So the House voted Tuesday. 215 to 205, pretty much straight down party lines, and now the resolution killing the FCC's broadband privacy rules is sitting on Trump's desk waiting for a signature that's basically a formality at this point. The Senate did their part on this last week, 50-48. I've had it open in a tab since Tuesday night trying to decide if I'm actually mad enough to write about it or just mad enough to complain to my wife over dinner, and it turns out it's both.
Quick version if you missed it: back in October the FCC (under Wheeler, pre-Trump) passed rules that would've made ISPs get your actual opt-in permission before selling stuff like your browsing history, app usage, location data, all of it. Those rules hadn't even kicked in yet. Now they're dead before they ever took effect, and Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Charter, all of them, are free to bundle up where you go online and sell it to whoever wants it, no permission needed beyond whatever's buried in a terms-of-service doc none of us read.
Here's the thing that gets me. With a browser you don't like, you switch browsers. Hate an app's data practices, delete the app, use a different one, there's always a competitor one download away. Home internet doesn't work like that for most people. I've got exactly one option where I live - Comcast, and that's it, no fiber, no real DSL alternative, nothing. So "just switch providers" isn't advice, it's a punchline. I was on hold with them for 41 minutes back in February over a billing thing that turned out to be their mistake, and that's the company that's now got a green light to build a profile on every site I visit.
I'm not going to pretend I've got some nuanced take here where there's a reasonable case on the other side. There isn't, not for me anyway. It's bad. Full stop.
What I actually did about it, since ranting doesn't do much: I signed up for Private Internet Access Wednesday night. Paid the $39.95 annual rate, which works out to something like $3.33 a month, way cheaper than the monthly plan. Got it running on the laptop and my phone in about twenty minutes total, and then spent another hour trying to get it configured on the router itself because I wanted the whole house covered instead of just my own devices - my wife's laptop and the kids' iPad go straight through Comcast otherwise, VPN or not. Router setup was more fiddly than I expected, some DD-WRT firmware wrangling that I won't bore you with, but it's working now as far as I can tell.
Small annoyance, and this is the kind of thing nobody warns you about: I had a Skype call with a client at 9pm Wednesday and the connection kept stuttering, and it took me a solid ten minutes of troubleshooting before I remembered oh right, I've got a VPN running now, that'll do it sometimes depending which server you're routed through. Turned it off for the call, back on after. Not a dealbreaker, just one more little tax on top of everything else.
I don't fully trust PIA either, if I'm honest. Any VPN provider is just moving the trust problem from your ISP to a different company, and I can't audit their logging policy any better than I could audit Comcast's data practices. But at least it's a company I chose instead of the only one available on my street, and at least there's some competition in that market even if there isn't in the broadband one. That's about the best any of us are going to do here for now.
Funny thought I had typing this up tonight: a week ago, Comcast writing this post I'm typing right now into some data broker's spreadsheet wasn't something I even thought about. Now it's the whole reason the post exists.