Washington sends ‘ anything goes’ message to Big Telecom

President Trump certainly has an odd idea of what it means to be a populist. Not only did he back a plan that would have stripped millions of people of their health insurance, he has undermined the notion that people might have some shred of privacy while on the Internet.

On Monday night, Trump quietly put his name to a bill stripping consumers of Internet privacy protections drafted by the Federal Communications Commission. The move, which breezed through the Republicancontrolled Congress, thwarts an effort by the FCC and previous Congresses to give consumers more choice over how extensively they are tracked online and how this information is used.

It is hard to imagine anything more anti- populist than this measure. The law will allow large corporations to profit by pummeling people with advertisements. It will also increase the sense of millions of Americans, many of them Trump voters, that their lives are being influenced by forces beyond their control.

Perhaps nothing underscores these developments more than the glee with which the Data & Marketing Association greeted the law’s passage. The association praised the move as beneficial to its members.

It also asserted that consumers actually want to be tracked, so they will see ads that are “relevant” to their preferences and buying habits. The group even assigned a value — $ 1,200 per year, per consumer — for the privilege of being tracked.

There might well be some consumers who want to see relevant ads. And under the FCC’s rules, they could have chosen to be tracked. The “opt in” policy that the FCC had proposed was, in fact, exactly the approach that would have served consumers well.

But most people we know do not want to be stalked around the Internet with sales pitches every time they make a purchase or conduct a search. Nor do they want to have to set up virtual private networks as a defensive measure, or worry about how else their data might be used.

Industry groups and consumer activists are engaged in a raging debate about whether existing law prevents service providers from selling data to third parties, such as potential employers or insurance companies.

To the extent there is wiggle room for service providers to sell data, the new law will only encourage them. Not only does the law overturn specific FCC rules, it sends a broad anything- goes message from the powers that be in Washington.

To be sure, the FCC rules had their flaws. They set off a kind of turf war between the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that normally handles privacy matters. And they would have applied only to service providers such as AT& T, Comcast and Verizon, and not to search engines, social media platforms and such.

Even so, the rules would have been a start. Their demise is the latest example of the Trump administration courting the vote of everyday Americans while selling them out to corporate interests.

Perhaps that explains why the president did this particular signing with such little fanfare.

JUSTIN LANE, EPA