America’s FCC-FTC Privacy Divide

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet order and proposed Title II privacy rules divided what was unified. For privacy, it broke what was working. Confused what was clear. Complicated what was simple. Unprotected what they sought to protect. Created more costs than benefits. In a nutshell, the Federal Trade Commission’s public analysis displays a substantial FTC-FCC privacy divide for American consumers.

The FTC approach focuses on what consumers care about concerning privacy while the FCC’s approach ignores what consumers care about privacy. The FCC-FTC privacy divide is much worse than just that. Before the FCC reclassified broadband as a telephone utility, and before it did not forbear from asserting telephone privacy jurisdiction temporarily until the FCC could devise operative privacy rules, American broadband consumers for the last 16 months have not had any operative federal privacy protection regulation. That purposeful indefensible lapse in consumer privacy protection suggests that the FCC cares much more about increasing their regulatory authority than protecting American consumers’ privacy and data security.