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back to article Just a little FYI: Small town ISPs want out of FCC privacy rules

An advocate group for rural broadband providers is asking the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to omit small ISPs from its planned privacy rules. The WTA (formerly known as the Western Telecommunications Alliance) has written [PDF] to secretary Marlene Dortch to request that the regulator omit small ISPs from rules …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    those rules should not apply because they would eliminate the methods the carriers use to notify customers of service changes and upgrades

    No they wouldn't. If the ISPs can't put together a mailing list (or Twitter. or a status page.) of their own customers, they are unfit to be calling themselves an ISP. Yeah, they're probably running it out through Mailchimp or similar for convenience; but if they can't do it themselves on their own damned network then how good are they going to be at the rest of it? *donk donk* Case dismissed. Lucky for whoever came up with this pearl that I'm not a judge. I'm *this* far away from adding contempt for thinking about arguing.

    Informing your customers is an entirely different thing to 3rd-party spammingmarketing.

    12 1 Reply
  2. Fred Goldstein

    The proposed rules are much, much stupider than you imagine. For example, they treat IP addresses as "customer proprietary information", as if you could actually send packets without revealing it. All sorts of dumb stuff like that is thrown in. The FCC has a legal mandate to guide "customer proprietary network information", which specifically refers to telephone metadata. They are trying to extend this to the Internet, well, because, but they don't understand the Internet at all, and it shows. Read the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking if you don't believe me.

    3 1 Reply
    1. Adam 52 Silver badge
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      The problem regulators in both the US and EU face is that IP addresses are close enough to personal identifiers to be used for marketing tracking and nefarious other spying. They want to protect privacy and so have to restrict the sharing. Otherwise the ISP would be free to release the fact that household X has been browsing at Marie Stopes, for example, something liable to provoke the US brand of religious terrorist.

      If you use the analogy of IP addresses and postal addresses, imagine if the postal service published all the addresses that commubicate with each other and the dates/times.

      Where, in my view, the regulations they go awry is to just have one classification of personal data and just one classification of storage/processing/disclosure.

      4 0 Reply
      1. Fred Goldstein
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        ISPs themselves are not deeply involved in surveillance marketing. That's the domain of what the FCC now calls "edge providers", the big web sites and consumer via-the-net service providers. Facebook is probably the most intrusive, though Google probably has the biggest trove. The FCC can't regulate them, however. So they're focusing on the "broadband" provider. And a small ISP not only doesn't have the resources to do surveillance marketing themselves, but it wouldn't be big enough to be of value. Nonetheless the FCC wants to pick on them because it thinks it can.

        The FTC, not the FCC, is the expert agency on privacy in the US. But the FTC loses its authority over a common carrier service. The FCC last year redefined "BIAS" as a common carrier service, simply to please "network neutrality" advocates. That took away the FTC's authority, so the FCC is playing Keystone Kop trying to figure out what to do.

        0 1 Reply
    2. Crazy Operations Guy
      Reply Icon

      IP addresses *are* personal information

      On their own, not so much, but the point of the rule is to stop ISPs from giving advertisers a list of IP addresses in addition to other pieces of information. It is completely possible to identify someone using nothing but data that isn't legally defined as "Personally Identifiable Information", and that is what the FCC is trying to put an end to. There have been some ISPs that sell lists of IP address and most-common domains visited, neither bit of data is legally classified as PII, but it presents some pretty severe privacy issues.

      0 0 Reply
  3. FuzzyPicture

    Upgrades?

    My ISP upgraded their service two years ago with a big govt grant but didn't upgrade mine. Never even offered a reduced rate. It wasn't until my service quit entirely that I checked their website to get their tech support phone number and I noticed their new services and reduced rates. I'd been getting hosed all those years. Notify customers of upgrades? HA HA, not in rural USA.

    6 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    smaller carriers only share customer information with their service partners, and not the advertisers the FCC is targeting with its rules.

    Doubleclick? NebuAD? Phorm? Oh, don't worry, they're just our service partners.

    2 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Obvious request for abuse.

    Breaking the law? Just have the government change the law. It works for the financial industry.

    The claim they are unable to contact customers should have resulted in their request being binned without further consideration as they have no problem sending bills and ensuring they get paid.

    3 0 Reply
  6. sixit

    Nothing in these rules prevents them from hiring a company to do their mailing for them, and nothing prevents them from doing advertising themselves.

    This is nothing more than a ploy to earn extra income by leveraging those customers' personal data.

    0 0 Reply

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