows this as well as anyone.
The FCC’s regulations weren’t about protecting consumers’ privacy. They were about government picking winners and losers in the marketplace. If two online companies have access to the same data about your Internet usage, why should the federal government give one company greater leeway to use it than the other?
1. Is he implying that the previous FCC was intentionally boosting content providers over ISPs? What motivation would they even have for doing this?
2. Content providers and ISPs do not directly compete with each other in the course of their primary business, so in what respect does the rule create winners and losers in the marketplace?
I suppose he could mean in the advertising marketplace. I guess I would prefer that both Facebook and Comcast be losers in that marketplace though.
3. Two online companies do not have access to the same data. Facebook has data + metadata for any interaction you have with their platform. Your ISP has metadata for interactions you have with any platform, along with data for any plaintext interactions. This is a massive difference in scale.
Users have the choice not to use Facebook, and thus not provide them with data. Users do not have the choice to access the internet without making use of a public utility (i.e. their ISP).
He cites an expert saying:
Rather, the most commercially valuable information about online users . . . is coming from other contexts,” such as social-media interactions and search terms.
I can see how user-shared data might be considered more commercially valuable, but this misses the point about the differences in the kinds of data we are talking about. When someone publishes on social media, they're making an explicit choice to share information with the public.
When that same person visits a website, it is not commonly understood that this act might reveal personal information (though end-users ought to be more aware of this). Consider a teenager doing research on pregnancy tests -- they do not intentionally publish information, but the metadata (webpages visited, time of visits, etc) is potentially revealing.
How hard is it to change your search engine? How hard is it to change your ISP?
It was at that point I realized this was a partisan polemic and not a balanced analysis.
A quick perusal of public filings for 2016 campaign contributions shows that democrats disproportionately received more money from unions (teachers, carpenters, nurses, restaurant workers, etc.), while republicans received more from casinos, private prisons, energy companies, and other corporations.
AT&T gave $7.7M to republicans for 2016, and $2.3M to democrats. Comcast was more balanced with $3.3M and $3.7M for republicans and democrats respectively.
There are certain sectors that give a lot of money to both parties. Hedge funds, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies are a good example, which might explain why we pay so much more for drugs than most countries, and why we've been so resistant to any form of single payer healthcare.
Political campaigns are long, drawn-out affairs in the US. The campaign for 2016 kicked off in the latter half of 2015! Running a campaign for that long costs a lot of money, and it all has to come from somewhere. Unless we're willing to get serious about campaign finance reform, or dramatically shortening campaign cycles, our politicians are going to continue to owe favors to special interests.
Now I have to pay for a VPN so my own flipping ISP doesn't sell my data to advertisers even though I'm already paying over $100 per month for the service. I have to stop writing now, because my brain is filling up with expletives, and I fear I'm about to become incoherently angry.
Plus now I'm paying $10 a month for a basic level of privacy that the previous law made free. I can afford it, but it's still obnoxious.
Still, there are other advantages. With some work, you can make it very hard for websites to find out who you are. And you can change personas easily. And have many of them.
It's operationally equivalent to changing ISP.
I'm not arguing that it's OK for ISPs to collect and sell data. I'm just pointing out an option. There's also the issue that being in the same jurisdiction as your exit ISP may not be such a great idea.
In short, the Obama administration fractured our nation’s online privacy law, and it is our job to fix it. We pledge to the American people that we will do just that.
Gee, I can't help notice you don't have a replacement plan on the table. Kinda like AHCA. Kinda like every other "repeal and replace" initiative you guys have put forward only to pull a bait-and-switch and stop after the "repeal" half.
That the WashingtonPost even gives him a platform to spew this garbage does more harm than good.
We're living with a president who believes that reality is defined by what's on TV, and that by controlling the narrative, you can control what's perceived to be true.
In this mindset, truth in media is irrelevant. What matters is the story the media tells, and if it's in your favour it's good, if it's not it's "biased". Since all media is biased, it's easy to tell the "bias" story; you just pick out the bits of the story that are missing, or overly stressed, or the tone, or whatever.
It's an easy game to play.
He rationalizes this by claiming that user-action data (search, post, etc) is more valuable than browsing data.
Nothing in this article justifies the change in any manner that benefits consumers. In fact, it explicitly states the change was all about helping ISPs make money.
The ISP should provide a way to route and transfer data and nothing more. They are not a content provider and they are not an ad provider - but they want to be. What they really want is to implement MITM attacks to gather data and ad-injection for additional revenue. We shall have to overcome that in the near future too.
Even if you consider the argument flawed or disagree with it for other reasons, it's REALLY important to hear viewpoints from those in a position to set policy.
Particularly interesting is how it breaks down along party lines. There is almost no difference between Democrats and Republicans on most of the questions.
83% of Democrats and 84% of Republicans are very or somewhat concerned about the privacy of their information online.
82% of D and 84% of R say no to ISPs sharing personal information without permission. 8% of D and 8% of R say yes to it. The rest are not sure.
72% of D and 72% of R say that the FCC's privacy rules should be allowed to go into effect. 80% of D and 75% of R said that Trump should veto the bill to overturn the FCC's rules.
The age and race breakdowns were also interesting, with older people more concerned about privacy than younger people, and whites more concerned than blacks or hispanics.
I'm normally one to push for keeping political stuff off of HN, but that's when it's not related to the tech industry.
But this would seem like exactly the kind of political topic that should be discussed here...
That ruling was the reason.The outgoing FCC majority adopted the privacy regulations it did late last year; they were replacements for the FTC orders that were struck down.