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The common "accepted knowledge" these days among many is that the rise of disinformation and conspiracy theories must be driven by social media, and Facebook in particular (with Twitter and YouTube right behind). This theory has always seemed a bit bonkers, and we've pointed to multiple detailed, data-driven studies that showed that cable news was a much bigger driver of misinformation than social media. Specifically, it found that conspiracy theories and misinformation and the like didn't actually "go viral" until after it appeared on cable news.So, it's good (but not at all surprising) to find yet another study pointing out the same thing. This one, first highlighted by MediaPost, involved a big survey exploring the spread of conspiracy theories -- and found that the mainstream media is often the biggest vector, rather than social media.

The US Senate this week approved a new five-year term for Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, making her the first permanent FCC chair in agency history. Technically the first female chair was Mignon Clyburn, who temporarily served as interim chair before Tom Wheeler was appointed boss back in 2013. Rosenworcel's term was set to expire at the end of the year, raising some concerns that her re-nomination would stall, leaving the GOP with a 2-1 FCC majority at Biden's FCC.While that scenario was avoided, Rosenworcel's appointment still leaves the agency gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners, and incapable of having a voting majority on any policy issue of substance. If you recall this was quite by design; the GOP rushed to appoint Trump ally Nathan Simington to the commission late last year in a quick appointment process that took less than 30 days. This was at the behest of the telecom and media sectors, which very much don't want the Biden FCC rolling back any of the Trump-era deregulatory favors, whether that's net neutrality or media consolidation rules.To that end, telecom giants like AT&T, hand in hand with Rupert Murdoch, are now focused on blocking Biden's other FCC pick, Gigi Sohn, from being appointed to the FCC so Rosenworcel can't actually use her Democratic majority. That has involved pushing the false claim through trusted news outlets that Sohn wants to "censor conservatives," despite absolutely zero evidence that's actually true.This being the post-truth era (especially in the GOP), that doesn't seem to matter. Saule Omarova, a Cornell Law School professor and Biden's pick for comptroller of the currency, backed out of her nomination this week because the banking industry was worried she might actually hold them lightly accountability for something. The banking industry in turn got the GOP to run a campaign accusing Omarova of being a "communist" because she was born in the Soviet Union:

Clearview has burned its bridges inside the facial recognition tech industry. Despite it being largely morally malleable, the industry as a whole appears to have cut ties with CEO Hoan Ton-That's startup, which relies on more than 10 billion images scraped from the web to generate a database for its customers to match faces with.The company played it fast and loose upon rollout, handing it out to whoever seemed interested, inviting them to run searches against photos of friends and family members. The "give it a spin" invitations were handed out to government agencies as well, inviting cops to play image roulette with Clearview's ever-expanding database.To date, the efficacy of Clearview's AI remains untested. Clearview did finally volunteer to have the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) examine its product for accuracy but only allowed it to run a one-to-one test -- the kind that would, for instance, allow a phone user to unlock their phone via facial recognition.This is not the product Clearview sells. Clearview sells one-to-many matching, relying on images and other personal info scraped from the internet. This practice has alienated the internet. It has also gotten Clearview kicked out of two countries and served with multiple lawsuits. Consequently, other facial recognition tech companies are cursing Clearview both over and under their breath as the company somehow manages to remain viable in the face of months of negative press coverage.Persona non grata status apparently applies to even other controversial facial recognition tech companies. AnyVision spent some time in the media spotlight for being used by the Israeli military to surveill Palestinians. It managed to take down Microsoft with it (albeit temporarily), exposing the tech giant's pinky-swear-rejection of enabling abusive surveillance to be the lip service it was. AnyVision doubled down on its first mistake(s) by threatening to sue news agencies that reported on this factual development.AnyVision resurfaced a couple of years later as the company behind pervasive surveillance systems deployed by Texas public schools. AnyVision appeared to be good at what it did. It matched faces per school hot lists and let administrators know any time those faces were detected. A little too good, perhaps. The system racked up 164,000 "hits" during its seven-day test run, returning as many as 1,100 matches for a single student.AnyVision is back. Sort of. It has rebranded as Oosto, divested itself of some of its more problematic deployments, and is now taking shots at Clearview.Back in September, it argued that facial recognition companies selling to government agencies should offer customers a blank database -- one the end users could fill with mugshots and persons of interest. This was a clear shot across Clearview's bow. Clearview's main selling point is its scraped database of 10 billion images. AnyVision also forwarded this suggestion to a number of government bodies, including the UK's Surveillance Commissioner and the NIST.It's always good to be wary of private companies pleading for the government to regulate them more. It often means incumbents are looking for better ways to stave off competition by helping enact rigorous guidelines that upstarts can't afford to implement. And AnyVision's suggested "fixes" for facial recognition tech obviously aims to exclude Clearview from the government market in multiple countries, making it that much easier for the rebranded company to find customers in need of controversial tech that at least won't be as controversial as Clearview.The war of words continues, albeit behind a paywall:

Summary: In early May 2021, writer and researcher Mariam Barghouti was reporting from the West Bank on escalating conflicts between Israeli forces and Palestinian protestors, and making frequent social media posts about her experiences and the events she witnessed. Amidst a series of tweets from the scene of a protest, shortly after one in which she stated “I feel like I’m in a war zone,” Barghouti’s account was temporarily restricted by Twitter. She was unable to post new tweets, and her bio and several of her recent tweets were replaced with a notice stating that the account was “temporarily unavailable because it violates the Twitter Media Policy”.The incident was highlighted by other writers, some of whom noted that the nature of the restriction seemed unusual, and the incident quickly gained widespread attention. Fellow writer and researcher Joey Ayoub tweeted that Barghouti had told him the restriction would last for 12 hours according to Twitter, and expressed concern for her safety without access to a primary communication channel in a dangerous situation.The restriction was lifted roughly an hour later. Twitter told Barghouti (and later re-stated to VICE’s Motherboard) that the enforcement action was a “mistake” and that there was “no violation” of the social media platform’s policies. Motherboard also asked Twitter to clarify which specific policies were initially believed to have been violated, but says the company “repeatedly refused”.Company Considerations:

