MorgueFile 

WASHINGTON – Less than two weeks before Election Day, the Federal Communications Commission passed what privacy advocates hailed as a victory for consumers.

Internet providers cannot sell personal information such as browsing history to advertisers and others without getting the customer’s OK.

But illustrating the many ways that Donald Trump’s election is shaking up Washington — including some that his supporters may not have expected — those rules could soon be overturned, say conservative and liberal analysts.

Other controversial decisions passed by the the FCC’s Democratic majority in the last few years are likely to be overturned.

Net-neutrality rules prohibiting internet providers such as AT&T and Comcast from slowing content from sources such as Netflix will likely have a target around them, too, analysts said.

A potential prohibition on cellphone companies from excluding their own content from from data limits could also have trouble passing.

“Everything. They’ll undo everything,” said Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, a free-market tech policy think tank in an e-mail this week.

Szoka and others, such as Jeffrey Eisenach who is heading tech policy for Trump’s transition team, have been long critical of the FCC’s aggressiveness under the leadership of Democratic Chairman Tom Wheeler.

An upcoming change in course illustrates how Trump’s election will affect dozens of regulations other than those, like gun control and greenhouse gas standards, that were centerpieces in his campaign.

It’s also a sign of the tension between the dual, sometimes conflicting messages of Trump’s campaign, which reflected both populism and promises of reduced regulation.

Some rules, now likely to be repealed, have populist appeal.

“There is this wildly unpredictable streak to the racist but populist campaign that we just saw, and I have no idea whether or how they will try to honor both the populist promises and the deregulatory promises simultaneously. They are often contradictory,” said Matt Wood, policy director of Free Press. The progressive tech policy group pushed for the privacy rules against the opposition of internet providers.

Eisenach’s selection to the transition team signaled that Trump’s FCC could seek to remove regulations on cable and cell-phone companies, said John Bergmayer, senior staff attorney for Public Knowledge, another progressive tech advocacy group.

Eisenach – director of internet, communications, and technology policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute – did not respond to an interview request.

But in an Oct. 25 interview on C-SPAN, he said he expects Trump’s appointees to the five-member commission to “take a less-regulatory position.” The result would be “less intrusion by the FCC” on cable and phone companies, he said.

Members of the bipartisan commission serve five-year terms, but Trump will appoint the new chairman and give Republicans the majority.

AT&T and Comcast strongly opposed the FCC’s new privacy rules, saying the Federal Trade Commission already has similar regulations. However, those require customers to tell internet providers they do not want their information sold.

The FCC’s new rules puts the onus on internet companies to tell customers what information they are gathering and get their permission to sell it.

A possible Trump choice to lead the FCC is Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai, who voted against the privacy rule.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, which pushed for the rule, said he’s also concerned that internet companies will try to roll it back.

“It’s the only defense the American people have over the increasing surveillance of their personal information by (internet service providers),” he said. “It’s completely ironic that Mr. Trump ran on a campaign to ‘Clean up the Swamp,’ but is allowing the most powerful lobbyists to set the policies.” 

AT&T did not return a request for comment, and spokespeople for Comcast and Verizon declined comment.

The net-neutrality rules, which drew four million comments to the FCC, came after Comcast was found to be slowing the delivery of some content.

Netflix and other content providers – particularly those that stream movies and video – worried that large internet companies would slow their services unless they paid extra. That would allow companies such as Comcast and AT&T to choose which companies could afford to put content on the internet.

The dispute, however, became largely a legal one. Major internet providers wanted rules to be written in such a way that the FCC and consumer groups thought would be overturned by the courts. If the rules are charged now, Bergmayer, at Public Knowledge, worries that the internet companies will sue to get them thrown out.

In November 2014, Trump tweeted that President Barack Obama’s support for FCC regulations was a “top-down power grab.”

On the other hand, Bergmayer said the idea of keeping a handful of internet providers from influencing what people see has “real populist resonance.”

Randolph May, president of the Free State Foundation, another free-market think tank, said a new issue shows the dangers of the net-neutrality rule.

In addition to prohibitions on slowing content, it allows the FCC to investigate violations of what critics called a vague “general conduct standard.” In its first test of the policy, the agency wrote AT&T on Nov. 9 that it is looking into an arrangement in which video from its subsidiary, DirecTV, doesn’t count toward monthly data limits.

Consumer groups and the FCC worry that such arrangements give internet providers power to allow some companies to offer video entertainment, or mobile video games, at an advantage over others.

May said it’s another example of government overreach.

All the regulation does, he said, is have a “chilling effect” on letting customers get video or games without hitting their data limits.

Kery Murakami is the Washington, D.C. reporter for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Contact him at kmurakami@cnhi.com.