The big telcos have always been horrible and they will never change. I used to work for a small provider in that industry and always hated USWest because of that experience. They will never change as long as they exist, whatever name they go by.
Good to see Maine has a law protecting privacy. I agree with other commenters that this kind of law should be broad-spectrum, affecting all businesses from telcos to lemonade stands.
My ISP is a municipal fiber provider with strong and proud Net Neutrality. Obviously NN isn't a privacy issue, but it's unlikely to pair with trying to sell personal data (of our own neighbors!) for cash.
In addition to consumer protection laws, strongly consider supporting local municipal FTTH. Compared to Comcast, I pay less money for unmetered symmetric gigabit, it's run by ordinary people (not comic book villains), and the money stays here in town. All it takes is determined civic engagement.
(And that includes voting out the people who support these attacks against people.)
If you're asking how to create a municipal fiber ISP, take inspiration and guidance from existing success stories. It'll vary depending on the state and culture and require multiple steps. If telecoms have already bribed the state govt to ban municipal Internet, collect signatures for a ballot question on whether to allow municipalities to decide for themselves. Next, start a local campaign to promote municipal FTTH. There, keep your messaging simple, consistent, and on-point (see below).
Meanwhile, collect signatures for a small, non-threatening initiative like whether the city should explore the possibility of creating FTTH. Be involved in that process. Be helpful, positive, and patient. Contact other cities that have done this and get advice from them. Get the study/plan published. If the city govt is against it, vote them out and continue. Otherwise, encourage local govt to promote the plan. Then have a ballot question on whether to build the municipal fiber ISP.
Reasons to build a municipal fiber ISP:
* lower cost Internet and money stays here
* superior service
* net neutrality and consumer protection
* jobs, jobs, jobs
* increased property values
I could imagine the dynamics in Virginia being more challenging than other states, given the relatively large size of municipalities (counties), where other states often have another level lower (township, town, city).
If you're trying to get Loudoun County to provide municipal fiber, that'd be a much bigger project/investment than a smaller municipality. Obviously some independent cities in Virginia are smaller (especially Falls Church), but most folks live in relatively large counties.
For those that are unaware, if you live in California the recently passed CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) gives you a lot of new power to force companies to delete your data and let you opt-out of them selling it.
It's a little tedious since you have to do it with each company, but so far I've found that it largely works.
You can also do it for equifax, experian, and transunion (though when I tried equifax it was unsurprisingly broken).
You can either request the data they have on you, ask for it to be deleted (the parts they don't require for operation), or opt-out of resale.
This website [0] has a bunch of links to the CCPA pages for different companies. The better companies have enabled this ability for all users, but generally the companies you'd rather delete from have only enabled it for California.
They don't remove data related to your FICO score that they can legally keep for that purpose.
They remove any other data about you that they collect and would otherwise 'anonymize' and sell. You can ask them to give you the data first before asking them to delete it if you're interested in what it specifically is.
Yep. I also heard a podcast about a woman who was born at home and never got a social security number. So to the government and to creditors she didn't exist and it was a nightmare for her to do anything financially that most people don't even think about.
Sounds like I have an equal first amendment right to publicly expose the personal cell phone numbers and home addresses of every lawyer, corporate executive, and lobbyist who think this is a good idea.
No you don't. Those folks are a different class of people than you, a better class, a class that deserves privacy - us peons aren't important enough to have to worry about that stuff.
That's what they'll argue anyway. They'll use different words, but whatever words they use will carry that message.
Privacy isn't a right. It's a product you buy. Rich people are better. They deserve more and better versions of all products: Justice, education, health care...
Defeatist attitude aside, what would happen if we crowd funded a wikileaks-type organization that operates "as an ISP" and doxxed politicians/lobbyists/lawyers/isp executives?
> what would happen if we crowd funded a wikileaks-type organization
Hard to say with any certainty, but there is the case of the founder of a certain Wikileaks-type organization currently playing out that you might want to look at...
AT&T put hundreds of thousands of subscriber emails on the web with no password or firewall or meaningful authentication of any kind. (They were server-sent autocompleted values in the username field
of a login form that had a sequential integer URL argument.) He and a conspirator downloaded them all and sent them to the media to run stories about AT&T’s negligence (instead of, say, selling or publishing the list, or emailing them malware, et c).
He did a few years in federal, mostly in solitary.