For a long time now, it's been fairly clear that consumer safety was an afterthought for some of the more well known companies developing self-driving technology. That was made particularly clear a few years back with Uber's fatality in Tempe, Arizona, which revealed that the company really hadn't thought much at all about public safety. The car involved in the now notorious fatality wasn't even programmed to detect jaywalkers, and there was little or no structure at Uber to meaningfully deal with public safety issues. The race to the pot of innovation gold was all consuming, and all other considerations (including human lives) were afterthoughts.That same cavalier disregard for public safety has been repeatedly obvious over at Tesla, where the company's undercooked "autopilot" technology has increasingly resulted in a nasty series of ugly mishaps, and, despite years of empty promises, still doesn't work as marketed or promised. That's, of course, not great for the public, who didn't opt in to having their lives put at risk by 2,500 pound death machines for innovation's sake. Every week there's new evidence and lawsuits showing this technology is undercooked and dangerous, and every week we seemingly find new ways to downplay it.This week the scope of Elon Musk's failures on this front became more clear thanks to a New York Times piece, which profiles how corner cutting on the autopilot project was an active choice by Musk at several points in the development cycle. The piece repeatedly and clearly shows that Musk overstated what the technology was capable of for the better part of the last decade:

Apple's announcement that it was suing Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group for targeting iPhone users was coupled with another, equally dismaying (I mean, for NSO…) announcement: it would be informing targets of malware anytime it detected a suspected intrusion.Actually, this may be more of a concern for NSO's customers. After all, they're still paying the same licensing fees even if their targets are being warned of hacking attempts. It can't make them happy and -- since it appears many of NSO's customers like to target non-terrorists and non-criminals -- there's really nothing they can do about it. Local entities may be sworn to secrecy with court orders (if those are even obtained) but there's nothing preventing Apple from alerting users that malware might be present on their phones.Given the long list of seemingly inappropriate targets for NSO's Pegasus spyware -- which includes journalists, activists, dissidents, government critics, political figures, religious leaders, lawyers, ex-wives, etc. -- Apple's policy is the Right Thing To Do. NSO's customers agree to use the spyware to target terrorists and dangerous criminals. They clearly don't do that. If NSO won't stop them (and it won't [until very recently]), this is one way to mitigate the damage.And so the disclosures have flowed. A Polish prosecutor who dared to offend the ruling party in that country was one of the first notified by Apple's new program. Since then, the floodgates have opened, potentially ruining the surveillance plans of several governments. Here's Carly Page for TechCrunch, rolling out the details on Apple's unwelcome mat.

Any cursory look at Techdirt for stories involving YouTube and copyright issues will give you a very accurate impression of the state of all things copyright for the platform: it's a complete shitshow. You will see all kinds of craziness in those posts: white noise getting hit with a copyright claim, labels claiming copyright on songs in the public domain, and all kinds of issues with automated systems like ContentID causing chaos. That really is a sample platter rather than the whole meal, but it's also worth noting that YouTube knows this is a problem.To that point, the platform recently put out its first "Copyright Transparency Report" that teases out all kinds of numbers for copyright claims on YouTube videos. As with any statistical report, how you view it is going to come down to how you want to slice and dice the numbers. For instance, it's worth noting that over 99% of the copyright claims YouTube receives comes from ContentID, an automated system. More to the point of this particular post, you will likely also witness copyright enforcement advocates focus on numbers like this from YouTube's own report.

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Missouri Governor Mike Parson is nothing if not committed to shamelessly lying. As you'll recall, after journalists from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ethically informed the state that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website included a flaw that revealed the social security numbers of over 600,000 state teachers and school administrators, Parson responded by calling the reporters hackers and vowing to prosecute them. Again, the DESE system displayed this information directly in the HTML, available for anyone to see if they knew where to look. That's not hacking. That's incompetent computer security.So far, this has mostly played out as expected. A month after the revelations, DESE finally admitted it fucked up and apologized to the teachers and administrators and offered them identity fraud protection services. Then, last week, a public record request revealed something incredible, though perhaps not surprising: the FBI had already told Missouri officials that no hacking took place and DESE had prepared a statement (correctly) thanking the journalists for alerting them to their own fuck up... but that statement was ditched in favor of the nonsense one claiming that the journalists "hacked" the system. As we said in that last story, right at the end it notes that the Highway Patrol investigation, instigated by Parson, was "still active."And now Parson is still standing by the ridiculous claim that the reporters are hackers. As for how he could possibly claim that after the revelation of internal documents on the situation? Well, Parson is trotting out the old "fake news" bullshit:

For several years now a steady parade of scandals have showcased how the collection and sale of consumer location data (to governments and data brokers alike) is a hugely unaccountable mess with few if any guardrails. And every week or so a new scandal emerges making that point abundantly clear. This week it's the unsurprising revelation that "security" and "family safety" app Life360, which lets parents track the location of their kids, has been selling access to this data to data brokers for years:

There's something different about being a cop. The training, the atmosphere, the culture… all of it leads to officers handling crime differently than regular people. Even when they're the ones committing it.A normal person doesn't do the things Newark police officer Luis Santiago did. While driving on the Garden State Parkway, Santiago struck and killed 29-year-old Damian Dymka. This is what Officer Santiago (who was off-duty and in his own vehicle) -- with all his training, expertise, and knowledge of applicable laws -- did next:

We'd already noted how Elon Musk's Starlink isn't going to be the broadband disruption play many people had imagined. The service lacks the capacity to really provide broadband to more than 500,000 to 800,000 users during its first few years in operation (for context, somewhere between 20 and 40 million Americans lack access to broadband, and another 83 million live under a broadband monopoly). With a $100 monthly cost and a $500 first month equipment fee, it's also not doing any favors for the millions of Americans who lack access to affordable broadband.Eventually, with a fully upgraded fleet of 42,000 low orbit satellites years from now, Wall Street analysts estimate Starlink could potentially reach upwards of 6 million users. But again that's an optimistic high end guess, and it requires that everything go swimmingly the next few years.Everything is not going swimmingly. Chip shortages initially delayed Starlink's exit out of beta. And now a new leaked email suggests that Musk is warning about a potential bankruptcy for Space X if the company can't sort out production of the company's Raptor engine:

