Internet service providers have intentionally misled Congress about browsing data encryption, Mozilla, the creator of the web browser Firefox, wrote in a letter on Monday, Ars Technica reports.
The letter comes in the midst of a debate of DNS over HTTPS, or DoH, which keeps third-parties from viewing a browser’s lookups, but can also make it more difficult for ISPs to see what websites their users are visiting.
Mozilla Senior Director of Trust and Security Marshall Erwin wrote in a letter to the chairs and ranking members of three House committees: "Unsurprisingly, our work on DoH [DNS over HTTPS] has prompted a campaign to forestall these privacy and security protections, as demonstrated by the recent letter to Congress from major telecommunications associations. That letter contained a number of factual inaccuracies.”
Several telecommunications groups sent a letter to the several House and Senate committee chairs and ranking members claiming that Google’s use of DoH “could interfere on a mass scale with critical internet functions, as well as raise data competition issues.”
Erwin says, "The focus of the lobbying effort has been on using Google as a boogeyman, given a lot of the antitrust concerns that exist today, to drive a lot of uncertainty about the potential implications of DNS over HTTPS.”
He adds that the groups are "explicitly arguing that ISPs need to be in a position to collect and monetize users' data. This is inconsistent with arguments made just two years earlier regarding whether privacy rules were needed to govern ISP data use."