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posted by martyb on Wednesday February 19 2020, @03:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the Captialistic-Voyeurism dept.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/isps-sue-maine-claim-web-privacy-law-violates-their-free-speech-rights/:

The broadband industry is suing Maine to stop a Web-browsing privacy law similar to the one killed by Congress and President Donald Trump in 2017. Industry groups claim the state law violates First Amendment protections on free speech and the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution.

[...] Customer data protected by this law includes Web-browsing history, application-usage history, precise geolocation data, the content of customers' communications, IP addresses, device identifiers, financial and health information, and personal details used for billing.

[...] The state law "imposes unprecedented and unduly burdensome restrictions on ISPs', and only ISPs', protected speech," while imposing no requirements on other companies that deliver services over the Internet, the groups wrote in their lawsuit. The plaintiffs are America's Communications Association, CTIA, NCTA, and USTelecom.

[...] The lawsuit is part of a larger battle between ISPs and states that are trying to impose regulations stronger than those enforced by the federal government. One factor potentially working against the ISPs is that the Federal Communications Commission's attempt to preempt all current and future state net neutrality laws was blocked by a federal appeals court ruling in October 2019.

[...] But while the FCC was allowed to eliminate its own net neutrality rules, judges said the commission "lacked the legal authority to categorically abolish all 50 States' statutorily conferred authority to regulate intrastate communications."

Previous Story:

Maine Governor Signs Strictest Internet Protections in the U.S.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @07:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2020, @07:59AM (#959819)

    There's a very specific reason, and it has to do with most people having no clue how the constitution works.

    The constitution does not grant you freedom of speech. You, as a human, *inherently* have freedom of speech. Governments cannot grant you that which you already have, they can only take it away. So freedom of speech does not give you anything - it only limits the power of our government to take it away. This is not a semantic issue. Let's say you did not consider corporations persons, so you'd like to allow the government to pass laws inhibiting their freedom of speech. Suddenly you'd open the door for the government to pass laws legally stating that e.g. no corporation is allowed to publish material critical of the government. And that would be legal because you're restricting the rights of our non-personed corporation, not the people trying to get material published using said corporation. That deterioration of freedom is already happening in places like Germany where it is literally illegal to criticize the president of the German federation and punishable with up to 5 years in prison.

    And this is not just for freedom of speech. The constitution doesn't grant you anything - it merely limits the powers of the government. So when you speak of bypassing the constitution, you're not talking about constraining a granted right - but rather granting the government a new and arbitrary power. Know what passports and federal income tax have in common? They were both "temporary war measures" granted to the government to briefly resolve an emergency situation. Kind of like the Patriot Act in modern times. You do NOT want to grant new powers to the government, especially the broad and incredibly disruptive powers the constitution expressly prohibits them from having.

    ---

    So yeah, obviously I think this case is absurd. But the solution of doing away with the first amendment (for anybody and anything) is a million times worse than any possible relief it MIGHT bring in the short run to this situation. And MIGHT is the right word there. This isn't a freedom of speech issue. This is an issue of us having such a convoluted and complex legal code that anybody with the right money can find a way to weasel out of most issues. Kill the first amendment defense (at immense cost) and the corporation will just find another angle to go for. If that doesn't work, they'll just lobby the government and buy a new loophole.

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