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The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#181

Post by dragonwriter »

tomohawk wrote: post #114

Before getting all spun up, I'd dig a little deeper on the issue than what the WaPo does in this piece. These regulations were only voted on late in 2016 and never went into effect. To do the regulations, the FCC reclassified the internet as basically ye olde telephone system, which then made it subject to their purview based on laws created in the 1930s. This is classic overreach. Congress never gave this authority…

> These regulations were only voted on late in 2016 and never went into effect. To do the regulations, the FCC reclassified the internet as basically ye olde telephone system

You are conflating two different orders; the reclassification was part of the 2015 open internet order (and was expressly laid out as a legal option in the court decision striking down the 2010 open internet order), not the 2016 privacy order at issue here.

> They did a swipe at the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC.

The FTC has no authority over even the non-telephone operations of the telephone companies who are many of the major ISPs.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#182

Post by kelnos »

howard941 wrote: post #110

Could and should have been filibustered in the Senate edit: note Senate....

Democratic Senators need to be careful what they filibuster. Absurdly, it only takes a majority vote for the Senate to change the rules to disallow filibusters.

Then again, the vote to change the rules to disallow filibusters could itself be filibustered.

But, the Senate, despite all that, could (on motion) declare the filibuster unconstitutional, and only require a simple majority vote to affirm it.

Man, our Congress is so broken.

Source: 2nd paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#183

Post by CrippledTurtle »

Can anyone explain why, when this went through the Senate, it wasn't filibustered? I was under the impression that almost all controversial legislation had to pass the filibuster threshold, and since Democrats were united in opposition against it, I would have expected them to filibuster this. Was there some loophole preventing them from doing so, or did they not consider it important enough to filibuster?

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#184

Post by DrScump »

niftich wrote: post #117
vancan1ty wrote: post #73

Something that is not mentioned in the article is that the FCC regulations in question were passed in October 2016 and have never gone in to effect. So, to be strictly accurate, the vote does not roll back any regulations which actually ever affected the internet. Sources: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/03/02/fcc-sets-... http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/03/28/broadband...

A few posters on the thread [1] for the Senate version's passing have noted [2][3][4] that this is the case, but those points appeared largely lost in the discussion to follow. To quote the comment at [2]: "This undoes the 73-page publication published on 2016-12-02 by the FCC, most of which took effect 2017-01-03, some parts later on 2017-03-02, both after the election and one of them after the inauguration." Meanwh…

The actual rule[0] as recorded in the Federal Register says: "The notice and choice rules we adopt today will become effective the later of (1) PRA approval[1], or (2) twelve months after the Commission publishes a summary of the Order in the Federal Register[2]."

So, given that it was published on 2 December 2016[2], the earliest it could possibly have taken effect is December 2 or even 4 (December 2 is a Saturday)

[0] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-16-148A1.p... (Item #312. Page 132 of 219 of the PDF. Yes, it's a huge file.)

[1] "PRA approval, as defined herein, is not complete until the Commission publishes notice of OMB approval in the Federal Register", so it was also conditional on approval by the Office of Management and Budget. AFAIK, that never happened, either.

[2] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-12-02/pdf/2016-28006.p...

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#185

Post by kobeya »

che_shirecat wrote: post #159
tomohawk wrote: post #114

Before getting all spun up, I'd dig a little deeper on the issue than what the WaPo does in this piece. These regulations were only voted on late in 2016 and never went into effect. To do the regulations, the FCC reclassified the internet as basically ye olde telephone system, which then made it subject to their purview based on laws created in the 1930s. This is classic overreach. Congress never gave this authority…

I don't understand why people like yourself have to try to reframe and deflect attention on everything to fit your political narrative. Why can't you just see the problem for what it is and hold the representatives with your political affiliation accountable? Who really cares who our "traditional" privacy regulator is if neither of them end up able/willing to do the regulating? Why are you trying to frame this as a m…

Because the truth matters. You're reacting to this based on the politically spun narrative that was fed to you when you first encountered the issue. The truth is actually a fair bit more complex.

This is a case of a regulatory agency overstepping its bounds and seizing jurisdiction outside of the domain allowed for it by Congress. That's the language in which the bill is framed, the the way in which it has been discussed in the past weeks and months that is has gotten (minimal) coverage.

Then the issue got picked up and spun when somebody called attention to the fact that the FCC's regulations (which they were not authorized to make) were more consumer-friendly than the FTC's. That's true, and it's a real problem. But that does not mean that the answer is to sanction the FCC's power-grab here. The right thing to do is to pursue consumer regulatory protections _within the confines of the law_, which means either petitioning the FTC or new legislation.

Don't confuse concern over process with favoring the resulting outcomes.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#186

Post by dannyobrien »

masonic wrote: post #142
ComradeTaco wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just say the regulations are old and therefore invalid because they're old. Remember, the telephone industry was regulated because telephone companies merged and cooperated to create regional monopolies and destroy competition, all at the expense of consumers. Comcast, Time Warner and the like have all been doing the same.

