Republicans just made clear how little they care about protecting the privacy of Americans by letting companies like Verizon and Comcast sell advertisers the internet browsing histories and other personal data of their customers without getting permission. The move could bolster the profits of the telecommunications industry by billions of dollars.

Following a party-line vote in the Senate last week, the House approved a resolution on Tuesday that would overturn a broadband privacy regulation the Federal Communications Commission adopted in October. That rule requires cable and phone companies to obtain consent before using information like which websites people visited to show them customized ads and to build detailed profiles on them. The White House said on Tuesday that President Trump would sign the legislation, which would also prohibit the F.C.C. from adopting a similar policy in the future.

Most Americans spend much of their lives online. They should be able to do so without fear that their internet service providers are logging their activities and selling the data. There is a long tradition of the government protecting such information. For example, the F.C.C. has long restricted what phone companies can do with call records. And in 1988 Congress prohibited video stores from disclosing the movies people rented.

Republican lawmakers, like Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, and the chairman of the F.C.C., Ajit Pai, say that the commission’s privacy rule is unfair because it applies only to broadband companies and not to internet businesses like Google and Facebook. This is highly disingenuous. Congress has only given the commission authority over telecommunications companies, so the F.C.C. couldn’t have come up with rules that applied to other businesses even if it wanted to.