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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a comment from Baron von Robber, responding to someone who is still insisting that Democrats "stole" the election:

We're nearing the end of our series of posts about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. We've already featured ~THE GREAT GATSBY~, The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game, Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here, and Remembering Grußau, and today we're looking at the third and final game based on The Great Gatsby and the winner of the Best Digital Game category: Rhythm Action Gatsby by Robert Tyler.From the name alone, you can probably guess what the game is: rhythm action games are a popular genre, and hey, why not make one for The Great Gatsby? The premise is presented as a joke, with the designer describing it as "the way F. Scott Fitzgerald would have wanted his legacy to be maintained" — but the game doesn't just lean on this one bit of amusing silliness, nor does it cut any corners in fulfilling its promise. Rather, it's full of handcrafted original material.But before we get to all of that, there's another thing that makes Rhythm Action Gatsby stand out among all the Gatsby-based games this year: it's partly based on the book's incredibly iconic cover art. (We wondered if the cover art was even itself in the public domain, but it turns out that unlike most books, that particular cover was actually designed before the writing was done and published along with the first edition, and has an interesting story all its own.) The floating eyes and mouth that almost everyone immediately associates with The Great Gatsby become the target points of the rhythm action game, controlled by the player as they gaze out from the screen. The eyes must be triggered in time with the sparkling fireworks that rise from below and represent the notes of the music, while the mouth must be controlled to speak the words that tumble down from above.The words are a well-known passage from the novel, dramatically spaced out over the 2-minute duration of the game — and it's all narrated aloud. That's where we get to all the other original material in the game. The narration? Freshly recorded by the designer, with a distinct mood and excellent delivery. The jaunty music that sets the pace of the game? An original piece written and recorded by the designer. And then there's all the details: the color changes and screen flashes that occur throughout the course of a playthrough, linked to both progression and the player's performance. All of this is choreographed so well that when it comes together it makes a rhythm game that, although simple and short, feels surprisingly dramatic and narrative — and that's not only impressive, it's extremely appropriate to an adaptation of a novel, and proves that the initial joke about the combination of genre and subject being silly wasn't quite what it seemed. That's just great, and makes it a worthy winner of the Best Digital Game award.(Oh, and at the end, your performance is ranked and you get to find out just how great of a Gatsby you are. Several of our judges played it multiple times to try for better results, and maybe you will too.)Play Rhythm Action Gatsby in your browser on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to Robert Tyler for the win! We'll be back next week with the final game jam winner spotlight.

The SolarWind intrusion, with the revelation that part of the architecture included, at least for a while, a really weak default password, and the hack of the water treatment plant with a similar password reuse problem, reminded me of this story I heard not long ago about another instance of poor security design.In a recent fan Q&A on Facebook, Bill Gibson, the drummer for Huey Lewis and the News, told a story about his friendship with Stevie Ray Vaughan. Stevie Ray Vaughan and his band Double Trouble had opened for the News for a while in the mid-1980s, and in that time Bill and Stevie had become good friends. Back at the hotel one evening after a show in New York City it came up that Bill had seen Jimi Hendrix perform something like seven times. Stevie, a guitarist who idolized Hendrix, was in awe. He wanted to hear everything about what it was like seeing Hendrix play, so he grabbed some beer and they settled in for an evening of Bill telling Stevie everything he remembered.By 3:00 AM they were out of beer, so they went down to Stevie's tour bus parked out in front of the hotel to get some more. He opened the bus with his key and started looking for the cooler he kept it in. "That's odd," Bill recalls Stevie musing, "The cooler is usually kept in this spot over here." Eventually he found a cooler elsewhere, removed the needed beer, and they left to go back up to finish their conversation.The next day they discovered why they'd had trouble finding the cooler. At the time, most bands were touring in buses that all came from the same company. That all looked the same. And that all were opened by the exact same key. Thus the reason that Stevie could not find the cooler where he expected it to be was because they were not on the bus where they expected to be. Instead of being on Stevie's bus, it turns out they were actually on UB40's bus that, unbeknownst to them, had just pulled up that night while they'd been ensconced in the hotel talking. Which Stevie's key had opened. And on which the UB40 band had apparently been sleeping the whole time Stevie and Bill were there inadvertently pilfering their beer…So let this story be a lesson to security designers, people who really should be employing security designers, and pretty much everyone else who likes to reuse their passwords: When the security credentials for one resource can be used to gain access elsewhere, especially in a way you did not anticipate, there's really not that much security to be had.And in most such cases it will likely be so much more than UB40's beer that's now been put at risk.

