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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

#371

Post by richforrester »

xelxebar wrote: post #361
richforrester wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realise this is a total straw man, but whenever I read Republicans vs Democrats I can't help but think about how utterly insane it is to have the opinions of 300 million Americans represented by TWO parties. Two. So Americans choose to agree with either EVERYTHING person A says, or EVERYTHING person B says. That's what it boils down to. And it freaks me out that in a day and age where we're so educated and "free",…

OP's comment is the straw man, not yours. If you go out and talk to these actual Democrats and Republicans, the bipartisan distinction seems more and more like a fraud. Seriously, have you ever met a person who's "core driving force" is money and "all they care about"? Does that description fit about half the people your know? Seems pretty cartoonish to me.

Cartoon of a president doesn't help USA's reputation.

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

#373

Post by intrasight »

adventured wrote: post #338
intrasight wrote: post #260

Isn't "https everywhere" going to make this a moot point?

Only partially. Your ISP can sell what domains you visit and the details of those visits such as duration. Your ISP can push various trackerware that steps in front of the https. Your ISP can do trackerware pre-installs on hardware you buy for example, such as smartphones.

But that trackerware would be easily filtered out with ad blockers. Not that we should have to do so, but we can.

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

#374

Post by adam_ellsworth »

What's the immediate consequence of this ruling? What is liable to change? Who can buy "my" data? What kind of time-frame are we looking at? Can foreign nationals buy data en-masse directly and/or will their purchases be proxied through "US citizens"? What depth of archives will be up for purchase? So man questions regarding this... I'd like to know the general fallout of this in both short and long-term results.

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

#375

Post by CalChris »

TillE wrote: post #326
CalChris wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third parties are even worse than the two parties. The Libertarians ran Bob Barr, a Clinton House prosecutor and Gary Johnson who happily sent people to prison for drug crimes. Jill Stein supports Putin.

> Jill Stein supports Putin No she doesn't, this is an absurd smear based on her attending a single event in Moscow.

http://www.jill2016.com/stein_in_russia_calls_for_principled...

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

#376

Post by vizeroth »

tomohawk wrote: post #130
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.

You also can't just say that the internet is the same as POTS. The FCC has scarcely been better than these companies. It has a history of being a revolving door for companies. Consider what RCA/FCC did to Armstrong back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong Just because the FCC does something doesn't mean its good, legal, or whatever. It's just what 3 of 5 unelected, unaccountable appointee…

The national infrastructure for the internet and POTS is the same, and has been since the mid-1990s, if not always. Internet PoP sites and telephone PoP sites in the U.S. are housed in the same building, usually in the same rack. The fiber was run in separate trays and they used slightly different equipment for each (OC-48 vs. OC-192 in the mid-1990s), but at least from that point on the primary difference between POTS and internet has been that POTS usually runs through a slightly lower-bandwidth version of the same system. The same people built, maintained, and upgraded the cables and equipment on the backbone, whether it was POTS or internet. It's still run primarily by Level 3 (which swallowed up most of the companies that built it, or the infrastructure and employees that survived or spun out of those companies) and AT&T, and many of the fiber runs across the country are still marked with MCI's logo.

I don't think the FCC is the best place to fix the problems with the internet, but I don't see the "repeal and don't fix" method that seems to be so popular with the Republicans lately as a better way to deal with it.

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

#377

Post by kobeya »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #272
alphapapa wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. But wouldn't it be better to pass a law to do this, rather than relying an executive agency's regulations, which may change at their will and be interpreted as they please each time the government changes hands?

It would be lovely for Congress to pass a statute ensuring data-privacy. Pity they just voted the other way around on party lines.

... did you read the thread you are replying to?

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

#378

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.

False. Parts of the regulation went into effect 30 days after publication. Parts went into effect 90 days after publication. Part would have gone into effect 6 months after publication. Part would have gone into effect 12 months after publication.

See pg. 202 of the Report and Order.

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

#380

Post by zoul »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #192
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…

The FTC did regulate ISPs, until they sued AT&T over their "unlimited" claims and lost in appeal. In losing, they actually lost the ability to regulate ISPs at all. AT&T wanted this. Here's the ruling: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/08/29/1... Seeing this coming, FCC proposed privacy rules around the same time: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-16-39A1_Rc... Which did go into eff…

Selling your customers’ private browsing data constitutes speech… Wow. Just wow.
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