this was a fast rulemaking as it was introduced in March 2016 and was approved just a few months later. an amazing time frame considering how slow the regulatory process. is. the following articles provide additional information. the key factor is that the FCC declared the internet as a public utility. Congress IIRC had passed a law saying that the internet was not to be considered a public utility. "The FCC didn’t roll out these rules in response to gross privacy invasions. The agency lacked jurisdiction until 2015 when it snatched authority from the Federal Trade Commission by reclassifying the internet as a public utility. The FTC had punished bad actors in privacy and data security for years, with more than 150 enforcement actions" https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-phony-internet-privacy-panic-1491000504 IP Addresses Are Not Telephone Numbers - The Fundamental Flaw with the FCC's Proposed Privacy Rules https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/north-america-bureau/2016/05/ip-addresses-are-not-telephone-numbers-fundamental-flaw-fccs The Downside of the FCC’s New Internet Privacy Rules There may soon be a new cop on the privacy beat — the Federal Communications Commission. Last month, the FCC issued a 150-page document <https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-16-39A1.pdf> proposing sweeping new rules and regulations for broadband Internet Service Providers (ISPs). But in my analysis, this is not good news for those who genuinely care about promoting consumer privacy. To understand why the FCC’s involvement would create more problems than it would solve, it helps to understand a massive shift in web security over the last few years: the overwhelmingly successful campaign <https://letsencrypt.org/> to encrypt data flowing to and from consumers over the Internet. https://hbr.org/2016/05/the-downside-of-the-fccs-new-internet-privacy-rules https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/11/technology/fcc-proposes-privacy-rules-for-internet-providers.html?_r=1 Open Internet advocates celebrated long and loud in June when a federal court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s “net neutrality” rules <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/14/the-fcc-just-won-a-sweeping-victory-on-net-neutrality-in-federal-court/> that prohibit broadband-access providers from blocking websites or accepting payment to prioritize traffic. But consumers and businesses should look beneath the rhetoric to see larger dangers lurking in the FCC’s actions. The new limits and the uncertainty over how the agency will interpret them could seriously constrain future evolution of the Internet. But the bigger danger comes less in the rules themselves than in how the FCC finally got them past the courts. To overcome explicit congressional limits on Internet regulation, and at the insistence of the White House <http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-white-house-thwarted-fcc-chief-on-internet-rules-1423097522>, the FCC began this time by “reclassifying” broadband access as a public utility. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/07/07/why-treating-the-internet-as-a-public-utility-is-bad-for-consumers/?utm_term=.768e1d48c0c3 -- Peter Kurilecz CRM CA IGP [log in to unmask] Dallas, Texas Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org http://twitter.com/RAINbyte http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/RAINbyte/ http://paper.li/RAINbyte/rainbyte https://groups.google.com/d/forum/archives-in-the-news Information not relevant for my reply has been deleted to reduce the electronic footprint and to save the sanity of digest subscribers List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance To unsubscribe from this list, click the below link. If not already present, place UNSUBSCRIBE RECMGMT-L or UNSUB RECMGMT-L in the body of the message. mailto:[log in to unmask]