Legislative proposals are part of dialogue. You can talk all day about generalities and get nowhere, having specific proposals to discuss -- and either criticize or propose alternatives to -- is what moves the dialogue forward.
If you read even the news articles on this particular proposal you'd see that's not the case:
(1) There are people who are simply set against regulation, (2) There are people who believe regulation is necessary, and favor the status quo of state-by-state regulation without federal regulation, (3) There are people who believe regulation is necessary, see value in federal regulation, but are concerned that federal regulation may be counterproductive if it fails to be as good as some of the existing state regulations and preempts them, (4) There are people who believe regulation is necessary, but that patchwork state-by-state regulation is itself counterproductive, so that it is important that consistent regulation be adopted at the federal level.
And there are fairly sophisticated arguments for all those positions.
> I think that a long drawn-out discussion among professionals would be more effective (if slower than) sound-byte politics.
This proposal is one of the products of the decades-long drawn-out discussion among professionals (and others) that have been going on about this issue (which has intensified in the last 1-2 decades with the growth of online commerce, but started long before that.)
Companies should be held accountable for the data they collect and how it is used. Most TOS are unconscionable. I'm sure some of the folks here read the entire TOS of every web service they use, but I've never met a person in real life who does. I think a framework for TOS that is basically just a check box "Do you collect: A, B, C" "Do you distribute: X, Y, Z" could be really useful. There could be some pretty cool strategies between web sites and browsers to help users determine what the site is doing and whether they want to proceed.
This is a time for a dialogue that builds a working framework, not a burst of legislation that pacifies the public and accomplishes at best a couple of short term goals.