Our lives are lived at the intersection of vast systems (economic, technological, and beyond) that are incredibly complex and often chaotic, and it's hard to understand and embrace what author Neil Chilson's new book, Getting Out Of Control, calls "the emergent mindset." On this week's episode, Neil joins us to discuss his book and why you can't simply "control" complex systems.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Sidney Powell, the self-proclaimed "Kraken," has managed to turn a bunch of potentially defamatory allegations and unabashed pro-Trump showboating into actual money. I mean, she probably had before this, what with the Trump camp being hip deep in grifters at all times. (And neck deep in people who apparently just love being grifted.)But this time it's the grifter, alleged defamer, and spectacular flameout being relieved of money. Sidney Powell -- along with several other lawyers who sued over Michigan election results (most notably, fellow grifter L. Lin Wood) -- has already been sanctioned by a federal court. Back in August, Judge Linda Parker ran Powell and her legal arguments through the judicial woodchipper, leaving nothing but minute chunks of election fraud rhetoric and MAGA blood scattered across the 110 pages of masterclass excoriation.For instance:

Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that we didn't need additional consumer privacy protections (or opt in requirements, or net neutrality rules) because consumers would keep the company honest. "The extensive oversight provided by literally hundreds of thousands of sophisticated online users would help ensure effective enforcement of good practices and protect consumers," Verizon said at the time.Six years later and Verizon found itself at the heart of a massive privacy scandal after it began covertly injecting unique user-tracking headers into wireless data packets. The technology allowed Verizon to track users all over the internet, and the company neither bothered to inform users it would happen, or gave users any way to opt out. It took security researchers two years before security researchers even realized what Verizon was doing. Verizon ultimately received a $1.35 million fine from the FCC (a tiny portion of what Verizon made off the program), but still uses the same tech (albeit with functioning opt-out) today.A few years later and it's not clear Verizon has actually learned all that much. The company last week began expanding its data collection and monetization once again, this time via a new "Verizon Custom Experience" the company says will help it "personalize our communications with you, give you more relevant product and service recommendations, and develop plans, services and offers that are more appealing to you." In reality that means Verizon is expanding the collection of data on the websites you visit, the people you communicate with, and the apps you use.Of course Verizon isn't asking user permission before enrolling them in this new exciting "experience," and while the company claims it emailed users to inform them they were being opted in, many customers (including myself) never received any such notification. So while users can opt out through a fairly simply opt-out process, most users aren't going to know they're enrolled in the first place. And Verizon being Verizon (where most of its apps and services are shoddy copies of better products), nobody really wants any of this stuff in the first place:

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This weekend, Representative Thomas Massie got an awful lot of attention for tweeting a picture of what I guess is his family holding a bunch of guns. It generated a bunch of outrage, which is exactly why Massie did it. When the culture war and "owning" your ideological opponents is more important than actually doing your job, you get things like that. Some might find it a vaguely inappropriate to show off your arsenal of weaponry just days after yet another school shooting, in which the teenager who shot up a school similarly paraded his weapon on social media before killing multiple classmates, but if that's the kind of message that Massie wants to send, the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment allow him to reveal himself as just that kind of person.However, as someone who continually presents himself as "a strict constitutionalist," it's odd that Massie seems to skip over the 1st Amendment in his rush to fetishize the 2nd. That's why the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University has now sent a letter on my behalf to Rep. Massie letting him know that he is violating the 1st Amendment in blocking me and many others on Twitter.To be honest, I had avoided tweeting about Massie's armory family portrait, because the whole thing was just such a blatant cry for attention. But then I saw that some other users on Twitter were highlighting that Massie was blocking them -- in some cases because they had tweeted at Massie a remixed version of the portrait, replacing the guns with penises. I made no comment on his photo, or his desperately pathetic desire to "own the libs" or whatever he thought he was doing. But I did tweet at him to inform him that under Knight v. Trump, he appeared to be violating the 1st amendment rights of those he was blocking.He appears to meet the conditions laid out in that and other rulings on this issue. Massie is a government official, who uses his Twitter account for conducting official government business, and who is then blocking users based on their viewpoints.In response to me pointing out that it violates the 1st Amendment for him to block people in this way... Rep. Massie blocked me.Seems a bit ironic for a "strict Constitutionalist" to block someone for merely pointing out that public officials blocking someone via their official government accounts violates the 1st Amendment. But, I guess that's the kind of "strict Constitutionalist" that Rep. Thomas Massie is. One who will support just the rights he wants to support, and will quickly give up the other ones, so long as he can be seen to be winning whatever culture war he thinks he's waging.This is pretty unfortunate. For all of Massie's other nonsense, he has actually been quite good in defending the 4th Amendment rights of the American public against surveillance. Perhaps he only believes in the even-numbered Amendments?Either way, our letter points out that his actions appear to violate the 1st Amendment, and asks that he unblocks me and everyone else that he has chosen to block.

There's no reason for the New York Times to be this bad at reporting. It has plenty of resources and a slew of editors, and yet we get headlines like this one, which says something completely false:If you can't read/see the screenshot, this is the original headline attached to an article that says nothing of the sort:

Take-Two Interactive continues to find itself in the news for all the wrong reasons. The game publisher and parent company of Rockstar Games, the studio behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise, had a reputation built for itself for making great AAA video game titles. More recently, its reputation centers more on its aggressive actions on all things intellectual property. The company has gone after its own modding community, seeing it as a threat to its release of a shitty anthology of past GTA games. The company has also found itself going after companies in totally unrelated industries over the silliest of trademark concerns. And, most recently, there was speculation that there was a threatened opposition to the trademark application filed by Hazelight Studios for its indie hit game It Takes Two, as though anyone were going to take that common phrase and confuse it with the much larger game publisher.That was left to speculation because Hazelight abandoned the application without explanation, though now we find that it was at least partially done due to the threat from Take-Two.

