Communications

If Congress passes the Email Privacy Act and sends it to President Donald Trump, it could be an "quick, easy bipartisan victory" for taxpayers and get the new administration and lawmakers off to a "positive" start, said IPI President Tom Giovanetti in an opinion piece in TechCrunch Wednesday.

Congress could chalk up a quick, easy bipartisan victory for taxpayers if both the House and Senate determined to pass the Email Privacy Act as early as possible.

IPI president Tom Giovanetti in a statement called it a "slam dunk" for President Donald Trump and Congress. "This legislation has nothing to do with preventing or prosecuting terrorism, but rather simply corrects lack of foresight in legislation passed 30 years ago, long before digital data became such a pervasive part of normal life," he said.

If the Act becomes law, digital data older than 180 days would still be considered active rather than ‘abandoned,’ and would still be subject to the normal requirements governing analog information.

McConnell would be "starting off on a very bad foot and confirming conservatives' worst fears about him" to reconfirm any Democratic commissioner before Wheeler's absence, IPI's Tom Giovanetti said.

It’s time to permanently rein in the FCC’s scope and authority by passing laws that limit its powers.

The Sixth Circuit Court’s rejection of the FCC's unconstitutional preemption of state laws regulating municipal broadband projects is a win for constitutional federalism and taxpayers. 

"No one has any idea what the Trump campaign's positions are on communications policy," Giovanetti told us. "There's no evidence at this point that there is anything approaching a policy process on the Trump campaign -- which is part of why I thought the platform was more important in this peculiar year."

"We salute the Congressional Republicans who have legislatively impeded [Obama's] plans to turn over the Information Freedom Highway to regulators and tyrants," the platform said. It included language similar to what IPI recommended last week: "We will consistently support internet policies that allow people and private enterprise to thrive, without providing new and expanded government powers to tax and regulate so that the internet does not become the vehicle for a dramatic expansion of government power."