Summary: Google's ad service offers purchasers access to millions of users, including those viewing videos on YouTube. But its policies -- meant to prevent abuse, fraud, harassment, or targeting of certain demographics -- sometimes appear to prevent legitimate organizations from doing something as simple as informing others of their existence.Chad Robichaux, the founder of Christian veterans support nonprofit Mighty Oaks, wanted to reach out to veterans who might need his services. But his attempt to purchase YouTube ads was rejected by Google's Ad service for a seemingly strange reason.According to a screenshot posted by Robichaux to Twitter, Google forbade the use of "Christian" as a keyword. To Robichaux (and many responders to his tweet), this was evidence of Big Tech's bias against Christians and conservatives.But the real reason for this block was far less censorial or nefarious, if no more explicable. According to YouTube (which reached out directly to Robicheaux), the aim isn't to keep Christians from advertising, but rather to prevent advertisers from targeting users on the basis of their religion. Unfortunately, Google's policy doesn't exactly make that clear, instead stating that ads cannot contain "religious basis" content if the purchaser is engaging in personalized advertising.Decisions to be made by Google:

Last Wednesday, the House passed the "George Floyd Justice in Policing Act," a bill that targets a number of aspects of law enforcement that need improvement, including two that have caused a considerable amount of collateral damage.The bill [PDF] -- passed by the Democratic majority 220-212 with all but one member of either party voting the way you'd expect them to vote -- bans discriminatory profiling, mandates more training on discrimination, and requires law enforcement agencies to collect data on investigatory activities. It also bans chokeholds and no-knock warrants, both instruments of death still permitted by far too many law enforcement agencies. The on-again, off-again limits on the requisition of military gear via the 1033 program are back on.There are also mandates for federal officers, finally requiring their use of body cams and dashcams -- something they've avoided doing for years.But here are the accountability add-ons that are resulting in pushback from law enforcement agencies, their supporters, and (of course) their unions.

Last week the FCC took the wraps off a new $3.2 billion program designed to help struggling Americans afford broadband during the pandemic. The program was required by Congress as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, and will, once fully operational, dole out $50 a month for broadband service to lower-income American families that qualify. That number jumps to $75 on Tribal lands (a stark reversal from the Trump/Pai era, where the FCC was interested in pulling back on tribal broadband subsidies). The program also doles out up to $100 for a tablet or computer.With COVID-19 showcasing broadband's essential nature in more ways than one, it's a welcome program that should deliver some immediate relief to the estimated 42 million Americans with no broadband whatsoever, and the estimated 18.5 million households that lack broadband access specifically due to the high cost of service. There's no reason children in the wealthiest country in the history of the planet should have to huddle in the dirt outside of Taco Bell, something interim FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel was quick to highlight:

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A little over a year ago we wrote about a laughably stupid SLAPP suit that the Trump campaign, represented by Charles Harder, filed against the NY Times. As we noted at the time, the lawsuit appeared to have no intention of succeeding -- it was purely performative nonsense. The lawsuit claimed that an opinion piece by Max Frankel was defamatory because it noted that whether or not there was any explicit collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia, it didn't matter, since both sides seemed to expect certain outcomes and allowed them to act accordingly.We also pointed out that the lawsuit completely misrepresented the article, pretending that Frankel's thesis -- again, that there didn't need to be any explicit deal -- was Frankel saying that there was "collusion" between the two. The case made no sense no matter how you looked at it. Frankel's article was an opinion piece -- and opinions aren't defamatory. It didn't allege what the campaign's lawsuit says it alleged, and there was no way in hell it could possibly meet the actual malice standard necessary for defamation.It took a year, but the Supreme Court of New York (which, contrary to its name, is more like a district court), has tossed out the lawsuit, though denying the NY Times' request for sanctions against Harder. As we expected, this was not a difficult decision for the court to come to. First, it was obviously opinion, and thus not defamatory:

One the one hand, you have wireless carriers telling anybody who'll listen that 5G will soon create the incredible, smart cities of tomorrow and no limit of incredible innovation. On the other hand, you have 42 million Americans without access to broadband during a plague, and tens of millions more stuck paying high prices for slow services thanks to monopolization and a lack of competition. It's a discordant reality gap that isn't lost on Martin Cooper, who invented the first cell phone (the Motorola Dynatac 8000x) in 1973. In an interview at CNET, Cooper pointed out how despite a history of innovation, the United States still somehow can't make broadband both universal and affordable, which is why 40% of US students struggle to get online:

It will come as no surprise to most of our readers that the NCAA is a jealous protector of its March Madness trademark. Much like the Super Bowl, the NCAA likes to march (heh) around and try to pretend like its trademarks give it overly restrictive rights when it absolutely doesn't.But what you may not be as familiar with is all of the ride along trademarks the NCAA has amassed relating to its men's basketball tournament. For instance, the NCAA also holds a trademark for "March Mayhem" and has used that in advertising partnerships in the past. For some reason, this has caused the NCAA to think that this allows it to oppose a trademark for a vasectomy clinic with an admittedly questionable marketing scheme.

At long last, some more NYPD police misconduct records have been released. Last month, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to block the release of these records, now publicly available thanks to the repeal of a state law that shielded these records from the public eye for more than 40 years.A first batch of records was released before the matter was even settled. Records obtained by the NY-ACLU and ProPublica were released by ProPublica even as the Police Benevolent Association secured a restraining order blocking their release. Since neither of these entities were party to the lawsuit (the PBA was suing New York City and Mayor Bill de Blasio), they weren't subject to the court order.The partial set of records published by ProPublica came from the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). The publication only included records for officers with at least one substantiated complaint against them. A much fuller set of data has now been released by the CCRB -- a set that dates back more than 20 years and covers tens of thousands of NYPD officers.

Last summer we wrote about an interesting case involving the latest evolution of copyright trolling, involving Jon Nicolini, who some copyright troll watchers may recognize from his participating in an earlier generation of copyright trolling, when he was a sketchy "forensic expert" for copyright trolling firm CEG TEK. These days, Nicolini runs his own firm, Okularity, which appears to have created a new form of copyright trolling. According to the lawsuit, rather than file lawsuits as the pressure point (as was common in the past), Okularity sends a ton of DMCA takedown notices to social media companies, and then once your account gets taken down, Nicolini pounces and demands huge sums to rescind the notices, so you can get back your account.As we wrote over the summer, one of Okularity's targets was the well known Paper Magazine, put out by the publisher Enttech Media Group. Enttech said that Okularity sought to have Paper Magazine's Instagram account shut down, and then offered to "settle," demanding a pretty massive sum in the process. The lawsuit alleged violations of DMCA 512(f) which is the (unfortunately) mostly toothless part of the DMCA that is supposed to allow those on the receiving end of bogus DMCA takedowns to fight back. In practice, however, courts have mostly rejected all 512(f) claims, or made it so they're basically impossible to do anything useful with. Because of that, any time we see a 512(f) claim that has legs, we pay attention.The original complaint also tried to argue that Okularity violated the RICO statute, and long time readers here know what we think of RICO claims. While there did appear to be some unauthorized practice of law happening, there didn't seem to be nearly enough to make a RICO claim -- because there's basically never enough to make a RICO claim. We predicted that the RICO claim would get tossed out, but that the 512(f) claim might live on.Turns out, we were right.While the case has had some twists and turns, this week the judge tossed out the RICO claims, but is allowing the 512(f) claims to move forward. Nicolini and Okularity had argued that Enttech's lawyer, Robert Tauler, should face Rule 11 sanctions for ignoring evidence regarding their fair use analysis, but the court rejected those as well. Tauler did have to file a third amended complaint, however, to get to this point, as the court did find the first two complaints somewhat deficient.But on the key point -- 512(f) -- the court notes that the case can continue, even under the confused Lenz standard in the 9th Circuit, that basically said (1) DMCA filers have to "subjectively" consider fair use to be a "good faith" filing, but (2) automated takedowns may be okay... because we say so. Nikolini and Okularity argued that they do consider fair use before sending notices, while Enttech argued the notices appeared to be totally automated. The court basically says -- Enttech has met the initial burden that the case can move forward.One key point of contention in this: the takedown letters sent by Okularity do contain a "discussion of infringement and fair use," Okularity claims that shows that it does consider fair use. Enttech responded that every single notice Okularity sends contains an exact copy of this discussion, suggesting no actual analysis is done, and it's just a cut-and-paste. This point is what the judge focused in on:

