In early April, Congress voted to remove a piece of consumer protections regulation regarding Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This allows companies like AT&T and Verizon the legal ability to collect your detailed browsing history and sell it without informing you or giving you a cut.

This, in a word, is bad.

This is not just a list of Google searches or websites you’ve visited. This includes social security numbers, real-time location data and medical information.

Before the rollback, ISPs could collect and monitor your activity, but needed explicit permission in order to monetize it. The central argument against ISP regulation was that Google and Facebook are operating unregulated in their collection and sale of user data, so ISPs should be allowed to do the same.

Critics of the bill respond that the internet giants like Facebook are providing valuable free services in exchange for the user data. Because Verizon and AT&T make users pay for internet access, they have no reasonable claim to loss.

Another critique is that Google doesn’t collect the entirety of a user’s browsing data because it only has access to the data collected from its website directly or through its ad network, Google Display Network. This means that if an internet user does not want Google to sell his data, he can chose not to use Google. However, if an internet user does not want the internet service providers to sell his data, he is forced to give up internet use altogether in order to protect his interests.

There are ways to combat this new rule. Users can create virtual private networks  (VPNs) or block browsing cookies, but nothing is 100 percent effective. Additionally, both methods negatively effect the internet experience; for example, removing cookies can lead to a never-ending redirect to a login-page because the website forgets that you are authenticated every time it refreshes. At the more practical level, the ads that you are shown on websites are going to be wildly irrelevant to you.

I believe that it is embarrassing that our legislative body – where the median ages for the House of Representatives and Senate are 57 and 61 respectively, more than twenty years older than the average citizen  – is allowed to pass sweeping deregulation that strips consumers of common sense protections in the name of greed.

The legislative body is comprised of career politicians, business executives, legal scholars and former academics. As of March 2016, only four members of Congress have a computer science degree at any level according to BRG News.

When Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Secretary of Education, everyone had a very clear idea of why that was inappropriate. She had no previous experience in the educational system, let alone the public education system, so it seems that she would be unfit or under-qualified to lead the nation’s public education system.

In the same vein, men and women who are not familiar with the nature of internet are not equipped to pass legislation on the subject. It’s clear that most members of Congress have limited understanding of how the internet works.

By allowing Congress to control these issues, we are essentially expecting a carriage-driver to create a sensible and efficient infrastructure for an automobile.