GOP Wants To Prevent The FCC From Protecting Broadband Consumer Privacy

Back in 2017 the FCC tried to pass some very basic privacy protections for broadband access. The rules simply demanded transparency as to what kind of data your ISP collects and sells. They also mandated that the trafficking of sensitive financial data by telecoms require the opt in consent of consumers.

Telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast didn’t much like that. So, in perfect synchronicity with the GOP, they first successfully painted the proposal as extremist, and then killed the rules with a simple majority vote via the Congressional Review Act. Not only did that vote kill the rules, the CRA prohibits the regulatory agency in question from revisiting the same rules ever again.

It was an obvious act of corruption and regulatory capture by a Republican party consistently in perfect lockstep with predatory and unpopular telecom monopolies. A relationship the party never has to genuinely take ownership of thanks to press outlets often incapable of calling out obvious corruption.

Fast forward to 2023 and the FCC is considering new privacy protections that would require ISPs be more transparent about privacy breaches. And, once again, Republicans like Ted Cruz are very upset about it.

While the CRA prohibits a regulator from exploring the same rule, it’s less legally clear if the FCC can embrace specific aspects of the bigger rule. So that’s what the FCC is going to try, according to agency boss Jessica Rosenworcel:

“By its terms, the CRA does not prohibit the adoption of a rule that is merely substantially similar to a limited portion of the disapproved rule or one that is the same as individual pieces of the disapproved rule.”

I’m not sure that’s going to work out, but I think it’s important for the FCC to try and thread the needle anyway just to see if there’s traction here. An FTC report from 2021 highlights how telecom giants spy on consumers, collect oceans of data, then — despite constant industry denials of this fact — turn around and sell some form of access to those datasets to a broad assortment of middlemen and nitwits.

Lost in the debate over whether this will succeed in courts will be the fact that this whole mess was caused by corruption we’re seemingly incapable of doing anything about. The telecom industry has the majority of Congress — and the entirety of the GOP — in its back pocket. We’ve normalized the fact an entire party that works in lockstep with telecom monopolists to routinely make your service shittier and more expensive.

The GOP has been endlessly busy trying to create a future where regulators have zero meaningful authority to hold giant companies accountable for anything. In telecom, this is all driven by the delusion that once you remove oversight of companies like Comcast and AT&T, amazing “free market” synergies fill the vacuum, unleashing amazing new benefits and synergies everywhere you look.

Of course, that’s manufactured delusion. Without competition or regulatory oversight, companies like Comcast and AT&T simply double down on all of their worst impulses. And the GOP fully supports that future, whether it’s the demolition of net neutrality, high broadband prices due to monopolization, a lack of consumer privacy, or your family getting ripped off by bullshit fees and surcharges.

But despite the widespread, bipartisan unpopularity of U.S. telecom giants, the GOP never has to truly own its policy decisions on this front. In part because they’ve now got their own propaganda-focused press sure to frame any attempt to hold corporations accountable as government overreach. But because the “both sides,” view from nowhere mainstream press is incapable of calling out obvious corruption.

To make matters worse, there are several upcoming Supreme Court rulings that will be specifically designed to undermine already shaky U.S. regulatory authority further. And here, too, the press hasn’t really explained the stakes to the American public adequately. What could possibly go wrong?