• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 13, 2025

Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have formed a 12-member working group to explore potential privacy legislation, the committee's leadership said Wednesday.

“We strongly believe that a national data privacy standard is necessary to protect Americans’ rights online and maintain our country’s global leadership in digital technologies, including artificial intelligence,” committee chair Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) and vice-chair Rep. John Joyce (R-Pennsylvania) stated.

“The need for comprehensive data privacy is greater than ever, and we are hopeful that we can start building a strong coalition to address this important issue,” they added.

Guthrie and Joyce stated that they “welcome input from a broad range of stakeholders.”

Chris Oswald, executive vice president at the Association of National Advertisers, said through a spokesperson that the organization will participate.

“The ANA plans to engage with the working group as well as continuing to work directly with committee leadership and members to share our vision of effective preemptive national privacy legislation that protects both consumers and the benefits of the ad-driven economy,” he said.

The major ad industry groups have advocated since 2018 -- the year California passed its landmark privacy bill -- for a national law that would override state statutes.

Federal lawmakers have drafted two major bipartisan privacy bills in recent years, but ad industry groups opposed both, and both ultimately failed to pass.

The American Data Privacy and Protection Act, proposed in 2022, would have prohibited companies from collecting or processing data about people's cross-site activity for ad purposes -- effectively outlawing one form of behavioral targeting. Other provisions would have continued to let companies draw on data collected from their own sites in order to serve targeted ads to adults, on an opt-out basis.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced that bill by a vote of 53-2 in 2022, but the full House didn't vote on the measure, and the Senate didn't hold hearings on it.

Last year, Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington) unveiled the bipartisan American Privacy Rights Act. That bill, also, would have prohibited businesses from serving targeted ads to consumers based on their activity across unaffiliated sites and apps.

Association of National Advertisers CEO Bob Liodice and American Association of Advertising Agencies CEO Marla Kaplowitz told lawmakers last year that the bill “would eviscerate the modern advertising industry.”

That bill died last year, after the House Energy and Commerce Committee cancelled a scheduled markup of the measure.