US telecom watchdog chairman defends new rules for selling browsing history
FCC chairman Ajit Pai said in an op-ed that Republicans, who last week voted in favor of new privacy rules that allow ISPs to sell users’ browsing history, have not compromised privacy rights.
Pai states that the online privacy of internet users is still guaranteed. He calls the many criticisms of the proposal exaggerated and believes that a lot of misinformation has been spread. According to him, with the votes in recent weeks, Republicans have not lifted existing privacy protections. In addition, Pai says ISPs have never had any intention of selling individual Internet users’ browsing history to third parties. According to him, online advertising doesn’t work that way. According to the chairman of the FCC, if ISPs do sell this data, that would go against privacy obligations that the providers took on earlier. Pai emphasizes this in an opinion piece in The Washington Post.
According to Pai, the new rules have only brought the old Federal Trade Commission regime back to the forefront of regulations for the privacy of internet users. Pai argues that the Federal Trade Commission has been effective in promoting privacy and that it has taken enforcement actions more than 150 times in the past, sometimes against the largest US Internet companies. In 2015, the FCC introduced new and stricter rules for ISPs during the Obama administration, taking these regulations over the Federal Trade Commission’s framework of rules.
Pai argues that the FCC rules created in 2015 forced ISPs to comply with different rules than content providers. He finds that undesirable. He believes that the FCC rules were not about protecting consumer privacy, but rather that the government chose “winners and losers in the marketplace.”
Pai is referring to the difference between companies such as Facebook and Google and the ISPs. ISPs do not consider it fair that stricter privacy rules apply to them than to content providers such as Google and Facebook. Pai disagrees with the statement that ISPs should be judged more harshly because they would have more access to Internet users’ personal information than Facebook and Google. In addition, Pai points to an official from the Obama administration who states that ISPs do not have extensive or unique access to personal information about internet users and that the commercially interesting data mainly comes from other contexts.
President Trump last week signed a proposal to roll back old privacy rules for US ISPs. Earlier, the Republican majority in Congress had already approved the plans. Later this year, providers will be able to share privacy-sensitive information with third parties without the explicit permission of internet users. This specifically concerns information such as browsing history, the use of apps, financial information, data about the user’s location and the content of emails. The ISPs want to be able to trade this data.