That may be but by signing this bill, instead of vetoing it, Trump gifted to internet service providers unfettered access and rights to our data trails. These data trails are significant regarding our online privacy and their monetary value. This bill gifts our data trails to big companies, providing them with a huge financial benefit while giving away our privacy to do so. Not only do we lose our privacy, we lose it without compensation of any kind.
Just as nothing was taken away, nothing was likewise gifted.
All of this stems from a regulatory control turf battle between the FCC and the FTC (a battle that I have serious doubts that Trump has been paying any attention to over the years), with the FCC declaring broadband Internet providers as being the same as a telecom utility, so as to regulate it under the Telecommunications Act. Here's a short piece on it (
F.C.C. Approves Net Neutrality Rules, Classifying Broadband Internet Service as a Utility) compete with the comments from what it now our new FCC Chairman.
For for record, I'm not at all a fan of our new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. I wasn't particularly on board with former FCC Chairman Wheeler, either, and over the years paid close attention to his comments and actions. Being involved with the Internet from virtually the very beginning, I've seen it go from the free and open glorious idea that it was to a much more clamped down, related thing. But everything that's good about the Internet still comes from the parts that are unregulated, and every regulation is one of a thousand paper cuts.
Certain types of regulation is good, though. I rather enjoyed, for example, when Wheeler snapped back hard Verizon when they tried to back-door bandwidth limits, but only to those on the grandfathered unlimited data plans. Of course, I'm grandfathered on the Verizon unlimited data plan, so I might be a little biased on that one.
But basically, though, this bill signed or not signed, the regulation put in place or not, it's the difference between opt-in and opt-out. Without the regulation you have to opt-out, and with the regulation you have to opt-in for your ISP to sell your data. So, with Trump signing the legislation, we're right back to where we were, having to opt-out of allowing our ISP to sell our data. The main thing to focus on here is that you CAN opt-out.
So you can be mad at Trump for this if you like, but the focus of your ire really belongs on Chairman Ajit Pai. He's perhaps not as sexy or an as emotionally satisfying a pinata as Trump, though, so I get that .