I witnessed the terrible effects it had on his health and psyche. He was never the same person again after he got out. Solitary confinement is torture.
sophocles is right. There are two sets of laws in America, and the bigger one applies to you and not them. If you don’t show sufficient respect for their authority and the more restrictive set of rules they apply to your lower-status group, they will stretch their own rules to the point where you will be railroaded and subsequently tortured.
Is there a better example of this than Epstein? To get away with one of the worst crimes for decades and once caught, to get a penalty that would be considered a slap on the wrist for tax evasion or drug possession, much less what he did.
There are teenagers who were dating someone with a slightly too large age gap who spent far more time in prison than Epstein did.
The guy had been baiting people to clock him in the face for his anti-social behavior on the internet since forever. I don't think it was what he did to AT&T that got him sent up, he'd been on the feds' radar since at least the Sarah Palin email hack.
If the government doesn't have enough evidence to convict you they shouldn't be allowed to trump up some other bogus charge and defend their unfair treatment by saying "well we wanted to get him on this other charge..."
Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison, of which he served approximately 13 months before the conviction was vacated by a higher court. That’s not several years.
He was in jail (holding in Essex County jail in NJ) for the second ~half of the trial as well, as even before he was convicted, he was stripped of many rights and due to FBI harassment of all potential employers was unable to support himself to their standards.
If someone becomes a NAZI after being tossed in jail for no good reason, well hey, fuck em'.
How about we stop justifying hurting people because of their (in this case retroactive) violations of social/political norms and worry more about if our society itself is tolerable and is, in fact, sometimes perfectly deserving of extreme reactions.
No. Society doesn't need to worry about whether it's tolerant enough of "nazis" (or any hateful, violent, extremist ideologues), nor do we all need to realize that our collective failure to be adequately sympathetic towards "nazis" justifies their extremism. The "nazis" are not the real victims here. They deserve the social and political punishment they get.
>They deserve the social and political punishment they get.
If the "they" are the people supporting the punishment and torture of someone for reporting on corporate incompetence, and the manner of punishment is extremism, then your rationale leads to the extremism you want to punish. By this rationale, society deserves the extremism it gives rise to through its treatment of individuals who were not extremist before the treatment.
If you're truly baffled as to the context in which the term "nazis" is employed in reference to weev's political views as an exemplar, and don't understand how it can possibly be the case that such views and their advocacy deserve to be opposed by civilized society, I'm not going to be the one to hold your hand and gently teach you how the lessons of the last hundred years have led most of humanity to reach that obvious conclusion.
But really you're not confused at all, you're just trying to bait me into a tedious semantic argument in which you'll suddenly forget how English works and what words even mean, and I'm not wasting my time with that.
When I worked at a large telco/broadband provider in the 90s and onward such concepts of selling this data was forbidden and you'd get funny looks for suggesting it. Our leadership chain - comprised of a mixture of long tenured employees with mostly engineering backgrounds supported not wanting to sell this data as well. It wasn't until the mid 2000s when our leadership got swapped out with younger executives who'd do 2 year rotations across the company and were looking to do a fast big bang to wow others that would go down this road. It wasn't just selling data this new gang wanted, but DNS redirection (think for nxdomains), and ad insertion thru TCP seassion hijacking platforms. There were a number of startups who were happy to give us free gear to sniff & manipulate customer traffic and we'd get a cut of the ad money.
Sure. Just get the corporate entity to say a single word. No representatives. No notes. No proxies. No robots. No automated voices. The actual corporate legal entity. Not even the CEO. No clever stand-ins with same name.
Just one mouthed, audible word to confirm the entity can qualify for speech. Then we can consider "free speech" for that entity.
I can only dream this would hold up even as I know there are likely dozens of loopholes to render it irrelevant. Not to mention specific exceptions and allowances already in law.
In the US, freedom of the press is explicily stated in the 1st. amendment to the constitution. It does not depend on any legal theory of publishing corporations being people.
Is your question intended to establish or imply that there is an error of fact in my previous post? It is not clear to me that there is any necessary relationship between the two.
The question is why the ISPs can't claim the same protections as The New York Times in selling this data. IOTW: is this a 'you know it when you see it' type of situation like pornography, or is there a real differentiator?
Privacy is a good one. I'd be fascinated to see how ISPs assert that publishing a news article is the same as selling/publishing all your search history or all your DNS history. And if it is your records why is it most peoples reaction is horror instead of happiness? Its because privacy has value. Which is why ISPs want to sell it.
Privacy isn't dead its just being sold as a commodity now. Without realistic permission and protection.
I'd go even further: the ISPs only have this data as a result of business dealing and such data is not expected to be shared. Sharing of my history is not necessary for providing me with internet. You want to allow accounting firms to share your financial records as well?
