This week marks a pivotal point in the history of the Internet. Monday was the 25th anniversary of the first .COM registration—and in some ways, the beginning of the commercial Internet. Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission unveiled its long-awaited National Broadband Plan, which proposes ambitious subsidies to encourage broadband deployment. On the theory that unease about online privacy may discourage broadband adoption, the Plan also calls for increased regulation of how websites collect, and use, data from consumers.

The debate over how to regulate online data use has gone on for over a decade, leading to today’s final “Roundtable” in the “Exploring Privacy” series held by the Federal Trade Commission over the last three months. The stakes in this debate are high: Data is the lifeblood of online content and services, and consumers will ultimately bear the cost of restrictions on data use in the form of reduced advertising funding for, and innovation in, online content and services.

That’s why this week’s most important technology policy event may ultimately prove to be today’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Rep. Barney Frank’s “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009” (H.R. 4173), which narrowly passed the House in December without a single hearing and no real debate. Although the sprawling (273,579 word) bill is mostly famous for creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, it would also, in just 613 words, “put the FTC on steroids,” in the words of Jim Miller, FTC Chairman from 1981 to 1985. With vastly expanded powers, the FTC could impose sweeping new regulation touching virtually every sector of our economy.

The current FTC chairman, Jon Leibowitz, has made clear his determination to step up regulation of online data use, advertising, “blogola,” and child protection, just to name a few of the hot topics in Internet policy. While the FTC will no doubt continue to push for increased statutory authority, such as the online privacy bill reportedly being drafted by House Commerce Internet Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (mandating opt-in for data collection), Chairman Leibowitz may be able to implement most of his radical Internet regulatory agenda using the new powers conferred on his agency in a bill (H.R, 4173) few realize has anything to do with Internet policy.

Most importantly, Rep. Frank’s bill would repeal procedural safeguards imposed on the FTC by a heavily Democratic Congress in 1980. The agency, in the 1970s, had so thoroughly abused its uniquely vast jurisdiction by, among other things, trying to ban advertising to children, that it was dubbed the “National Nanny” by the Washington Post—hardly a Thatcherite bastion. In fact, Congress actually briefly shut down the agency to make it clear that it had not dubbed the agency a regulatory knight errant, free to tilt its steely lance at imagined windmills of “unfairness” or “deception.” Besides requiring the agency to better define these vague concepts and focus on demonstrable harms, Congress strengthened safeguards it had put in place with the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Act to ensure that the agency did not rush into preemptive regulation without carefully weighing the costs and benefits of government intervention.

FTC Chairman Leibowitz complains that the Magnuson-Moss process takes too long, and Rep. Frank’s bill would indeed accelerate the rulemaking process—by eliminating opportunities for public input and Congressional notification, while removing restrictions on Commissioners’ ex parte meetings. So much for transparency!