#59: FCC Takes on Privacy (w/ FCC Commr. Mike O'Rielly)

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2016

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly joins the show to discuss the Commission’s foray into privacy. What exactly does the FCC have to do with Internet privacy? Nothing — until recently. Before the agency reclassified broadband under telephone-style regulation in the name of “net neutrality,” the privacy practices of Internet service providers (ISPs) were regulated by the Federal Trade Commission — not the FCC. But, as former FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright noted, the FCC’s Title II reclassification of broadband as a “common carrier” service stole the FTC’s “jurisdictional lunch money.” What does this mean for consumers’ privacy and Internet advertising?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarger, your host.
0:08.5	Joining me in the studio again is a special guest, FCC Commissioner Mike O'Reilly.
0:13.5	Commissioner, thank you for joining the show again.
0:15.5	Thank you so much for having me. I'm a place to be here.
0:18.0	So we've got the FCC adopting two proposals recently that are kind of related.
0:23.8	So let's, we'll start with the unlocking of the cable box. Any consumer who subscribes to both
0:30.7	traditional cable package and, you know, broadband or maybe one or the other, would notice that
0:35.9	they have to rent a set top box from their
0:39.3	cable or satellite or telephone provider to access programming. And this has been going on for
0:45.4	quite a while and typically about $15 to $20 a month for a set top box. And recently some
0:52.3	consumer advocates, quote unquote, and your colleague, Chairman Wheeler,
0:57.3	decided that that is a problem and that they need to, quote, open the market for competition
1:03.3	by forcing companies to alter their equipment so that edge providers or other companies, non-MVPDs, what we refer to as cable, telephone
1:14.6	and satellite providers, so that they can make their own set-top boxes. So that might include
1:18.6	companies like Google or Amazon, et cetera. So, you know, consumers might hate paying this
1:25.7	rental fee. You know, why is it bad that the commission wants to
1:29.9	allow consumers to access their direct TV through a different cable box sure thing so let me break it
1:36.8	down a little bit finer point you did a great job of framing discussion but first and foremost we have
1:42.1	a statutory obligation in this and it came from the 1996 Act.
1:45.7	My old boss, Tom Blythe, was the author of the provision known as Section 629, and it does have the
1:51.6	mandate to open up the set-top box market and allow competitive availability of what are known
1:58.9	as navigation devices, which are really set-top boxes.
	...

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