House Democrats are preparing a push for regulations that implement a ten-point “Internet Bill of Rights” drafted last year at the request of incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Rep. Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley Democrat tasked by Pelosi with assembling the digital rights manifesto, told the Washington Examiner that incoming congressional leaders are ready to move forward as Democrats reclaim control of the House.
Legislative action will center on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where Khanna, who has spoken with key Democratic committee leaders, anticipates an early focus on three of the points: erecting rules for Internet data transparency, rules for opt-in consent on data use, and data portability.
“We needed the broader framework to lay out the comprehensive strategy. The Internet Bill of Rights does that. Now we have to, in a piecemeal way, get into the details,” Khanna said.
Khanna believes there’s an opportunity for bipartisanship on the “bill of rights,” particularly after reports last year of Facebook app data exposing information on millions of users.
“I don’t see why it has to be partisan,” he said. “People who care about privacy don’t fall into a partisan camp.”
As an example of bipartisanship, Khanna said he has high regard for White House adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “constructive and solutions oriented” Office of American Innovation, with which he worked last year to pass the IDEA Act to modernize government websites.
Optimistic visions of working together will face a test, however. Traditionally, there has been a partisan skew on regulating tech company handling of data. In 2017, for example, the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission repealed a pending regulation requiring Internet service providers to get consent before selling user data. A House bill to reverse the FCC had 17 Democratic and just one Republican co-sponsor.
Khanna’s “bill of rights” is broader in principle than the repealed FCC rule, which would have regulated ISPs but not companies like Google and Facebook. Some Republicans argued it was wrong to regulate ISP data-handling but not the behavior of ad giants Google and Facebook.
Data transparency and opt-in consent would, under the Democrats’ outline, resemble to a degree the interstitial-plagued websites of Europe, where the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, last year required website visitors to manually consent to data use.
Democrats imagine a less intrusive version of the GDPR, Khanna said. “American consumers aren’t going to want to click 30 times a day for consent, so what we say is, any time you’re collecting data, you need to have consent,” he said.
Data portability — or allowing users to download and transmit to different platforms the totality of their online content — would foster innovation and competition, Khanna said, pitching the reform in language appealing to more conservative lawmakers. Currently it is often difficult or impossible for users to transfer their data from one social media service to another, for example, which limits the vulnerability of giants like Facebook and Twitter to competition.
Although Khanna expects House Democrats to pass a bill resurrecting Obama-era net neutrality rules banning ISPs from handling traffic differently according to content — a policy he supports — such an effort is likely to be blocked in the Republican-held Senate.
“I feel like it’s our responsibility to get something done, and that’s the expectation. And people expect that we would get something done that could become law, and not something that’s just rhetorical,” Khanna said.
Progressive activists are preparing for battle, meanwhile, and vow to pressure Democrats from the outside over long-sought agenda items such as government-mandated net neutrality.
“We’ll be pushing for lawmakers to support restoring strong net neutrality protections, and we’ll harness the power of the Internet to crush any attempts by telecom lobbyists to pass bad legislation that undermines net neutrality in the name of compromise,” said Evan Greer, a leader of the activist group Fight for the Future.
“As a nonpartisan organization, we’re not afraid to expose and call out lawmakers of either party if they’re attacking our basic rights in the digital age. We’re channeling Internet outrage into real political power,” she said.
