An Anti-Consumer Agenda at the F.C.C.
As President Trump rushes to dismantle Obama-era rules that protect Americans, he has an energetic helper over at the Federal Communications Commission. Its new Republican chairman has started undoing policies of his predecessor that were intended to make phone, cable and internet service more fair and more affordable.
Ajit Pai, who was a commissioner before he became chairman last month, is trying to wipe away net neutrality rules put in place by Tom Wheeler, the former chairman, to prevent broadband companies from creating fast and slow lanes on the internet.
Source: The New York Times
2015 WAS THE year the Federal Communications Commission grew a spine. And 2017 could be the year that spine gets ripped out.
Over the past two years, the FCC has passed new regulations to protect net neutrality by banning so-called “slow lanes” on the internet, created new rules to protect internet subscriber privacy, and levied record fines against companies like AT&T and Comcast. But this more aggressive FCC has never sat well with Republican lawmakers.
Soon, these lawmakers may not only repeal the FCC’s recent decisions, but effectively neuter the agency as well. And even if the FCC does survive with its authority intact, experts warn, it could end up serving a darker purpose under President-elect Donald Trump.
Source: Wired
These are the privacy rules your Internet provider might soon have to live by:
Should the government impose new rules on Internet providers to protect your privacy online?
That will be the subject of an Oct. 27 vote by the Federal Communications Commission, the nation’s top broadband regulator said Thursday.
The vote could finalize a proposal that would force Internet providers, such as Verizon or Comcast, to get consumers’ explicit consent before using or sharing personal data such as their Web browsing history, app usage history, geolocation information and the content of their emails and online messages.
Source: Washington Post
How much is your privacy worth?
That’s the question that Comcast customers may soon face if the broadband giant decides to start offering discounts in exchange for more intrusive access to user data.
This is not idle speculation. In a Federal Communications Commission filing this week, Comcast urged regulators not to ban internet service providers from offering cheaper service plans for those customers willing to accept increased monitoring of their web browsing habits.
Source: Vice Magazine
Internet providers won’t rest until the government’s net-neutrality rules are dead:
Internet providers who oppose the government’s net-neutrality rules will once again take the issue to court this week as they ask more than a dozen federal judges to throw out the regulations.
A Washington trade group representing cellular carriers, CTIA, will be requesting a rehearing of the case by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, according to a person familiar with the matter. Likely joining the group will be AT&T, the trade association USTelecom and a number of others, according to another person familiar with the issue.
Source: Washington Post
The Dragonslayer
Speaking exclusively to The Verge the day before he appeared in front of Congressional Republicans investigating the net neutrality vote, Wheeler was candid and direct about his desire to protect upstarts. “You know my mantra,” he says. “Competition, competition, competition.”
Far from being captured by telecom companies, Wheeler seems to relish the insight his lobbying history has given him about their operations. And he’s using that insight to fight the multi-headed dragons of the television, wireless, and broadband industries on multiple battlefields, all at once.
And he’s winning.
On Monday, the FCC issued a consent decree hitting Verizon with a $1.3 million fine for injecting those tracking beacons, called Unique Identifier Headers or UIDH, into unencrypted traffic on its network without customers’ knowledge or consent—a violation of both the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC’s Open Internet Transparency Rule.
Apart from the fine, the FCC also ruled that Verizon must be more transparent about its use of the beacons and, crucially, must not share customers’ beacons with third parties unless they opt in.
But the decree has a glaring loophole: Verizon can still track customers who haven’t specifically opted-in through AOL’s expansive advertising network, which according to ComScore reached 35 percent of all desktop internet users through ads appearing on websites they visited in January. That’s because Verizon now owns AOL, making its ad network a Verizon subsidiary instead of a “third party.”
Source: Vice Magazine
Net Neutrality Is in More Danger Than Ever:
Those threats are coming from multiple directions. Last month, presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, along with six other senators, proposed a bill that would overturn the FCC decision. The legislation, dubbed “The Restoring Internet Freedom Act,” would not only nullify the FCC’s net neutrality rules but prohibit the agency from passing similar rules in the future.
The bill is just the latest way that congressional Republicans have sought to undermine the FCC’s decision, and it’s far from the only threat to the regulations. From telecom industry lawsuits to free data for certain companies’ content, net neutrality as both a legal mandate and a political ideal is under siege.