Matt Starr Posts

On Thursday, April 27, the FCC took their first official steps towards making significant changes to the rules passed in their 2015 Open Internet Order (aka “Net Neutrality Order”).

Last week Congress officially overturned the FCC’s privacy rules for ISPs after the U.S. House of Representatives voted 215-205 and the Senate voted 50-48 to pass the resolution. President Trump signed the bill into law on Monday.

This morning the FCC passed its long-awaited data security and privacy rules for broadband internet access service (BIAS) providers on a 3-2 party line vote. While we won’t have the final language of the rules for several more weeks, Chairman Wheeler released a fact sheet earlier this month outlining what we should expect from the upcoming order. Unfortunately, albeit not surprisingly, the Commission has decided to move forward with its ex ante prescriptive approach and will not follow the FTC’s case-by-case framework.

Last Thursday, Reps. Michael Burgess (R-TX), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Peter Welch (D-VT) circulated a draft of a long-anticipated bipartisan data security and data breach notification bill, and it was certainly worth the wait. This bill has been in the works for months, but several of its original co-sponsors retired or lost re-election last year