How Trump and the GOP-led Congress swiftly dismantled Internet privacy rules
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This fist stage is a blow to the Google data monopoly.
I obviously don't know if there's a second stage, but there might be, if this spreads awareness that private coroporations store everything they do online—if it makes Americans more privacy conscious—there could be a second stage.
The second stage would be to introduce strong privacy regulations applied to everyone. This, again, would hurt Google more than the ISPs.
To someone like me who doesn't think Google can ever be hurt enough, this looks like a good law.
With Google, atleast you could choose to directly use google, or you can use tracking blockers. You had a decent level of choice. Without these privacy protections as law, anything and everything you visit, google or not, is available. So, sites that don't have google trackers on them, or don't collect specific data, like what kind of URL's your google account has visited while inside of a site - are now trackable, and sellable.
ISP's also can associate what you've visited to your actual service line. ISP's know if your IP has changed, and everything about your service. Google does not, not unless you've logged in or have cookies of your sessions, both completely optional.
I also don't think that having URL's themselves is a good metric. Google does a lot more than just URL's. Their JS trackers know what you're doing on a page, which gives more context to the data collected. So, Google and the big giants of online advertising I don't think are going to be outcompeted by ISP's any time soon. If anything, I would think that the data ISP's sell would be bought quite cheaply, because its only URL's.
(Note to submitter: Including "Trump" in headlines seems to trigger a penalty on HN. I guess the site's original headline would have kept your post afloat a little longer.)
The issue described in the article was decided along strict party lines. Surely not coincidentally, the bill favored the big telecom companies at the expense of the newer parts of the tech industry.
On the other hand, the Email Privacy Act passed 419-0 in the House -- totally unanimously! -- in 2016, and again by voice vote in 2017. Yet the Senate is blocking it, also in a bipartisan fashion.
This issue, by way of contrast to the other one, is about balancing individual liberties against what's useful to law enforcement, without any strong or clear commercial interest on either side.
Why can't we work together to solve the problem that both parties are causing?
We all agree the government overreach of the past few decades is too much. Why do we have to blame "the other party" ensuring that half the people who would help us will not?
It seems to me everyone is bleating about how terrible the other guys are, then turning around and trying to grab as much power as they can for themselves, ignoring what that means in the next election cycle, in case the other guys come into power.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp...
The continuous false equivalences between the actions of the two parts in the US is terrible. It's getting to be in the same category as the "both sides of the story" on climate change.
During the 90s and earlier sure. But starting around the mid 2000s and only increasing since there has been a drastic split between the actions and behaviors of each party.