They are only doing it because there's profit. Not because its a necessary aspect for providing internet access. Sharing your accounting data is similar. Another example: what if you go for counselling with psychologist etc? Is that protected?
Yes, HIPAA is a good analogue to compare against here. The Maine law is the inverse of HIPAA- it applies to ISPs (hospitals) rather than the data (medical records).
Of course, Maine does not have the power to institute HIPAA like regulations for internet data and so do this instead. Nonetheless, I think the telecoms broadly have a point here.
That is a reasonable question in its own right, but it is not clear to me how the answer to the question would differ if the freedom of the press were based on the principle of corporations having (some of) the rights of individuals, rather than it being expressly, if vaguely, stated in the 1st. amendment.
Ultimately, I think you will find that a great deal of law (and, much more broadly, ethics) comes down to 'I know it when I see it' (or, perhaps, 'we (the people) agree that we know it when we see it'.) This can be a difficult thing for people with a somewhat rigidly rational approach to life to accept.
The original question is if you curtail the ISPs rights here, under what legal framework are you not curtailing the rights of NYT/Wikipedia/etc.
Pornography in law is famous because it is one of the few 'I know it when I see it' situations. While certainly the law lacks the rigor we enjoy in technical fields, it is a rare circumstance where that is the legal basis of an opinion.
The original question is not intended to be considered as a rigorous argument, as its author made clear. My point of entry was to introduce a fact that answered your specific question, and as far as I can tell, it stands as such.
While the law, for obvious reasons, rarely uses 'I know it when I see it' justifications, I suspect that that is what most ethical principles ultimately depend on, and to the extent that the law tries to be ethical, the same goes for it.
Demand is far too overstating it. And I'm not proposing or demanding it become law. There's a bunch of side-effects we might not like.
But let's go with it anyway:
Freedom of speech is different from freedom of the press. But both are linked because the amendment was written to allow for people to record their grievances to government via a free press. This is why free press was linked - people wanted their speech recorded in print and it was seen that government might legislate this out of existence or otherwise restrict it.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Notice that people can obviously operate a press without congress outlawing it.
Care to show me where a corporation gets free speech from? Not from that amendment. It comes from law around granting corporations the status of "legal person". This was necessary to allow a group of people to operate a business and have the business be liable, make contracts etc instead of the group.
If you want to imply corporations have freedom of the press and therefore freedom of speech thats the only angle you have if you reject "legal person". Freedom of press is the ability to print. My fictional judge would accept that printed page as "from the corporate entity". But its still not speech: That judge would then ask the corporate entity to speak it.
As for a corporation actually being able to speak or print. The entity can own a printer. So it can "speak" via the press. But it can't actually talk without a proxy. No actual mouth nor was it born with one nor would it could presumably be seen to even possibly have been born with one. This covers the case where some clever lawyer might bring up exceptions for birth deformity as a reason for granting something without speech actual free speech.
But in reality its all moot: "legal person" is already a thing. And it overrides all of this. Until it doesn't I guess but that is unlikely.
The more astute would just say that any of these conditions would have to be put into law and the amendment prevents that. So, its still moot. Unless you determine that legal entities aren't actually people but only narrowly defined as people for particular reasons.
I'm ignoring the legalese to make a distinction between a human and non-human person.
Corporations were granted free speech in a couple famous supreme court cases (NYT v. Sullivan, NYT vs. U.S.) and is not tied to the more recent non-human 'person' law.
The relevant question in my mind is how to protect Wikipedia and the New York Times and The Red Cross and ... from censorship by the government. There are very many organizations which speak in ways that the government would prefer they wouldn't- not all of them are traditional press, but many are.
Your proposal would allow the government to censor them all as they no longer have that protected right.
I would actually argue that wikipedia, newspaper like the Times etc are acting as a press. Therefore covered by the amendment's specific mention thereof. Don't even need to invoke the freedom of speech of those who did the actual writing. You still could however[1].
The ISPs aren't acting as a press, unless they wish to assert that their primary objective is to publish IPs and other metadata. That is fine as well but they should then lose protection as a simple carrier of data. They would also incur liability of what is published. I'm fair sure they wouldn't want that. They would scream "we're not a press we're a carrier!" to escape that liability.
This is similar to the postal service asserting that they are a press and then selling delivery details or even opening your letters and sharing their content. So, what business are they in? Publisher or carrier? I think it matters.
