Sen. Ted Cruz and other Republican senators are fighting a Federal Communications Commission plan to impose new data-breach notification requirements on telecom providers.
In a letter sent to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today, the senators claim the pending FCC action would violate a congressional order.
They say the proposed data-breach notification rules are preempted by an action Congress took in 2017 to kill an assortment of privacy and security rules issued by the FCC. The Congressional Review Act was used in 2017 by Congress and then-President Donald Trump to throw out rules that would have required home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers' opt-in consent before using, sharing, or selling Web browsing history, app usage history, and other private information.
The invalidated FCC rules also included data-breach notification requirements that are similar to those the current FCC now plans to impose.
The FCC already enforces data-breach notification requirements, but the pending proposal would expand the scope of those rules.
Rosenworcel's data-breach proposal is scheduled for a vote at tomorrow's commission meeting, and it may ultimately be up to the courts to decide whether it violates the 2017 congressional resolution.
The Republican senators urged the FCC to rescind the draft plan and remove it from the meeting agenda.
The key legal question seems to be whether the FCC can re-implement one portion of the nullified rules as long as it doesn't bring back the entire privacy order.
We conclude that it would be erroneous to construe the resolution of disapproval as applying to anything other than all of the rule revisions, as a whole, adopted as part of the 2016 Privacy Order.
By its terms, the CRA does not prohibit the adoption of a rule that is merely substantially similar to a limited portion of the disapproved rule or one that is the same as individual pieces of the disapproved rule.
This Cyber News was published on arstechnica.com. Publication date: Wed, 13 Dec 2023 01:29:05 +0000