Internet rule protected consumers

Kudos to President Donald Trump and Congress for rolling back burdensome Obama-era regulations. But there is one rule they should have let stand.

Republicans have rediscovered a useful regulation-busting tool in the form of the Congressional Review Act of 1996, which had been used successfully only one other time, in 2001, to repeal Occupational Safety and Health Administration ergonomics rules adopted during the last week of Bill Clinton’s presidency. The CRA allows a new Congress and administration to undo rules passed during the final days of a previous administration, and bar agencies from adopting similar rules in the future.

So far, the CRA has been used to overturn 11 rules under the current administration, and two other such measures have reached the president’s desk, according to the advocacy group Public Citizen. The White House estimates that the repeal of the rules rescinded to date will save $10 billion over 20 years.

Among the most recently approved measures under the CRA is Senate Joint Resolution 34/House Joint Resolution 86, signed by Trump on Monday, which eliminates Federal Communications Commission rules set to take effect later this year that would have prohibited Internet service providers from tracking and selling customers’ data browsing and app activity without their permission.

In addition to the selling of customer data to marketing companies or others, the Electronic Freedom Foundation warns, this could open the door to other undesirable behavior, such as tracking which websites one visits and which apps one uses via preinstalled software on phones or tracking cookies, and inserting ads based on one’s browser history.

In an attempt to quell customers’ privacy concerns, several ISPs, including Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, issued statements reiterating that they do not sell web browsing histories or other personal information, and have no plans to do so in the future.

Many people do not find these reassurances convincing, however, and note that policies could change at a moment’s notice, particularly in the presence of a significant profit opportunity.

Nevertheless, the resolutions passed in a pair of close votes — a 50-48 partyline vote in the Senate and a 215-205 vote in the House, with 15 Republicans, including members of the Freedom Caucus, joining Democrats in opposition.

The issue is not quite as cut and dried as it might appear at first glance. The telecommunications industry has a point when it argues that the rules offered an unfair advantage to Google and Facebook, which would not have been covered by the same privacy protections, and which do essentially the same thing: mine users’ internet behavior and use that information to sell targeted advertising. Also, it could be argued that users have no property or privacy rights to their internet activity, which is possible only by voluntarily paying to use a private company’s services, argued or that if such a demand for privacy is great enough, other businesses will step in to satisfy that demand.

We choose to err on the side of privacy, however. In their zeal to overturn regulations, Republicans may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in repealing the FCC’s privacy rule.