In a bit of a Monday afternoon surprise, Rep. Devin Nunes has announced that he's retiring from Congress this month to become the CEO of Trump's new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group -- a company which apparently now has tons of money in the bank (even if from sketchy sources) but also is facing a newly revealed SEC investigation that might require someone who actually understands this stuff, rather than a very thin-skinned politician who sues people who criticize him.Note to Devin: you can't sue the SEC for defamation.There's all sorts of speculation about why Nunes would do this now. He's actually a pretty powerful Congressional representative, and in line to be in charge of some very powerful committees if, as is widely expected, the Republicans retake control over the House next year. But, he might also see the writing on the wall. Earlier in his career he was winning elections by a pretty wide margin, but the last two elections have actually been pretty tight. And, with California going through its redistricting process, he may have realized there was a high likelihood he'd lose next time around. Also, we know that watchdog groups have asked for an investigation into some of Nunes' activities.And, then, of course, there are all the many, many frivolous lawsuits he's filed over the last few years, with the first one remaining the most notable and the most ridiculous: suing a satirical cow that made fun of Devin Nunes online. The fact that he'd sue a satirist for making fun of him does not suggest someone who believes very strongly in free speech.So it should be extra interesting to see just how Devin Nunes handles content moderation questions for Truth Social now that he's in charge. Will he allow @DevinCow to have an account there? Or will he prove himself to be a hypocrite -- complaining about "censorship" on other sites, but actively engaging in the same (or more selective and biased) moderation on his own site? The press release from TMTG with quotes from Nunes reads as quite laughable when you realize he's suing satirical accounts on Twitter that made fun of him:

Some good news for Clearview, the bottom dweller of the facial recognition field. The prodigious scraper of web content has finally submitted its algorithm (the one it actually sells to government agencies) to the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and has obtained a score that justifies its frequent blustering about how accurate its AI is. Here's Kashmir Hill with the details for the New York Times.

Israeli exploit seller NSO Group has long past reached the limits of its non-denials and deflection attempts. There's only bad news on the horizon for the tech company, which would be a lot less disheartening for the company if it hadn't been preceded by months of bad news.Already considered morally suspect due to its decision to sell powerful phone hacking tools to human rights violators, NSO has since proven to be pretty much amoral. Investigations uncovering abuse of its spyware to hack phones of journalists and activists began to surface three years ago before a leaked database of alleged spyware targets was given to investigators and journalists. Since then, NSO has waged a losing battle with a seemingly endless onslaught of revelations that put its hacking tools in the hands of bad actors and its powerful spyware (Pegasus) in the phones of journalists, activists, lawyers, diplomats, politicians, and religious leaders.NSO was sued by WhatsApp and Facebook in 2019 for using the messaging app to send malware to targets. It was sued by Apple just a couple of weeks ago for targeting iPhone users. It is facing investigations in a handful of countries, including its home base. It has been blacklisted by the US Commerce Department and its list of governments it can sell to has been drastically trimmed by the Israeli government, from 102 to 37.The question now is: does NSO Group even feel it when news breaks about additional misuse of its spyware? Or does it just prompt an exasperated "what now?!" from its execs as it tries to figure out how to remain viable in the future? Whatever the case is, this latest revelation isn't going to get its Commerce Department blacklisting lifted any time soon.

Last week, we called out a questionable move by Twitter to put in place a new policy that banned images or videos that included someone without their permission. The company claimed that this was to prevent harassment and also (for reasons I still don't understand) buried the fact that this was not supposed to apply to public figures or newsworthy media. However, as we pointed out at the time, the standard here was incredibly subjective, and wide open to abuse. Indeed, we pointed out examples in that article of the policy clearly being abused. And even as Fox News talking heads insisted the policy would only be used against conservatives, in actuality, a bunch of alt right/white nationalists/white supremacists immediately saw this as the perfect way to get back at activists who had been calling out their behavior, leading to a mass brigading effort to "report" those activists for taking pictures and videos at white nationalist rallies and events.In other words, exactly what we and tons of others expected.And, a few days later, Twitter admitted it messed up the implementation of the policy -- though it doesn't appear to be rolling back the policy itself.

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The Chinese government is truly, undeniably, utterly evil. Anyone saying otherwise has something to sell (most likely to the Chinese people or their government). Private companies and public entities alike have kowtowed and capitulated rather than face the ferocity of the easily angered government and/or risk losing access to a marketplace containing a few billion people.China has embraced its own version of capitalism to create the leverage it now wields against those who offend it, no matter where else in the world they might be located. It sees even more opportunity in ultra-lucrative Hong Kong and has taken direct control of the region. It refuses to acknowledge Taiwan's existence as a separate country and demands apologies from world leaders and professional athletes when they make the "mistake" of acknowledging yet another lucrative region China wishes to directly control.It has rolled out multiple layers of oppression to keep its citizens in line, starting with pervasive widespread surveillance that ties into "citizen scores" that limit opportunities for those the government believes aren't patriotic enough. It is engaged in the erasure of its Uighur Muslim population, utilizing concentration camps, disappearances, brutality, and a war of attrition designed to eliminate these "unwanteds" completely in the coming years.Is China irredeemable? I guess it all depends on what you think of redemption. The underlying basis of Christianity is that no one is completely irredeemable (even if far too many Christians seem to believe certain people are). Our penal system, in a much more half-hearted way, conflates punishment with rehabilitation, as if the best way to turn your life around is to see it destroyed. China isn't a Christian nation, so that ends that part of the speculation. And China most likely believes people can be punished into contrition, which will "redeem" them while allowing the state to remain intact. Can China ever be anything than increasingly worse versions of itself?Sanctions and public condemnation haven't had any effect. The Chinese government isn't too big to fail. Nothing ever is. Just ask the former USSR (which, unfortunately, is resembling its old self more and more every day.) But it is too big to care what anyone else thinks. The first step towards redemption is realizing you need to be redeemed. Will China ever reach that starting point?It seems unlikely. The government likes things the way they are. And its vision for the future is the elimination of any roadblocks to complete power. But it still struggles to control the narrative, despite constantly finding new ways to limit the spread of information it doesn't approve of and its rewriting of even very recent history to excise anything that might suggest the state is immoral, fallible, or dangerous to the citizens it oversees.Which brings us to this, which isn't the worst thing China has done. Instead, it's just another example of the Chinese government tossing aside concerns about its public image. Press freedoms are practically nonexistent in China. And now the government is planning to actively target journalists who refuse to play by its rules.