Well, calling them "old" is silly because these privacy improvements never went into effect . Referring to this privacy exposure as "something that may/will happen because of Trump" ignores that it is already Federal law and has been since 2015. Yes, in removing FTC authority over broadband, the Obama administration created this privacy exposure in the first place . That tap wouldn't shut off until next December at t…

The court decision (it was a court interpretation, not a particular executive action that led to the FTC's authority being removed) dates from August, 2016, and only applied to the 9th circuit. See https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/08/29/1... (The case was the FTC suing to prevent AT&T conducting data-throttling to customers who had bought unlimited data plans. AT&T claimed that the FTC no longer had jurisdiction, and the court agreed.

Given that circuit split, it's unlikely -- no matter how evil you imagine ISPs to be -- that they would start scooping up data and selling it immediately, and only in a narrow set of States. The FCC regulation was an attempt to restore an existing privacy situation, across the whole of the US market.

Again, it's extremely unlikely that with an impending privacy regulation being imposed, ISPs would proceed with monetising user browser histories for a short period of time before they were once again vulnerable to regulatory penalties for doing so.

If I may be less than oddly silent, I think we (EFF) didn't talk about this much because it seemed like various parts of the USG were (slowly) moving to fix a problem that came out of a court decision that could have gone either way.

You can read a little bit more about our work during the Obama administration (and before) on net neutrality here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/deep-dive-defense-neut... . One of the points we talked about during that administration, and this one, is the risk of FCC over-regulation, and regulatory capture. If you want to view these challenges in a public choice theory (ie generally Republican) model -- at the FCC, the risk is largely one of ISP dominance, as it is traditionally the telcos that stand to benefit from investing in moving the FCC to their position. In this case, you actually have Congress stepping into to push them even more that way. That's a problem under a Democratic or Republican administration, which is why I think you saw more Republicans move to oppose the repeal than Democrats support it.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#187

Post by 0xa »

ComradeTaco wrote: post #74
pnathan wrote: post #19

This, right here, is the consequence of the withdrawal from politics many geeks advocated very strongly in an earlier time. "Everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter"... turns out to only be a viable philosophy when things mostly work well enough . What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice sid…

The votes in both the house and the senate were almost entirely along party lines. Every republican in the senate that voted, voted for this act and every democrat in the senate that voted, voted against this act.

The reality is more nuanced--the time to stop this legislation was by preventing it coming to vote in the senate. Typically the senate needs 60 votes to forcefully end debate[0], then merely majority to pass it. Once can disguise support for a bill by approving to end debate, then voting "Nay" given it will get the necessary 50 to be approved.

For JS 34 [1] Mitch McConnell (R, KY) limited debate to 10 minutes--I'm unclear from the transcript exactly how this was allowed. Richard Blumenthal (D, CT) offered resistance to limiting debate, and Kamala Harris (D, CA) and Patrick Leahy (D, VT) requested the role be called several times as a delaying tactic, but the limiting of debate went through.

Just prior to the vote, Brian Schatz (D, HI) offered some debate, but this is cosmetic given the known votes.

My read there is little to be gained by trying to legislate implementation power that has been ceded to the executive branch and the various agencies that are run by appointment, and therefore a costly filibuster and fight was not worth the time, effort and political mud.

[0] https://www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/577d2a5e-2b47-4045-95fa-a7639...

[1] https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2017/03/23/sen...

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#188

Post by kelnos »

esaym wrote: post #97
cmurf wrote: post #57

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2017/h202 215 yea, 205 nea. All yeas were Republicans.

>> ISP companies also contended that the FCC rules have placed them at a disadvantage with other non-ISP Internet companies that also collect user data, like Netflix or Facebook. I think there is always a flip side and I think this is it. Why can facebook take my data and sell it but for the ISP, my data is treated like a health record? Personally, I don' think anyone should be able to sell my data.

I think part of it is choice. You can legitimately choose to not use Facebook (even though admittedly for some people that's difficult due to network effects). Don't like Google's data collection policies? Use Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. Don't like Netflix? Use HBO Now, Prime Video, Google Play, iTunes, Hulu, or buy a cable subscription.

However, most people in the US have a choice of only one or two ISPs, so there may not be an option to choose a company that doesn't sell your data.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#189

Post by ignu »

tbrownaw wrote: post #163
toss1941 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always interpreted that resignation as "both sides are terrible, so I'm going to keep voting for my side". I wonder how many people really felt strong enough about politics to claim both sides are equally bad and then decided not to vote on that basis alone.

I wonder how many people really felt strong enough about politics to claim both sides are equally bad and then decided not to vote on that basis alone. Since both sides are astonishingly bad, I usually end up voting third party in races where there is one.

and that's why bills like this pass.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#190

Post by GabrielF00 »

CrippledTurtle wrote: post #183

Can anyone explain why, when this went through the Senate, it wasn't filibustered? I was under the impression that almost all controversial legislation had to pass the filibuster threshold, and since Democrats were united in opposition against it, I would have expected them to filibuster this. Was there some loophole preventing them from doing so, or did they not consider it important enough to filibuster?

This bill is under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn rules enacted by the executive branch in the last 6 months. A joint resolution of disapproval under this act can't be filibustered.[1]

[1]https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43992.pdf

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