Georgetown's Larry Downes Is Down on FCC's Broadband Privacy Plan

Larry Downes, project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, is no fan of the Federal Communications Commission's broadband privacy proposal. Downes filed a letter in the docket referencing his article in the Harvard Business Review on what he says is the three major problems with the FCC proposal:

False Premise – The FCC’s assumption that Internet service providers have 'unique' access to consumer information is flatly wrong. Thanks to a nearly-complete campaign to encrypt information flow, ISPs are largely blind to the kind of sensitive information the FCC claims as its chief motivation for the rulemaking.

Double Standard – Leaving out the dominant 'edge' providers who are in fact the 'gatekeepers' of transactional information unnecessarily subjects consumers to two sets of different rules and different enforcement mechanisms for information exchange.

Transaction Costs of 'Opt-In' – Subjecting ISPs and ISPs alone to 'opt-in' requirements for nearly any use of consumer information, as all economists agree, significantly raises the transaction costs of precisely the kind of information exchanges that have so far fueled the 'cycle of innovation' that elsewhere the FCC praises as the source of the Internet’s phenomenal success. To do so only for those providers who have the least access to transaction data is both arbitrary and capricious.