Killing people using metadata is boring. These days, we're killing people using data brokers.

Over the last month we've written quite a few times about various state legislatures (and Governors) picking up on the nonsensical and unsupported statements that (1) "conservatives" face too much bias in social media content moderation decisions and (2) that Section 230 is somehow to blame for this. They've pushed a whole bunch of blatantly unconstitutional state laws that would seek to limit how social media companies can moderate content -- effectively compelling them to host content they disagree with (which would violate the 1st Amendment). Of course, as we've noted for quite some time now, both Republicans and Democrats seem to be very mad at Section 230, but for totally contradictory reasons. Republican bills seek to make social media companies moderate less content, while Democratic bills seek to make social media companies moderate more content.Both approaches are unconstitutional violations of the 1st Amendment. While most of the fights over the past few years have happened in Congress, now with these bad bills moving to the state legislators, it appears that Democrats don't want to be left behind. Over in Colorado, Colorado Senate president pro tempore Kerry Donovan would seek to force companies to moderate "hate speech," "fake news," and "conspiracy theories."The full bill is really, really bad. Websites would need to register (for a fee) with a "digital communications commission" in Colorado, and that Commission would accept complaints against social media websites if they were used for hate speech, undermining election integrity, disseminating intentional disinformation, conspiracy theories, or fake news. There's a big problem with this: most of that is protected under the 1st Amendment. I know that many people don't like that those things are protected speech, but you actually should like it. Because if "fake news" or "undermining election integrity" was not protected under the 1st Amendment, just imagine how the Trump administration would have abused both things.After all, it spent four years arguing that any criticism of the administration was "fake news" and claimed, repeatedly (despite the total lack of evidence) that the processes and procedures that helped make the 2020 election fair actually "undermined election integrity." This is why we don't let the government punish people for speech around those issues, because the government will define it in ways we dislike.As Eugene Volokh notes, beyond the fact that all of this is pretty clearly unconstitutional, the bill doesn't even bother to define "hate speech." Or "undermine election integrity." Or "fake news." Or "conspiracy theories." Or "intentional disinformation."Kerry Donovan is now running for US Congress as well (against conspiracy theorist Lauren Boebert). One would hope that she would have first learned how the 1st Amendment works before seeking to run for Congress. We might agree that Boebert clearly doesn't belong anywhere near Capitol Hill, but that's no excuse for misunderstanding some fairly basic principles in the Bill of Rights.

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Put enough cameras up and pretty soon they become tasty targets for malicious hackers.

As companies like Google shift away from individual behavior tracking in their ad efforts, telecoms like T-Mobile are headed in the opposite direction. The wireless giant this week announced it would be automatically enrolling all of its customers (including recently acquired Sprint customers) in a new behavioral tracking and ad system the company is launching on April 26. Whereas Google is shifting to its FLOC system that tends to clump consumers into groups of like minded consumers (an approach that still comes with its own issues), T-Mobile is doubling down on individualized targeting, and will start sharing its customers’ web and mobile-app data with advertisers.While this sort of tracking is nothing new for AT&T and Verizon, it's a shift away from T-Mobile's more consumer friendly branding, and will be something new for recently acquired Sprint customers. Fortunately users can opt out of the tech, though that may not always mean what you think it does. AT&T, for example, has historically viewed "opting out" as meaning "we will no longer hit you with targeted ads based on your online data," not that they won't gather data whatsoever. Other times in telecom, opting out can easily be reverted to opting in without the consumer really knowing.T-Mobile, like so many companies before it, tries a bit too hard to hide behind the claim that "anonymization" of individual user data makes collecting it ok, something that's been disproven by a repeated barrage of different studies. It only takes a small number of additional data points to quickly make users not so anonymous.One investigation of "anonymized" user credit card data by MIT found that users could be correctly "de-anonymized" 90 percent of the time using just four relatively vague points of information. Another study looking at vehicle data found that 15 minutes’ worth of data from just brake pedal use could lead them to choose the right driver, out of 15 options, 90% of the time.Despite this, companies continue to toss around the word "anonymization" as some kind of get out of jail free card, as if the terminology means anything. Case in point: T-Mobile's comments to the Wall Street Journal, which were thankfully quickly corrected by the EFF's Aaron Mackey:

You may have heard that in recent days a series of deepfake videos appeared on TikTok of a fake Tom Cruise looking very Tom-Cruise-ish all while doing mostly non-Tom-Cruise-ish things. After that series of short videos came out, the parties responsible for producing them, Chris Ume and Cruise impersonator Miles Fisher, put out a compilation video sort of showing how this was all done.As you can see, this was all done in the spirit of educating the public on what is possible with this kind of technology and, you know, fun. Unfortunately, some folks out there aren't finding any fun in this at all. Instead, there is a certain amount of understandable fear for how this technology might disrupt our lives that is leading to less understandable conclusions about what we should do about it.For instance, some folks apparently think that deepfake outputs should be considered the intellectual property of those who are the subjects of the deepfakes.

Summary: In 2012, the Huffington Post did an exposé on eating disorder blogs, mainly on the site Tumblr. It discussed the world of “thinspo” and “thinspiration” blogs, that focused on building a community around losing unhealthy amounts of weight. In response, Tumblr announced that it was banning “self harm” blogs, and classified eating disorder blogs among those no longer allowed.Three years later, a study by Munmun De Choudhury discussed how there was still eating disorder information on Tumblr, but that it was mainly split into two different categories: those who were supportive of eating disorders such as anorexia (referred to as “proana”) as well as communities built up around recovering from eating disorders. One interesting finding of the report was that the “recovery” groups often used the same keywords and messaging, in an attempt to permeate among the “proana” groups, in order to try to encourage those with eating disorders to seek support, therapy, and help towards recovery.That same year, Amanda Hess argued in Slate that the rush to ban content about eating disorders on social media (or, in the case of France, where such things were outlawed) was the wrong approach.

There was a time not too long ago when tech companies enjoyed broad public support and adulation. Now they face widespread opposition and criticism from almost all corners. The shift from one to the other has long been called the "techlash", but it's always been unclear where it really came from and how it happened, and especially what role tech journalism and company communications played. This week, we're joined by Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt, author of the new book The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication, for a deep dive into the story of the techlash phenomenon and how companies are reacting to the new dynamic.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

If everyone's going to be talking about Dr. Seuss, then we need to talk about this terrible decision from the Ninth Circuit a few months ago. Not to validate the idea of "cancel culture" in the particular way it's often bandied about as a sort of whining over people not wanting to be associated with certain ideas, but because when law takes away the ability to express them in the first place, that's censorship, it's an affront to the First Amendment, and it's something we all should be outraged about. And, as this case illustrates, the law in question is copyright.We've written about this case, Dr. Seuss Enters., L.P. v. ComicMix LLC, 983 F.3d 443 (9th Cir. 2020), many, many times before: some people wrote a mash-up using Seussian-type imagery and Star Trek vernacular to express new ideas that neither genre alone had been able to express before. And Dr. Seuss's estate sued them for it.The little bit of good news: their trademark claim failed. Applying the Rogers test to determine whether the Lanham Act could support such a claim, both the district court and the appeals court agreed: it didn't.

