Congress completed its overturning of the nation’s strongest internet privacy protections for individuals on Tuesday in a victory for telecommunications companies, which can track and sell a customer’s online information with greater ease.
In a 215-to-205 vote largely along party lines, House Republicans moved to dismantle rules created by the Federal Communications Commission in October. Those rules, which had been slated to go into effect later this year, had required broadband providers to receive permission before collecting data on a user’s online activities.
The action, which follows a similar vote in the Senate last week, will next be brought to President Trump, who is expected to sign the bill into law. A swift repeal may be a prelude to further deregulation of the telecommunications industry.
Republicans said President Barack Obama’s appointee to the F.C.C., Tom Wheeler, had created a slew of overbearing rules for broadband providers that would put them at a disadvantage relative to internet companies like Google and Netflix. Those internet companies are not regulated by the F.C.C. but are increasingly in competition with telecom companies for online streaming customers.
Lawmakers and Republican regulators at the F.C.C. have said they plan to target the 2015 classification of broadband as a utilitylike service that is strapped with strong regulatory oversight. They are also set to seek the overturning of Obama-era net neutrality rules that forbade broadband providers from blocking, slowing down or charging extra for downloads of websites and apps.
“What we’ve created is confusion, and this is the way to rein in an agency that was overreaching,” said Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, who introduced the House bill to overturn the privacy rules. She used the Congressional Review Act in a procedure that lets lawmakers scrap regulations recently created by government agencies.