Congressional Republicans overturned FCC broadband privacy rules to protect surplus dispossession

Evidence

In a chilling epilogue to this chapter in the history of surveillance capitalism, on March 28, 2017, a newly elected Republican Congress voted in favor of a resolution to overturn the broadband privacy regulations over which the FCC had struggled just months earlier. The rules had required cable and phone companies to obtain meaningful consent before using personal information for ads and profiling. The companies understood, and they persuaded Republican senators, that the principle of consent would strike a serious blow to the foundational mechanisms of the new capitalism: the legitimacy of unilateral surplus dispossession, ownership rights to surplus, decision rights over surplus, and the right to lawless space for the prosecution of these activities. To this end the resolution also prevented the FCC from seeking to establish similar protections in the future. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 535

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the later privacy-rule reversal and the partisan ‘surveillance capitalism vs. democracy’ theme Zuboff develops. — connects to: The FCC broadband privacy rules were repealed by Congress in 2017. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 550; ISPs lobbied to kill FCC privacy rules, claiming unfair competition with Google — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 532

Broader Connections

• ISPs lobbied to kill FCC privacy rules, claiming unfair competition with Google #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 532