Your Internet Provider Shouldn't Sell Your Clickstream

BOSTON - The revelation that Internet providers have been quietly testing systems to watch and monetize everything their customers do online ought to settle the privacy debate: it is time for Congress to draw the line in statute, not in press releases.

We accept a bargain with the Internet's advertising economy: in exchange for free services, companies watch what we do within their walls. Google's bargain is at least visible. But the Internet provider is not a website. It is the road, and the road should not be reading the postcards.

The providers say customers can opt out. That gets the principle exactly backward. The default in a free society is not surveillance with an escape hatch. It is privacy, with surveillance available to those who freely choose it.

The technology industry will resist regulation, as industries do. It has a point that clumsy rules could break useful services. But the alternative — a patchwork of corporate promises, revised quarterly in the terms of service — is not privacy. It is theater.

The next Congress and the next president will write the internet's rulebook for a generation. They should begin here: the pipe is not the publisher, and your clicks are not its inventory.

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