On March 31, 2016, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that proposed to establish new privacy guidelines for broadband Internet service providers (ISPs).1 The FCC designed the proposal to “ensure broadband customers have meaningful choice, greater transparency and strong security protections for their personal information collected by ISPs.”2 To accomplish this goal, the NPRM proposes to apply the privacy requirements of Section 222 of the Communications Act3 to ISPs that offer broadband Internet access service (or, in the NPRM’s terminology, “BIAS”).4 The FCC asserted that applying the privacy requirements set forth in Section 222 would “give broadband customers the tools they need to make informed decisions about how their information is used by their ISPs and whether and for what purposes [their information may be shared] with third parties.”5
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