[1] The weaker fallback of a corporation using its employee's freedom of speech asserts that those employees are fully protected from the corporation. I doubt that is ever true. So in a real way the employees don't have free rein over their opinions and speech. Restricted speakers. I'd therefore not be relying on that. I'd want wikipedia etc protected under freedom of press instead.
What about institutions which wish to speak but certainly aren't primarily press? The Red Cross, Unions, Universities, an activist bakery. Their freedom of speech (or press) is protected too. What distinguishes them from the ISPs?
Newspapers do not have a specific call-out. The printing press does, which was simply the most advanced method of spreading your speech at the time.
The founders wanted the ability to print what they wanted and, just as importantly, not be forced by the government to print things they didn't want to.
> Wikipedia can fall back on the individual editors' rights
Can it? Then why couldn't any other company similarly fall back on to the rights of their employees. e.g. whoever is compiling the data being sold in the telecom case.
Employees would be seen as acting on behalf of the corporate entity. So really they are proxy and/or talking for the corporate entity. Not themselves.
Most random employees have no usefully unrestricted free speech when their contract often deliberately punishes them if they say the wrong word. Those people working for companies shut up about their work unless they are willing to go whistleblower / they reveal a workplace safety issue / have legal advice etc.
What about the flip side of that. If the NYT prints a slanderous story about you, can you sue the deep-pocketed times, or do you have to go after the underpaid reporter?
Freedom of speech exists so that entities are presumed to be able to say things without interference from the government. An absolutist stance such as yours results in things like governments disincorporating newspapers that publish politically unfavorable content simply because the newspaper is s corporation and it can't itself physically speak (or write something, or publish something) without a human intermediary.
I like where your head's at, but guardians speak on behalf of minors, lawyers speak on behalf of clients, and representatives speak on behalf of their electorate (in theory), so executives speaking on behalf of groups of employees isn't much different.
> “Maine's decision to impose unique burdens on ISPs' speech—while ignoring the online and offline businesses that have and use the very same information and for the same and similar purposes as ISPs—represents discrimination between similarly situated speakers that is impermissible under the First Amendment,” the lawsuit claimed.
I agree. The law should apply to everyone, not just ISPs.
That's not how "free speech" works. That right isn't violated by privacy protection laws.
Free speech states that a state isn't going to prosecute you directly for whatever you may say. But that doesn't mean you are free from the consequences of what you're saying.
Privacy protection simply states that any legal person who feels that your actions violated the consent they gave, is free to sue you via the legal system for compensation for damages incurred. Which has little if anything to do with free speech.
If a telco uses the "free speech" argument, they essentially argue "we're a media company and we are accountable for what we publish".
If we're discussing media companies, it's interesting to note that these pull the "freedom of press" card to defend divulging person or confidential information in news outlets.
At this point, the entire discussion becomes rather silly semantics.
Interestingly, many EU countries also have "secrecy of correspondence" enshrined as a fundamental principle into their constitutions. The U.S. does not:
>Free speech states that a state isn't going to prosecute you directly for whatever you may say. But that doesn't mean you are free from the consequences of what you're saying.
If you are punished by the government for what you say, are you not being prosecuted by the government for what you say? If we say that all one needs to do to be punished for saying the wrong thing is to enter into an agreement with another person, what is to stop Facebook from adding something to its EULA saying by using the services you are agreeing to not say anything out of line with what Facebook wishes?
It seems like the end result of this rationale is that we allow the government to enforce private agreements that compromise speech. Effectively meaning you can sign away your First Amendment rights.
The whole "doesn't mean you are free from the consequences of what you're saying" is meant in respect to how other people are treating you, not how the government is treating you (regardless if it is on behalf of another person).
There's a pretty big difference between the qualifiers used in the 1st and 4th Amendments.
The 1st begins with "Congress shall make no law.."
The 4th states "..shall not be violated"
This is important because the 1st restricts what the government can do, while the 4th restricts what anyone can do. In other words, Congress need not pass a law restricting the collecting and sale of private information because that activity is already banned by the 4th. This is a job for the courts.
I don't believe that's accurate. I've heard first hand from lawyers that the bill of rights guarantees protections from government action, not other citizens or entities like corporations. That's why, for example, we have to have laws that make it illegal for people to break into your home and steal stuff. Otherwise, we could just apply the 4th amendment.
No individual or company has to necessarily "respect" your first amendment right to free speech, as that is something that can only be violated by the government or a government affiliated entity for which these protections also apply.
First Amendment seems to mean whatever the hell we want it to mean, these days.