We'd already noted how telecom and media giants are hard at work trying to scuttle the nomination of consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Sohn is not only a genuine reformer, she's broadly popular on both sides of the aisle in telecom and media circles. So companies like AT&T and News Corporation, which enjoyed no limit of ass kissing during the Trump era, are working overtime to come up with some feeble talking points loyal politicians can use to oppose her nomination. It's not going well.About the best they could come up with was the entirely false claim that Sohn wants to "censor Conservatives." Anybody who actually knows Sohn knows the claim isn't true, and she's historically gone well out of her way to embrace policies that encourage diversity in media and speech, even when she doesn't agree with the speaker. Despite being a nonsense claim, it has been broadly peppered across the right wing echo chamber, including the usual columns at Breitbart, editorials by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Tucker Carlson, and elsewhere.The claim popped up again at last week's nomination hearing before a Senate Judiciary Committee courtesy of Senators Ted Cruz and Dan Sullivan:

This week, we've got a lot of commonalities among the winners. Both top comments on both sides are very similar responses to the same thing! On the insightful side, both winners come from our post about how the FBI showing up at a journalist's door is intimidation, and both are replies to someone who questioned this assertion. In first place, it's an anonymous response:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, Trump's telecom adviser was saying he wanted to dismantle the FCC because broadband monopolies aren't real — while Trump was appointing a third anti-net neutrality advisor to his team, Wall Street was dreaming of megamergers under his administration, and AT&T was showing everyone what the death of net neutrality would look like. Meanwhile, folks were lining up to seek action from Obama in his final days, with congressional staffers who reined in 1970s surveillance calling on him to pardon Ed Snowden, Dianne Feinstein asking him to declassify the CIA torture report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee seeking the declassification of evidence of Russian election interference.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, the SOPA fight continued. The mainstream press started to step up in opposition, with the NY Times, LA Times and Wall Street Journal all publishing pieces against the bill. Another DNS provider came out against it, as did educators who were worried about its impact on education. On the other side, an ex-RIAA boss was ignoring all criticism and claiming complaints are just attempts to justify stealing, the MPAA was offering false concessions, NBC Universal was threatening partners to get their support, and a highly questionable "consumer" group released an extremely misleading report claiming the public liked SOPA. Meanwhile, at least one court was acting like it was already law.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, the explosion of online video was leading to all sorts of misplaced blame for various issues (including lock picking apparently) while Disney was complaining that notice-and-takedown was too burdensome and Google was trying to pay off big entertainment companies to leave YouTube alone. Legal questions around embedding infringing content were heating up as well. Meanwhile, the RIAA finally succeeded in getting the US to pressure Russia into shutting down Allofmp3, the UK decided against extending copyright terms, and an appeals court held up yet another ruling that states can't ban video games.

Two years ago, the Wisconsin Supreme Court handed down a pretty important decision, only somewhat tempered by its limited jurisdiction. It decided Section 230 immunity applied to the buying and selling of guns via a third-party platform, Armslist.Survivors of a mass shooting in Wisconsin tried to hold Armslist directly responsible for the criminal act, arguing that the site's facilitation of sales that bypassed local regulations on gun sales (mainly background checks) allowed the shooter to arm himself illegally. The shooting may have been on the mass shooter, but Armslist was apparently an accomplice because its marketplace allowed someone who shouldn't have had access to guns to acquire one.The plaintiffs hoped to bypass Section 230 immunity with arguments that centered on negligence. The Copia Institute (a Mike Masnick joint) filed an amicus brief on behalf of Armslist, asking the court to reject arguments that would carve some very damaging holes in Section 230 protections.The court found in favor of Armslist, specifically citing Section 230.

It's been said that any time a bill in a legislature is named after someone who died, you know there's going to be problems with the bill. That's because most of those bills are responses to truly horrific or tragic circumstances, but then our natural inclination is to go too far in diminishing the rights of the public in response to a single horrific scenario. This is, unfortunately, the case with the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act of 2021. The events that precipitated the bill are, undeniably, awful and tragic. In the summer of 2020 an obviously mentally unwell lawyer, who had represented a client before US District Judge Esther Salas, went to her home, dressed as a FedEx delivery person, and shot and killed Judge Salas's son, Daniel Anderl (as well as shooting and injuring Salas' husband, Mark Anderl). The shooter then took his own life.Obviously, everything about that story is horrific, and there are all sorts of things that it should lead us to think about regarding policies that protect human life and how we deal with things like mental health. But, rather than taking a bigger look at things, Congress set out to try to create a special class for protection: federal judges. And, yes, there are reasons to make sure that federal judges are safe, and it's perfectly reasonable to support the underlying goals of such a bill. But, this bill goes too far. The underlying setup in the bill is that it wants to hide personal information about judges at the request of those judges -- who are labeled (oddly) as "at risk individuals" in the law.The law then bans "other businesses" from posting any information on an "at risk individual" (i.e., a judge) if that individual sends a request to take down the information:

Jack Dorsey has left Twitter, which he co-founded and ran for more than a decade. Many on the American political right frequently accused Dorsey and other prominent social media CEOs of censoring conservative content. Yet Dorsey doesn't easily fit within partisan molds. Although Twitter is often lumped together with Facebook and YouTube, its founder's approach to free speech and interest in decentralized initiatives such as BlueSky make Dorsey one of the more interesting online speech leaders of recent years. If you want to know what the future of social media might be, keep an eye on Dorsey.Twitter has much in common with other prominent "Big Tech" social media firms such as Facebook and Google-owned YouTube. Like these firms, Twitter is centralized, with one set of rules and policies. Twitter is nonetheless different from other social media sites in important ways. Although often discussed in the context of "Big Tech" debates, Twitter is much smaller than Facebook and YouTube. Only about a fifth of Americans use Twitter and most are not active on the platform, with 10 percent of users being responsible for 80 percent of tweets. Despite its relatively small size, Twitter is often discussed by lawmakers because of its outsized influence among cultural and political elites.Republican lawmakers' focus on Twitter arose out of concerns over its content moderation policies. Over the last few years it has become common for members of Congress to decry the content moderation decisions of "Big Tech" companies. Twitter is often lumped together with Facebook and YouTube in such conversations, which is a shame given Dorsey's views on free speech.Dorsey has been more supportive of free speech than many on the American political right might think. Did Twitter, under Dorsey's leadership, adhere to a policy of allowing all legal speech? Of course not. Did Twitter sometimes inconsistently apply its policies? Yes.But no social media site could allow all legal speech. The wide range of awful but lawful speech aside, spam and other intrusive legal speech would ruin the online experience. Any social media site with millions or billions of users will experience false positives and false negatives while implementing a content moderation policy.Yet Dorsey defended keeping former President Trump's Twitter account live, and expressed concern about suspending Trump's Twitter account in the wake of the January 6th coup attempt.It became clear in the last few years that Dorsey is open to new ideas that may end up being considered mainstream eventually. We are still in the early years of the Internet and social media and users are used to centralized platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But, increasingly, there are decentralized alternatives, and a few years ago Dorsey announced the decentralized social media project BlueSky, with the goal of moving Twitter over to such a system eventually.Dorsey has not been shy about his passion for decentralization, citing the cryptocurrency bitcoin as a particular influence, "largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be."I predict that in the coming years decentralized social media will gradually become more popular than current centralized platforms. As I wrote earlier this year:

