Cancellation of FCC's ISP privacy rules drives Virtual Private Network adoption, but VPNs can have privacy issues of their own
If you're most people, you just found out about the FCC's internet privacy rules by way of their untimely demise. Thanks to the FCC's new chief, Congress …
Context & Ripple Effects
The repeal did not arrive out of nowhere: Chairman Ajit Pai first moved to halt the security provisions in February, the FCC then voted to stay its own 2016 rules before they took effect, and a former staffer walked through what repeal would mean as the House prepared its vote. The throughline was that broadband providers like Verizon were positioning themselves as ad-tracking giants on an unpoliced network.
This article is the consumer-side echo of that sequence: with the rules dead, privacy protection migrates from regulation to individual tools like VPNs — which raises the awkward question of who watches the VPN operators.
First-order effects
- Consumers who never followed the rulemaking now learn of it only after repeal, and the direct effect is a surge of traffic shifted into VPN tunnels to keep browsing data away from ISPs like Verizon, whose supercookie history shows how it uses unconsented data.
Second-order effects
- ISPs respond by selling the cure alongside the disease: Verizon's own Safe Wi-Fi VPN markets itself as blocking ad-tracking even while its privacy policy reads as a placeholder saying otherwise, turning VPNs from a consumer countermeasure into another carrier revenue line.
Third-order effects
- If demand keeps growing while trust does not, the VPN market faces pressure to outgrow its Wild West phase and develop industry standards — effectively replacing the repealed FCC rules with self-policing, where accountability depends on which provider you pick.
The trend: Consumer privacy protection is shifting from regulatory mandates on ISPs to individually purchased tools, forcing the VPN industry toward voluntary standards as it absorbs demand created by deregulation.