Telecom Lobbyists Have Stalled 70 State-Level Bills

I think one very likely cause for telecoms being vehemently against privacy legislation is that both AT&T and Verizon are trying very hard to enter the adtech market. They are hoping that first party customer data combined with more traditional third party cookie data will give them a competitive edge, but it'll only happen if they are allowed to use all of that data in the first place.

I used to work in ad tech, and this kind of stuff was responsible for my steady disillusionment with advertising as an industry. While the argument could be made that marketing/advertising can be benign, it's quite obvious (once you know where to look) that it creates all sorts of perverse societal incentives that work against individual citizens' interests.

In California and Washington state, they have a lot of initiatives. I think an initiative might be a better way to get pro-consumer changes. We did already pass a net neutrality bill in Washington.