Inside the FTC’s crusade to make the Internet dumber and more expensive.
The Internet was built off of a deal between companies and customers, one that we ought to understand. Companies provide a cornucopia of free, or almost-free, content and services, but in exchange we provide companies with data that helps them direct tailored advertisements to us.
The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, does not like this deal. Under the twin pretenses of privacy and data security, the FTC wants to make a new Internet, one more suited to the preferences of legal academics and bureaucrats than consumers. The new Internet would only permit companies to gather the data the government deems necessary.
The FTC has set out to create an Internet New Deal that would end “Surveillance Capitalism,” as they call it, and mandate “data minimization” as a means to stop the unjust “monetization” of data. For companies and consumers, it would be a bad deal.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Arena Magazine
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.