“Americans hoping for stronger data privacy protections may find a foe in Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.
As a justice on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he dissented against his colleagues’ 2017 decision to uphold net neutrality, the Obama-era regulation requiring internet service providers such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T to treat all internet traffic as equal. Net neutrality violates the First Amendment, he said, because the regulation “infringes on the internet service providers’ editorial discretion.”