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posted by martyb on Thursday August 04 2016, @05:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-charge-for-bandwidth-consumed-by-ads dept.

Stuck with Comcast? You may get stuck some more!

Ars Technica , Gizmodo, ZDNet, and a host of others are reporting that Comcast claims that the FCC has no authority to limit or prohibit the internet provider from distributing web histories to advertisers.

From the Ars Technica article:

As the Federal Communications Commission debates new privacy rules for Internet service providers, Comcast has urged the commission to let ISPs offer different prices based on whether customers opt into systems that share their data and deliver personalized ads.

Comcast executives met with FCC officials last week, and "urged that the Commission allow business models offering discounts or other value to consumers in exchange for allowing ISPs to use their data," Comcast wrote in an ex parte filing that describes the meeting. (MediaPost covered the filing yesterday.)

AT&T is the biggest Internet provider offering such a plan. AT&T's "Internet Preferences" program reroutes customers' Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzes the customers' search and browsing history, and then uses the results to deliver personalized ads to websites. With Internet Preferences enabled, AT&T customers can pay as little as $70 per month for 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home service, but those who don't opt into Internet Preferences must pay at least $29 a month extra.

[Continues...]

The Washington Post adds:

Consumer groups who oppose Comcast have said that Internet providers have a unique vantage point over everything an Internet user does online. For example, Netflix's intelligence about its users is largely limited to what customers do on its own platform, with little visibility into how those same people watch videos on Hulu or Amazon. (Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Internet providers, however, can detect when a subscriber visits all three sites.

Many analysts expect the FCC to finalize its privacy rules for Internet providers this year. But there are a lot of details to be hashed out, including whether Internet providers will be able to share subscriber data by default with marketers or whether they will be required to first obtain customers' explicit approval.

It's still unclear whether Comcast has actual, concrete plans to roll out a discount, data-driven Internet program. But what is clear is that the company has at least considered the possibility and wants looser rules for the industry that would permit such plans. A Comcast spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gizmodo puts it succinctly: "Comcast has logged yet another tally in the competition for Shittiest Company In Existence."


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Ezber Bozmak on Thursday August 04 2016, @05:23PM

    by Ezber Bozmak (764) on Thursday August 04 2016, @05:23PM (#384121)

    Right now they are charging for privacy. They just aren't collecting the fees themselves. If you use a big corporate ISP, you should already expect that they are spying on your traffic. Not only has verizon been caught doing it, [washingtonpost.com] they keep buying companies that are all about advertising. [bloomberg.com]

    If you want privacy from your ISP you have to go with a dedicated third party privacy service, aka a VPN. And for that you'll pay somewhere in the range of $40-$200/yr. (Not to be confused with 'free' VPNs that have privacy invasion as their business model.)

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