Cybersecurity Policy Report, FCC Asked to Eliminate Cyber, Privacy Rules in ‘Delete, Delete, Delete’ Proceeding, (Apr 15, 2025)

By Lynn Stanton

Stakeholders are seeking the elimination of a broad swath of FCC rules they argue are unnecessary and harmful to competition, deployment, and innovation, including some related to cybersecurity, privacy, and data breach reporting.

Parties were responding to a public notice in GN docket 25-133, the FCC’s broad “delete, delete, delete” deregulatory proceeding seeking comment “on every rule, regulation, or guidance document that the FCC should eliminate for the purposes of alleviating unnecessary regulatory burdens,” according to an agency news release.

In the public notice, the FCC had noted that President Trump “has called on administrative agencies to unleash prosperity through deregulation and ensure that they are efficiently delivering great results for the American people,” FCC, Public Notice, Dkt. 25-133 (March 12, 2025).

ACA Connects said the FCC should “grant the pending petition for reconsideration to rescind the previous administration’s unlawful expansion of the Commission’s authority” under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

In response to the Salt Typhoon cyber espionage campaign that targeted U.S. telecom carriers, the Commission in January imposed stricter cybersecurity rules on carriers using its CALEA authority. CTIA, NCTA, and USTelecom later petitioned the FCC to reconsider the rules (CPR, Feb. 20).

ACA also asked the FCC to “delete the expansive data breach rules adopted for telecommunications carriers and interconnected VoIP providers.” Those rules were adopted in 2023 to expand the Commission’s 16-year-old breach notification rules to cover certain personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers and financial information, rather than just customer proprietary network information (CPR, Dec. 14, 2023).

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged the FCC to “consider significantly modifying or extending the implementation time frame” for its mandate for wireless providers “to adopt secure methods to authenticate a customer before giving a customer’s phone number to a new device or new wireless provider and maintain records of SIM change requests.”

The FCC in 2023 approved rules to protect wireless consumers from SIM (subscriber identity module) swap and port-out fraud by requiring wireless providers to adopt secure methods of authenticating a customer before redirecting a customer’s phone number to a new device (CPR, Nov. 15, 2023).

In addition, the Chamber called for eliminating certain cybersecurity and data breach mandates, which it said exceeded the Commission’s authority.

News: FederalLegislation DataPrivacy DataSecurity DataBreach