More on the Internet Privacy Acts
As more news sources have revealed more about the issue, we add to our summary. A lot of stories are covering that Illinois is passing a bill to guarantee privacy, even as the federal law will take it away. It turns out that California passed such a privacy law in 2005. The laws allow consumers to find out what companies like Google and Facebook have on them, and who they sold the information to.
The privacy regulation that Obama signed does not go into effect until later this year. That is the one that will be blocked by the Republican law. Trump has favored this Republican law, selling our data.
Lets look at what is going on with our Internet Service Providers. We pay a lot monthly for our internet access. But the ISPs don’t provide any content. We pay for that through subscriptions, through taxes for government information, and through viewing ads for many sites. Nobody wants to let the ISPs also profit from selling our private choices of what to view, or what we talk about in our messages. Do we let the Telephone companies monitor our calls and sell our data? Do we let the post office open our letters or bills or magazines and sell the data? It is silly to think that we must allow the ISPs to invade our privacy which we don’t allow elsewhere, just so they can make more profit. It is basically embarrassing for the Republicans, the party of freedom and protecting our rights against government intrusion, to be prostituting themselves and their principles before companies seeking only profit.
Under President Obama, the Office of Science and Technology Policy had 130 members, including 20 in the technology and innovation division, that could have advised Trump on Internet matters. So far, Trump has only appointed only one member to this office.
The House sponsor of the bill is Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee’s 7th district. She also has received the largest amount of contributions in the House from the telecom companies, of $84,000.
If states do not block the Republican’s sale of OUR data, not theirs, many people may only use the Internet sparingly, and not for entertainment. In terms of value, seven of the top ten companies are internet based companies, like Amazon and Google or Alphabet. Is Trump going to go down in history as The Man Who Broke the Internet?