Kudos for open records laws proving to us that not only is Missouri Governor Mike Parson a technologically illiterate hack, but he's a lying one as well. You'll recall, of course, that in October, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on how the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website was designed in such a dangerous way that it was exposing the social security numbers of state teachers and administrators, and rather than thanking the journalists for their ethical disclosure of this total security fail by the state, DESE and Governor Parson called them hackers and asked law enforcement to prosecute them. Governor Parson continued to double down for weeks, insisting that reporting this vulnerability (and failed security by the government he runs) was malicious hacking until DESE finally admitted it fucked up and apologized to the over 600,000 teachers and administrators whose data was vulnerable -- but never apologizing to the journalists.The Post-Dispatch, whose reporters potentially still face charges, put out an open records request to find out more about what the government was saying and discovered, somewhat incredibly, that before DESE referred to them as hackers, it already knew that it was at fault here and even initially planned to thank the journalists. As the documents reveal, the FBI flat out told DESE that this was a DESE fuckup and DESE had sent Gov. Parson a planned statement that thanked the journalists:

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Over the past couple of years, the US government -- working with law enforcement agencies around the world -- has managed to shut down cell phone services it alleges were sold to members of large criminal associations. These prosecutions have allowed the DOJ to push the narrative that encrypted communications are something only criminals want or need.But in multiple cases, encryption was never a problem. Investigators were able to target criminal suspects with malware, allowing access to communications and data. The FBI, along with Australian law enforcement, actually ran a compromised encrypted chat service for three years, allowing the agencies to round up a long list of suspects from all over the world.One of those targeted by these long-running investigations was Canada-based encrypted phone provider Sky Global. The DOJ claimed the company sold phones to criminals and even secured an indictment that charged Sky CEO with assisting in the distribution of at least five kilos of cocaine (this amount triggers mandatory minimum 10-year sentences). This claim was based not on CEO Francois Eap's own actions, but the alleged actions of his customers, some of whom engaged in drug dealing.That was added to RICO allegations Eap is facing. But, so far, the US government has made no attempt to extradite Francois Eap and put him on trial. A new report by Joseph Cox for Motherboard possibly shows why the government is hesitant to make this any more of a federal case than it already is. Sky Global is fighting back in court, submitting internal communications that show it made efforts to assist in investigations and refused to remotely wipe phones it could tie to criminal activity.Sky has filed a motion seeking the return of seized domains [PDF]. In it, the company details how it cooperated with law enforcement and attempted to deter criminals from buying its phones. At this point, Sky Global is effectively dead, even though prosecutors have yet to secure a conviction of Eap or anyone else employed by the company. The DOJ has seized all of the company's websites, making it nearly impossible to continue to sell phones or provide services to existing customers.The exhibits included with Sky’s filing show in new detail the effort Sky took to remove criminals from its platform.

For decades regional U.S. telecom monopolies have often refused to deploy broadband into low ROI areas, despite billions in subsidization. At the same time, they've fought tooth and nail against towns and cities that attempt to improve their own regional broadband infrastructure. Often by using a bunch of sleazy and disingenuous arguments, or, in some cases, literally buying and writing state laws that block locals from deciding what they can and can't do with their own local infrastructure. The only real goal: protect giant regional monopolies from disruption and competition.In Maine, Charter (which sells broadband and TV under the Spectrum brand) has been waging a not so subtle war against the town of Leeds, which is contemplating a community broadband network. Charter took the time to help create a phony grass roots group dubbed Maine Civil Action, which bombarded locals with pamphlets telling them such a project would be an inevitable taxpayer boondoggle resulting in worse service (that's false, if you were unaware, not only do plenty of community broadband operations operate in the green, data suggests they routinely provide significantly cheaper, better broadband):

"Probable cause on four legs." That's the cop nickname for drug dogs, which need to do nothing more than something only perceptible to the officer/trainer to allow officers to engage in warrantless searches. For years, drug dogs and the "odor of marijuana" have allowed both cops and dogs to follow their noses to all sorts of otherwise-unconstitutional searches, much to the delight of law enforcement and its desire to make easy busts and seize cash.Then came the creeping menace of legalized marijuana, which meant cops in some states could no longer assume the odor of marijuana was reasonably suspicious enough to convert pretextual stops into full-blown searches. These legal changes also promised to put their dogs out of business because they were trained to detect weed along with other illicit substances. With marijuana no longer necessarily illicit, the dogs became more of a problem than a solution. As far too many law enforcement officials claimed, the legalization meant the literal death of drug dogs, rather than just a speed bump on the road to warrantless searches.Marijuana has been legal in Colorado since 2012. And yet, cops still use drug dogs that obviously cannot indicate via an "alert" whether it has detected now-legal weed or something still actually illegal under state law. That inability to tell officers "hey, I detected a legal substance" is now causing problems for drug convictions and their underlying drug dog-enabled searches.The Colorado Court of Appeals has just ruled [PDF] that a drug dog alert no longer generates the required amount of probable cause necessary to allow cops to engage in deeper, broader searches of people and their property. (via FourthAmendment.com)Here's how it began:

Whether you're a baseball fan, or a sports fan in general, or not, regular readers here will know that we've covered aspects of many sports leagues and Major League Baseball in particular. As you'd expect with any major business like MLB, some of those posts have dealt with some nonsense intellectual property actions the league has undertaken, but many more of them have been positive articles about the forward-thinking folks at MLB when it comes to how they make their products available using modern technology. The league's website work has always been particularly good, whether it's been the fantastic MLB.TV streaming site the league operates, or even simply the base MLB.com site itself.But that latter site has now become a petty pawn being played by MLB as part of the owner's lockout of players that just kicked off. For non-MLB fans, the quick version is this: the collectively bargained labor agreement between owners and players expired this week without a new agreement inked. As a result, the players are now locked out of team facilities by ownership. That last bit is important, because many people have been describing this as a labor strike. It isn't. At all. This is the owners refusing to let the players fulfill their duties. And as part of that, it seems, MLB released the following news update on its MLB.com website.