A group of gun's rights advocates marching in Virginia recently argued that not being allowed to brandish assault weapons at the capitol was violation of their "symbolic" speech.[0]
I'm just waiting for the point where someone tries to make the defense in court that shooting another person in the head was an exercise of their freedom of speech.
Great: furniture movers should also have the free speech right to talk about my address, describe all my possessions, etc.
I hire those assholes to transport my bits, unmodified except for TTL, from my endpoint to a peer, no more, no less. Since they have a de facto monopoly I don’t even have the ability to choose an alternative. This exploitative crap must be stopped.
Furniture movers do have that free speech right. It's completely kosher for them to chat with some friends in a bar about how weird your possessions are or how hard it was to get to your address. Maybe ISPs should have special restrictions the same way medical providers do, but there's no general principle that people who discover private things about you aren't allowed to talk about it.
I mean every platform is monetizing data. If the telcos are arguing 'google and facebook are the same as us, we should have the same business models' I kind of agree
Of course my version is that they're all common carriers and have to comply with some norms, but allowing platforms to do this but not telcos is potentially silly
Somewhat more information, including the plaintiffs (America's Communications Association, CTIA, NCTA, and USTelecom), in the referenced Ars Technica article:
California Constitution
ARTICLE I DECLARATION OF RIGHTS
SECTION 1.
All people are by nature free and independent
and have inalienable rights. Among these are
enjoying and defending life and liberty,
acquiring, possessing, and protecting property,
and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness,
and privacy.
The constitution can't be used in this case to support a right to privacy. The argument for privacy here is that Maine's law doesn't infringe on the 1st amendment.
A case about access to contraception has nothing to do with free speech at all, nor is it even the same kind of "privacy." They're two different concepts, with the same word.
It's actually the seizure clause. The government can't seize your duck without a warrant, and that means if somebody's speech about you weighs as much as a duck, they've seized a duck's weight in information about you (measuring as if it's written on constitution-grade parchment), which violates your right to privacy as implied by the 4th amendment.
I previously worked under the umbrella of a major Canadian telecom (though in their media arm—radio, publishing, television).
I'd heard they gathered a large amount of data, but more to do with the trend of just hoovering up every bit possible and store it in their data lakes.
My understanding at the time is they had no idea what to do with it.
Some of these initiatives could be rooted in little more than some manager wanting to stamp `mined data lake using machine learning and AI to generate $(x) in $(m)`. It doesn't have to actually mean anything.
That said, maybe they've discovered a route to more revenue, hence the push.
edit: Should clarify this was in Canada when the linked article is about the US.
Was this Rogers New Media? Just curious because my recollection is that they owned the network infrastructure for the cable internet side and were the first folks in Canada to go big on deep packet inspection boxes (aka Cisco pcube, which was from an acquisition of an Israeli compamy) to deal with "undesirable" traffic but also mining customer data.
I didn't work on that side of the company so I can't comment with accuracy (the entire entity was around 25,000 people at the time). Only what I've heard along the way. I know they wanted to leverage the data, but I didn't gather they had necessarily developed much use at the time. They were definitely interested in collecting data, however.
edit: I'd like to add a disclaimer that my comments are as good as hearsay. I just wanted to add them for context.
I would be fine with that argument if they could get media companies on board with fair use and more limited copyright again. At least that would be consistent logic, but that won't happen.
What monopoly? Here in Palo Alto I have full consumer “choice”: comcast or att.
I have to use crapcast (though goes down each night) as att, despite their ads, will only provision me 768kb DSL though I’m less than a mile from the CO/DSLAMS (and the PAIX for that matter)
I assume elsewhere the two companies have a deal where comcast is slow and att is faster. Of course the competition authorities and fcc are utterly supine.
Palo Alto used to run its own infrastructure but over the years stupid privatization has gradually shed phone, TV, garbage collection, parking enforcement and such for inferior, more expensive private services. I expect power and water to fall next.
In most places the energy company owns the poles and the municipality grants them the right to be the sole energy provider. The access to the pole is limited to the cable company and the phone company(around here spectrum[cable] and cincinnati bell[phone]). The other option is satellite. Municipalities require payments for each lot that the company services whether or not they have a paying customer. These companies are given exclusive rights to access the poles.(Source=widowed spouse of TCI VP)
I imagine if historically cable tv and phone were transmitted by the same technology or company, there would only be one company allowed access. Since these were historically separate, they are granted access to the poles. Technically this is not a monopoly given that there are two different providers. It is monopolistic in my view. I have yet to live in an area that has more than two companies with pole access.
