from the the-best-government-money-can-buy dept
Telecom and media giants are running a sleazy year-long smear campaign against Biden FCC nominee Gigi Sohn aimed at miring the agency in perpetual consumer protection gridlock. The attacks have been carefully seeded across the US press through various think tanks and nonprofits, and falsely accuse Sohn of everything from hating police to being an enemy of rural America. The lies are baseless, but have proven effective enough to stall Senate confirmation.
Gridlocked at an even 2-2 commissioner split, the FCC can’t do absolutely anything deemed controversial by industry or its loyal GOP allies, including reversing many of the most unpopular Trump era decisions on net neutrality or media consolidation rules. There are also indications that the FCC may be unable to impose any fines for the wireless industry’s rampant abuse of wireless consumer location data:
Mobile carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, could temporarily avoid paying $200 million in privacy penalties because of the Federal Communications Commission’s partisan split, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Sources familiar with the situation told the WSJ that the FCC, which has two Democratic commissioners and two Republican ones, needs one more vote of approval to levy the fines, and both Republican members haven’t voted yet.
One obstacle is FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who spends the lion’s share of his time going on the television to complain about TikTok, despite the fact he doesn’t actually regulate social media. Carr’s performative concerns about privacy very rarely extend to the telecom sector he actually regulates, despite telecom’s long, rich history on this front.
Activists for years have warned about the obvious threat of over-collection and sharing of sensitive consumer wireless location data, be it gleaned from your mobile phone or apps. Now, post-Roe, it’s all but guaranteed this and other data (search histories, app usage) is going to be used by states (and potentially vigilantes, since this data is often easy to purchase) looking to target abortion seekers and those who help them.
Most companies claim that collecting this data isn’t a big deal because it’s “anonymized,” despite the fact that studies keep showing that word means nothing. Telecom giants often claim they don’t sell this kind of data, but that’s generally found to be a lie (they just call the practice of bundling and transferring and selling it to others something else). Not surprisingly, abuse of this paradigm was rampant.
Keep in mind that the FCC’s belatedly doing the bare minimum here. Wireless giants collected and sold sensitive location data to any nitwit with a nickel for decades, hoovering up countless billions in additional revenues over the entirety of their operational histories. The FCC’s proposing a $200 million fine that will probably be negotiated down by lawyers.
A good chunk of the FCC’s privacy rulemaking authority was stripped away when the GOP and telecom sector gutted FCC broadband privacy rules in 2017. Now efforts to do the bare minimum on privacy is stalling out because industry has managed to gridlock the nation’s top telecom and media regulator.
Assuming Sohn is re-nominated in the new year, it will likely be until sometime in the middle of 2023 that she’s seated at all. The FCC will then have a year and a half before the next presidential election to implement any reform; an extremely tight window that surely pleases industry giants looking to keep the FCC on the consumer protection sidelines in perpetuity.
Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, competition, fcc, fines, gigi sohn, high speed internet, location data, privacy, telecom, wireless
Companies: at&t, t-mobile, verizon
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