As I just made clear, I'm no fan of Twitter's new "private media" policy, which I think comes from a well-meaning place, but will lead to widespread abuse by malicious actors seeking to hide evidence of bad behavior (indeed, there's evidence this is already happening). But that's no excuse for Senator Josh Hawley (supporter of the January 6th insurrection, and who seems to think his job as Senator from the confused state of Missouri is to product manage internet services). Hawley reacted to this new policy by saying that it's a reason to break up Twitter. He says "we oughta break them up" at the end of a very bizarre interview with Fox News host Pete Hegseth.We'll get to the other nonsense from Hegseth and Hawley in a moment, but let's start by focusing on the "we oughta break them up" line. First off, he's clearly saying that the company needs to be broken up in response to the company's editorial decisions. That's... just a blatant violation of the 1st Amendment. Hell, just imagine how he (or Hegseth!) would respond to a Democratic Senator saying Fox should be "broken up" because of the company's editorial bias. I imagine both Hawley and Hegseth would go nuts about such unconstitutional overreach. But here, Hawley suggests breaking up Twitter in response to its editorial choices, and Hegseth seems happy to support that position.That's because neither of them have any principles. They're fine with ignoring the Constitution if it allows them to attack their perceived ideological enemies.Second, under what possible theory would you "break Twitter up" here. Twitter is relatively small as a social media player. Reports from about a month ago show Twitter as the 15th largest social media service globally. Even in just the US, it appears that Twitter comes in at least 7th place and possibly lower, depending on WhatsApp and TikTok's growth.So the company, in no way, qualifies for any sort of antitrust treatment no matter how you look at it. The only possible reason to suggest that we should "break up" Twitter is because you disagree with their policies, which is a blatantly authoritarian position. Which, well, fits when we're talking about Josh Hawley.As for Hegseth, his little bit of pandering is ridiculous as well. After mispronouncing both the first and last name of Twitter's new CEO, Parag Agrawal, he blames Agrawal for the new policy (that surely was planned much earlier). He then goes on a rant about how this policy is "meant to protect" antifa and Black Lives Matter protestors, but insists that it won't be used to protect conservatives.Of course, as we showed in our original post, nearly all of the examples of enforcement so far have gone the other way. The policy has been used to takedown images and videos of Trumpists and white nationalists who didn't like being called out by others. But, never expect a Fox News host to let facts get in the way of winding up the ignorant base. Hegseth also fails to mention the fact that the policy doesn't apply to public figures or newsworthy events -- and names multiple public figures and newsworthy situations that he insists will be "censored" under the policy. Basically, pure disinformation.He then says:

There is no "going dark." Consecutive FBI heads may insist there is, but a document created by their own agency contradicts their dire claims that end-to-end encryption lets the criminals and terrorists win.Andy Kroll has the document and the details for Rolling Stone:

I've been working on a post about a whole bunch of interesting (and good!) things that Twitter has been doing over the last few months. I'm not sure when that post will be ready, but I need to interrupt that process to note a truly head-scratching change in Twitter's moderation policy announced this week. Specifically, Twitter announced that its "private information policy" has now been expanded to include "media." Specifically, Twitter says that it will remove photos and videos that are posted "without the permission of the person(s) depicted." In other words, Twitter has taken the old, meme-ified, "I'm in this photo and I don't like it" into official policy for taking down content.Buried deeper in the rules is a very subjective conditional:

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Back in June we reported on how Florida's social media moderation bill was tossed out as unconstitutional in a Florida court. The ruling itself was a little bit weird, but an easy call on 1st Amendment grounds. It was perhaps not surprising, but still stupid, to see Texas immediately step up and propose its own version of such a bill, which was signed in September. We again predicted that a court would quickly toss it out as unconstitutional.And that's exactly what has happened.There was some whispering and concerns that Texas' law was craftier than the Florida law, and parts of it might survive, but, nope. And this ruling is actually more thorough, and more clear than the slightly jumbled Florida ruling. It's chock full of good quotes. The only thing that sucks about this ruling, honestly, is that Texas is definitely going to appeal it to the 5th Circuit court of appeals and the 5th Circuit is the craziest of Circuits and seems, by far, the most likely to ignore the basic 1st Amendment concepts in favor of some weird Trumpist political grandstanding.However, for this brief shining moment, let's celebrate a good, clean ruling that vindicates all the points many of us have been making about just how batshit crazy the Texas law was, and how it was so blatantly an infringement on the 1st Amendment rights of websites. There are a bunch of pages wasted on proving that the trade groups who brought the lawsuit have standing, which aren't worth rehashing here beyond saying that, yes, trade groups for internet companies have the standing to challenge this law.From there, the ruling gets down to the heart of the matter, and it's pretty straight forward. Content moderation is the same thing as editorial discretion and that's clearly protected by the 1st Amendment.

We've long illustrated how U.S. broadband is dominated by regional monopolies, which, in turn, are often coddled by state and federal governments (aka corruption). That broken market (and regulatory capture) results in all manner of problems, from spotty coverage and slow speeds, to repeated privacy violations, net neutrality violations, and some of the worst customer service of any industry in America (no small feat if you think about it).Of course, it also results in the U.S. having some of the most expensive broadband anywhere. A new report by CompareThe Market finds that U.S. broadband is the 9th most expensive country for broadband in the world, with people paying an average of $66.13 USD per month. That's in line with prices paid in such countries like Honduras and Guatemala:Keep in mind most of these data analysis efforts don't include hidden fees, usage caps, and broadband overage surcharges, meaning the amount Americans actually pay is usually significantly higher than what's represented here.Like so many reports, the data breakdown just dumps this information at the readers' feet without explaining why U.S. broadband consistently ranks among the worst broadband nations in the world (whether we're talking about speed, price, or availability). And while for years the industry (and those paid to apologize for regional monopolization) tried to argue that it was simply because the U.S. was so big or because U.S. ISPs are saddled with too much regulation, that's never been true. The U.S. broadband market isn't free. It's heavily monopolized and overseen by corrupt policymakers (regulatory capture).In 2021 the issue is no longer geography, or even technology. It's the fact that we've let a handful of giant telecom and cable monopolies not only cordon off regional fiefdoms, but all but dictate both state and federal telecom policy the vast majority of the time (including literally writing state laws and local ordinances). Instead of tackling this problem head on, feckless U.S. policy makers (enabled by a lazy and timid press) generally mumble about the causation free "digital divide," then repeatedly just throw more money at the problem.When that doesn't work, everybody just shrugs and repeats the process the next time data shows the U.S. continues to be violently mediocre in broadband. There's a vast coalition of well-funded organizations, individuals, think tanks, consultants, and companies tasked with ensuring this dynamic never actually changes. As the data repeatedly attests, they've been winning that fight for the better part of a generation now.

