So this happened Tuesday and I've been stewing on it since: the House voted 215-205 to kill the FCC's broadband privacy rules. The Senate already did their part last week, 50-48, so now it's just sitting there waiting on a signature to become official. Once that happens, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Charter, all of them, are free to sell your browsing history, your app usage, even your location data, without ever having to ask you first.
I want to be clear about what actually got killed here because a lot of the coverage I've seen this week is muddy on it. The FCC passed these rules back in October under Wheeler, and they hadn't even taken effect yet. The idea was pretty simple: ISPs would need opt-in consent before selling "sensitive" data like browsing history and app usage to advertisers. Not a ban on selling data. Just a requirement that they ask first instead of making you dig through a settings menu to opt out, if there even was one. That's it. That's the whole thing that just got tanked.
And the argument for killing it, from what I can tell, is that it puts ISPs at a "disadvantage" compared to Google and Facebook, who don't have these same restrictions. Which, sure, fine, but Google and Facebook don't see literally every unencrypted packet you send. Your ISP is a different category of company. I can switch away from Facebook. I switched to DuckDuckGo for search two years ago and barely think about it anymore. I cannot switch away from Comcast, because in my apartment they're the only option that isn't hilariously slower DSL. That's the part that gets left out of the "let the market decide" framing. There is no market. I checked again this morning out of spite and yeah, still one choice.
Here's my small, dumb, personal confession though: I've had a VPN subscription sitting unused for probably two years. I bought it during some Black Friday deal, used it for maybe three weeks, then got annoyed that Netflix kept detecting it and blocking me, and just stopped bothering. Paid for it anyway on autopilot because canceling things is more effort than my brain wants to spend on a Tuesday. Well, I finally went and actually configured it properly last night instead of just running the default app, split tunneling and everything, DNS leak test and all that. Took maybe forty minutes total. If you've been putting off the same thing, this is your nudge. It is not hard. You do not need to be technical. You just need forty minutes and to stop assuming it'll be a hassle.
None of this is signed into law yet as I'm writing this, it's just passed both chambers, so there's a window where in theory something could change, though I wouldn't hold my breath. And even once it is signed, this only rolls back rules that hadn't taken effect yet, it doesn't create some brand new power ISPs didn't already sort of have in a grayer legal area before October. Which is honestly the most annoying part of the whole story: we're not really losing something we had. We're losing something we were about to get.
One thing I keep seeing in the reactions online that bugs me is people acting like a VPN fixes all of this. It helps with the specific ISP-selling-your-data problem, sure. It does nothing about the sites you're logged into, the trackers embedded on basically every page you visit, your phone's location history sitting on Google's servers. A VPN is one lock on one door in a house that's got about nine doors. Worth locking anyway. Just don't mistake it for the whole house being secure.
Anyway. My Comcast bill is due Friday, same as always, thirty seconds after I finish typing this I'm going to go pay it, because what else am I going to do, not have internet. That's the actual dynamic here and no amount of opt-in consent language was ever going to change it.