Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

The Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing today to examine the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC ) proposal to apply new privacy regulations to broadband Internet access providers only while leaving Silicon Valley’s big data companies untouched.

Until the FCC decided to get involved, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulated the privacy practices of big data companies (e.g., Google, Facebook and Amazon) and Internet access providers (e.g., Comcast, AT&T and T-Mobile) in the same way. The FTC applies its privacy framework equally to commercial entities of all types because, “Whether such collection occurs online or offline does not alter the consumer’s privacy interest in his or her data.”

The FCC is trying to avoid this inconvenient truth by claiming that Internet access services pose a greater threat to consumer privacy than all other Internet services.

• This claim contradicts the findings of the FTC that Internet access providers “are just one type of large platform provider that may have access to all or nearly all of a consumer’s online activity. Like [Internet access providers], operating systems and browsers may be in a position to track all, or virtually all, of a consumer’s online activity to create highly detailed profiles.”
• It contradicts the findings of experts like Peter Swire, President Clinton’s Chief Privacy Counselor and Obama Privacy Advisor, who will testify at the Senate hearing that other types of Internet companies “often have access to more information and a wider range of user information than [Internet access providers].”

• And it contradicts common sense: Half of the world’s most valuable companies are Silicon Valley companies who have built their empires on the collection and exploitation of consumers’ online data. (As of March 31, 2016, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are all among the ten largest public corporations by market capitalization.)

The fact that Internet access providers don’t pose a greater threat to consumer privacy than other Internet companies means the FCC’s proposal to apply different privacy rules than the FTC will harm competition without protecting consumers’ privacy online.

While I expect the Democratic senators who recently expressed their support for the FCC’s discriminatory plan will try to cast Internet access providers as the privacy bogeyman at today’s hearing, the data shows Silicon Valley’s big data companies are already winning the war to collect consumer data by a landslide—and those companies want the government to help them keep it that way. If these Senators were truly concerned that the FTC’s privacy framework is inadequate, they wouldn’t be sending letters to the FCC and they wouldn’t be ignoring Silicon Valley’s big data companies; they’d be proposing legislation that would apply their preferred privacy framework to all Internet data collectors in a fair and non-discriminatory manner.

It’s hard to see how anyone who is thinking seriously about online privacy issues could support the FCC’s plan. But it’s an easy plan to support if you want to help Silicon Valley’s big data companies insulate their massive market value from competition. If big data companies are trying to plot a way to divert consumers’ attention from the enormous amount of personal information those companies are collecting everyday, they couldn’t write a better script. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to have a happy ending.

The FCC’s plan will do little, if anything, to protect consumer privacy online. But it will help today’s big data winners become tomorrow’s big data monopolies.

This article was originally published on www.forbes.com and can be viewed in full

(0)(0)