There is this thing that sometimes happens to companies that are wildly successful where they stop focusing so much on making the things that made them successful and turn instead to intellectual property trolling. Think Atari, for instance. Atari was once a behemoth in the gaming industry, but have since been reduced to trying to bully and/or sue everyone who comes even remotely close to referencing one of its properties, rather than making any real hay in the industry.This process of devolving from competing business to grifting troll is at its most obvious in the end-state, where Atari is now. I won't pretend that a company like Take-Two is anywhere near there just yet, but it is notable that we have seen a recent uptick in the company engaging in this restrictive and trollish behavior. Whether it's fighting its own modding community to release shitty versions of its own older games or filing trademark oppositions for axe-throwing companies (yes, seriously), this just isn't where the focus should be for a company known to make amazing AAA video game titles.There is apparently more here than had been previously known. NME has a decent writeup discussing all the IP action Take-Two is getting involved in, some of which includes the examples mentioned above. However, it also includes a couple of other examples of trademark bullying I hadn't seen previously. The first deals briefly with an opposition for a trademark application by Hazelight Studios for its game It Takes Two.

Summary: In the six years since Discord debuted its chat platform, it has seen explosive growth. And, over the past half-decade, Discord's chat options have expanded to include GIFs, video, audio, and streaming. With this growth and these expanded offerings, there have come a number of new moderation challenges and required adapting to changing scenarios.Discord remains largely text-based, but even when limited to its original offering -- targeted text-oriented forums/chat channels -- users were still subjected to various forms of abuse. And, because the platform hosted multiple users on single channels, users sometimes found themselves targeted en masse by trolls and other malcontents. While Discord often relies on the admins of servers to handle moderation on those servers directly, the company has found that it needs to take a more hands on approach to handling content moderation.Discord's addition of multiple forms of content create a host of new content moderation challenges. While it remained text-based, Discord was able to handle moderation using a blend of AI and human moderators.Some of the moderation load was handed over to users, who could perform their own administration to keep their channels free of content they didn't like. For everything else (meaning content that violates Discord's guidelines), the platform offered a mixture of human and AI moderation. The platform's Trust & Safety team handled content created by hundreds of millions of users, but its continued growth and expanded offerings forced the company to find a solution that could scale to meet future demands.To continue to scale, Discord ended up purchasing Sentropy, an AI company that only launched last year with the goal of building AI tools to help companies moderate disruptive behavior on their platforms. Just a few months prior to the purchase, Sentropy had launched its first consumer-facing product, an AI-based tool for Twitter users to help them weed out and block potentially abusive tweets. However, after being purchased, Sentropy shut down the tool, and is now focused on building out its AI content moderation tools for Discord.Discord definitely has moderation issues it needs to solve -- which range from seemingly-omnipresent spammers to interloping Redditors with a taste for tasteless memes -- but it remains to be seen whether the addition of another layer of AI will make moderation manageable.Company Considerations:

Well, it's been yet another hilarious couple of days for Israel's NSO Group. I mean, not so much for NSO, which is currently sitting at the center of a raging dumpster fire of its own creation. But just because NSO isn't laughing doesn't mean it's not funny.For years, it sold spyware to whoever wanted it. Those customers used the powerful phone exploits to target journalists, activists, dissidents, and high-ranking government officials.Some of this had already been exposed by security researchers like Canada's Citizen Lab before the bombshell dropped: a list of 50,000 alleged NSO malware targets. NSO denied having anything to do with the list, but report after report tied its spyware to abuse by government agencies and quasi-political leaders like kings and princes in the United Arab Emirates, one who used the malware to hack the phone of his ex-wife and her lawyer.France's President, Emmanuel Macron, was one of those on the target list obtained by journalists. This prompted the President (and other French government officials) to acquire new phones. Because of this, the French government has decided it won't be requiring the services of NSO in the future.

Over the last few years we've heard a lot of nonsense claiming that Section 230 somehow magically turns social media into state actors. This idea, pushed heavily by disgraced law professor Jed Rubenfeld has not fared well in court. As law professor Eric Goldman highlights, multiple courts have been easily rejecting these claims. Notably, they're mostly citing the failed lawsuit from PragerU that insisted that a very light touch moderation (filtering out a very small percentage of their videos from the even smaller percentage of users who turn on "restricted mode") was a form of censorship. The 9th Circuit pointed out that the 1st Amendment says otherwise (which is amusing since Prager himself pretends to be a big supporter of the 1st Amendment).Either way, three recent cases claiming that social media were state actors all clearly and easily rejected those claims. The first two of these were pro se lawsuits that were mad about social media sites in semi-coherent complaints that the courts construed as liberally as possible to try to find any sort of legitimate claim, and the courts (rightly) found that those claims were barred because the social media sites (YouTube and LinkedIn) were clearly not state actors.First up, a district court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which made short work of a lawsuit against YouTube filed by a pro-se plaintiff with a variety of different claims about harassment and hacking (that were somehow YouTube's fault?) leading to the suggestion (the complaint is not particularly clear) of a civil rights violation. The court points out that YouTube is not a state actor and thus there's no possible claim here:

Senator Tillis penned a letter to President Biden this week that is breathtaking in its obtuseness. In it, he demanded that the President withdraw the nomination of Gigi Sohn to the FCC for having championed the longstanding ability of the public to receive over-the-air signals on public airwaves. Or, in other words, for having done exactly what we should want an FCC commissioner, tasked with the stewardship of the nation's spectrum, to do.

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A few months back we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had taken to Newsweek to dust off a fifteen year old AT&T talking point. Namely that "big tech" companies get a "free ride" on telecom networks, and, as a result, should throw billions of dollars at "big telecom" for no real reason. You'll recall it was this exact argument that launched the net neutrality debate, when former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proclaimed that Google wouldn't be allowed to "ride his pipes for free." Basically, telecom giants have long wanted somebody else to fund network builds they routinely leave half finished despite billions in subsidies.While this dumb argument originated with AT&T, it has been adopted by countless international telecoms over the years. Like this week, when a coalition of 13 large European telecom companies signed a joint letter demanding that U.S. tech giants pay them more money for no coherent reason: