Maine's new ISP privacy law has both California and New York beat

The Great State of Maine, having jettisoned its far-right lunatic "government" and replaced it with a responsive, progressive, evidence-based one, is now set to pass the nation's most stringent ISP privacy law, going further than both New York and California.

The new law restores the Obama-era ISP privacy protections that Trump's FCC chair Ajit Pai canceled before they could go into effect: rules that ban your ISPs from selling or sharing or exploiting the about your internet use without your explicit consent (this is what California's law does, too, but in California, it's an opt-out rule and in Maine, it's opt-in, and literally no one ever wanted to opt in to having their phone company spy on them and then sell the information they glean thereby).

The telcoms lobby, US Telecom, has objected on the ground that the Maine law will create a "patchwork" and consumers won't know what the rules are, because in US Telecom land, consumers are constantly buying internet connections in different states and relying on the rules from the last state to be in effect.

(The fact that US Telecom is objecting to an opt-in rule really says it all: if they were convinced that their customers wanted to be spied on by their ISPs, then an opt-in would just be a small hurdle en route to providing their customers exactly what they want)

The Maine law is a dare to both the FCC and Congress. Under Obama, FCC chairman Ajit Pai (then a mere commissioner) argued that the FCC could not tell states what rules the could and could not set for their ISPs (Pai, a former Verizon exec, wanted states to continue their practice of banning cities from setting up municipal broadband networks, while Obama's FCC chair Tom Wheeler [a former Comcast exec!] wanted to ban the practice). Read the rest