I lived in one of those areas in the 90s. We had dial-up. I was incredibly happy when we moved to the city and were able to get broadband. I was shocked when I found out a friend who lives in my city today was still operating with broadband. He complained about his wife having trouble using voip while watching netflix, so I suggested he upgrade his router or move it. When I went over to install the new router I found a broadband modem...! His street is serviced by the same companies as mine. He is in an arguably affluent neighborhood. He had to switch companies to get to 50mbit+.
It doesn't have to be. Fraud is still a crime. If I send the firm a BTC and they don't send me back a BTC worth of goods, how long will they remain in business?
Most corporations would have a very difficult (i.e. impossible) time tracking down all of their owners for a signature on those contracts.
That's why we allow them to be a legal person. So Comcast can sign a contract to purchase a new toner cartridge, rather than requiring a signature from each owner of each of their 4.5 billion shares outstanding.
Wouldn't most of that be handled by corporations making agreements among themselves? I don't think "the entire financial system" is really based on hooking individual people on unsustainable credit.
No, the entire financial system is based on companies being able to enter into contracts directly, rather than requiring each of their owners to be individually involved in every transaction.
This isn't so. Most employment is at-will. This works fine, because lots of laws govern what employers may do to employees, and anyway slavery is illegal so any employee may leave at any time. 95% of any employment contract is various attempts to get around those legal protections for the employee.
This is an especially pernicious case of the normal Stockholm Syndrome we see whenever the special status of corporations is challenged. No firm is 100% robots yet. If we withdraw our consent, they have to raise wages and improve working conditions until we relent.
The law only protects you from actual crimes. There are hundreds of other small provisions which have to be negotiated as part of a contract to be enforceable from a legal perspective.
This is especially true for freelancers, who don't have a single employer and are instead usually paid for deliverables as specified in a contract. Being able to quit anytime doesn't help if you've already spent weeks or months working on a project and never get paid because the company decides on a whim that they don't need your deliverable anymore.
The U.S. Supreme Court has accepted the notion of corporate personhood in constitutional cases dating back more than a century. In its 1897 decision in Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad Company v. Ellis, for example, the Court said that it was “well-settled that corporations are persons within the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Corporate “personhood” goes back even further, to at least 1819 with the Dartmouth v Woodward decision.
Citizens United has been surrounded by ignorance, promoted by newspapers who, incidentally, had their effectiveness and power reduced since they were no longer the only “protected” gatekeepers for picking political candidates.
Why should the New York Times editorial board get to express their opinions through millions of printed papers distributed through an expensive and vast logistics network, or via a website maintained by hired employees with a budget of millions per year?
Why shouldn’t Bob’s Hardware Inc., be able to also spend money, in exactly the same way as the New York Times to spread the message of their preferred political candidates that would be helpful for their business? How is Bob’s Hardware any less entitled to being able to express their opinions or present their facts than the N.Y. Times? Should the EFF be able to spend money at the same levels as what the New York Times spends to cut down trees and print some words on it and then send those words to readers all over the world? Media organizations can spend limitless amounts on getting their message out — Bob’s Hardware ought to have the same rights.
The First Amendment doesn’t protect newspapers as a special class — it protects everyone. The “press” is referring to the actual machine used to print things, not specifically to a news gathering organization.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/02/dont-be...
How perverted. They claim that the entity has a right to free speech? And worse, that somehow that entitles them to do as they please? Is Alan Dershowitz behind this?
Certainly a court challenge would pit the 1st Amendment rights of the consumer against that of a corporation. Something along the lines of citizens have the right of freedom of expression that is not accumulated and traded. In a sane world, a corporation would not trump the rights of a private citizen: the purveyor of goods and services meant to improve the lives of citizens. Right..? right?! But after Citizens United, who could really be sure that the average citizen is any more important than a corporation's personhood.
Good to see Maine has a law protecting privacy. I agree with other commenters that this kind of law should be broad-spectrum, affecting all businesses from telcos to lemonade stands.
My ISP is a municipal fiber provider with strong and proud Net Neutrality. Obviously NN isn't a privacy issue, but it's unlikely to pair with trying to sell personal data (of our own neighbors!) for cash.
In addition to consumer protection laws, strongly consider supporting local municipal FTTH. Compared to Comcast, I pay less money for unmetered symmetric gigabit, it's run by ordinary people (not comic book villains), and the money stays here in town. All it takes is determined civic engagement.
(And that includes voting out the people who support these attacks against people.)