Unfortunately this is feeling similar to net neutrality to me. It’s something that keeps coming back every few months/years and receives attention from people in the tech/privacy/security communities, but doesn’t seem to receive much opposition outside of those communities. Since it’s being pushed as a way to protect children, it’ll likely be harder to get people to oppose it. I hope that the recent uptick in the general population’s privacy awareness (however small it may be) and initiatives by some tech companies will help people understand how bad this could/would be for their privacy.

I didn’t see anything mentioned about this in the article, but I wonder how this would impact VPNs. I’m sure most companies, especially those that are allowing more employees to work remotely due to COVID, would be opposed to this bill as they rely on the corporate VPN for security.

Additionally, this seems to be something that ISPs may support. In theory, it would enable them to collect more information on their users for them to later sell/share. It could also help them in providing preferential treatment of different sites/services (eg - device A is using a VPN so it gets throttled, device B is accessing an encrypted alternative YouTube frontend so it gets throttled, device C is accessing the EARN IT compliant YouTube site directly so it gets the fastest speed possible).

In the event that it does pass, I am curious how this would change the privacy/security landscape. Would more privacy oriented companies turn to decentralized services/models? Would things like the fediverse be more quickly adopted by the average consumer? Would self hosted services become a more attractive business model? Would this force companies to limit what is hosted on 3rd party cloud providers? Would it lead to stronger initiatives to create a “new internet” or larger adoption of networks like Tor? I really hope we don’t have to find out, but maybe it wouldn’t necessarily be the end of (the little) privacy that we currently have.