HR 6032 Passes in House – Internet Connected Devices

Yesterday the House passed HR 6032, the State of Modern Application, Research, and Trends of (SMART) IoT Act, by a voice vote. The ‘debate’ lasted just over 8 minutes and consisted mainly of praising committee leadership for their bipartisan support for crafting this bill.

In my earlier post on this bill I had serious reservations about the definition of ‘internet connected devices’ used instead of trying to define IoT. That concern is further aggrevated by the discussion of the IoT problem found in the House Energy and Commerce Committee report on the bill. In both the sections describing the purpose of the bill and the need for the legislation, the term ‘internet connected devices’ is never used; all references are to the undefined acronym ‘IoT’.

Those discussions in the report clearly (but certainly not concisely) indicate that the Committee is concerned about a wide variety of devices that are connected to the internet but, may communicate over the internet without the specific control of the owner of the data that is being shared or with whom the data is being shared. But that concern is specifically ignored by the inclusion of the requirement in the definition of ‘internet connected devices’ that the physical object connected to the internet would “communicate information at the direction of an individual” {§2(c)(2)(A)}. One of the big problems of so many IoT devices is their capability to communicate information without the direction of the individual owner/operator of the device.

This bill obviously has bipartisan support and more importantly the lack of any significant opposition, so it could be passed in the Senate under their unanimous consent process. If there were a single Senator, however, that objected to this bill, the bill would languish in that body in the limited number of floor hours available for consideration of bills under regular order. I do not expect to see this bill reach the President’s desk.