How the Broadband Industry Could Challenge FCC’s Privacy Rules

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to pass privacy rules. Once approved, the rules would require explicit consent from customers before companies can use many forms of data for marketing purposes. The agency is permitted to regulate internet service providers as it does phone companies as a result of a 2015 network neutrality rule that reclassified ISPs as common carriers.

While the net neutrality rule gives the regulator solid legal standing to issue rules for ISPs, industry giants such as AT&T have argued that the privacy rules still might not align with the FCC’s authority to regulate privacy under the 1996 Telecommunications Act. If broadband providers decide to sue, that argument will likely be the one that they use, an industry source said. The law prohibits phone carries from using a customer’s “proprietary” information, which includes the location, time, date, duration of phone calls, the type of network a consumer subscribes to, as well as any other information that a provider could obtain from a customer’s phone bill. In a regulatory filing with the FCC, AT&T argued data such as web browsing and app usage can’t be proprietary if other web entities have access to it.