Last week we wrote about the many, many, many constitutional problems with a bill proposed in Utah to try to tell internet companies how they can moderate content. As we noted, the bill clearly violates the 1st Amendment, the Commerce Clause, and is also pre-empted by Section 230.So, of course, it passed.The Salt Lake Tribune report has a stunning set of paragraphs that demonstrate that supporters of the bill not only ignored many, many experts telling them the constitutional problems with the bill, but they then pretended no one notified them of those concerns (this is blatantly false):

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A bill [PDF] that's likely headed to a dead end at the governor's desk or a state court targets protected speech that might make some cops angry. The bill may end up dead, but the Kentucky Senate still needs to explain how it let the bill pass, considering it contains this very, very stupid addition, presumably courtesy of the bill's sponsor, Sen. Danny Carroll -- a former police officer.The bill converts free speech into a second degree misdemeanor. And it only targets speech that targets certain public employees.

AT&T had a damn good ride during the Trump administration. Not only did it convince Trump regulators to effectively lobotomize the nation's top telecom regulator (right before a pandemic, no less), the company got billions in tax breaks for doing effectively nothing. And while the government did sue AT&T over the Time Warner merger, that had more to do with making Rupert Murdoch happy than making life hard on AT&T (AT&T won the lawsuit anyway). All told, AT&T nabbed billions upon billions in regulatory favors, merger approvals, and tax breaks. In exchange the US public saw...58,000 layoffs.As another indication that AT&T's good times may be slowing down, the SEC filed suit against AT&T this week, accusing the telecom giant of leaking cell phone sales information to analysts and reporters to change their revenue forecasts for the company. This, in turn, let AT&T "beat" analysts' revenue forecasts in the first quarter of 2016, according to the SEC complaint (pdf). Technically, the SEC says AT&T violated the Securities Exchange Act and the SEC's Regulation "fair disclosure" rules, which "prohibit selective disclosures by issuers of material nonpublic information to securities analysts."Granted, this will now see a year+ of litigation ending it a tiny, pathetic fine (that could then be negotiated away to nothing), but it's still interesting to see regulators trying. From the SEC announcement:

We give government agencies a whole lot of power. That's the way the government works: we, the people, allow agencies to perform their duties with minimal interference and, in exchange, we theoretically benefit from these services we pay for indirectly.To perform their duties, agencies need a bit of runway. Discretion is theirs alone. We can hope to force external change, but internally, agencies operate without direct oversight from the people funding them. And when it comes to litigation, government agencies can usually dodge lawsuits, thanks to multiple levels of immunity. Qualified immunity shields public servants from accountability. Absolute immunity shields pretty much everything else.But there's a flipside, one we don't see all that often. The government can dodge a lot of accountability, thanks to its immunity stacks. On the other hand, it can't easily engage in litigation against the citizens signing its paychecks, thanks to Constitutional, judicial, and legislative protections.The government can only do so much when it feels besmirched. And it definitely can't do this sort of thing. Government officials can sue in their personal capacity. But they can't sue as a cohesive whole. That's the uptake from a short decision entered against a Native American tribe that decided to sue TV producers over some fictional stuff that happened in a fictional TV show. (via the Volokh Conspiracy)The Cayuga Nation -- a federally recognized Native American tribe that possesses land in New York, Oklahoma, and Ontario, Canada -- sued over its depiction in the Showtime series, Billions. In one episode, the Cayuga tribe was depicted as engaging in an illegal land deal -- one that involved bribery and blackmail.The tribe sued, claiming it had been defamed. But the court [PDF] handling the case points out the tribe is a governmental agency and, therefore, cannot engage in libel lawsuits. The First Amendment forbids this sort of government action, even if the government agency pursuing the claim operates outside of the federal government's purview.

The end of a crooked and corrupt era in Mississippi is still paying long-belated dividends to wrongly convicted criminals in Mississippi. The state that has defined "backwater" for so many years is slowly crawling out of its self-created gutter.Eddie Lee Howard has been freed. And it took "only" 26 years. Howard was convicted of murdering Georgia Kemp back in 1995. He was 38 at the time he was arrested. He is now 67. And he is being freed.The case was built on the testimony of two supposed experts, an overworked (and underqualified) coroner (Dr. Steven Hayne) and Dr. Michael West, a self-avowed "bite mark expert." In reality, state medical examiner Dr. Steven Hayne was just another cog in the conviction wheel -- a coroner who somehow managed to perform more than six autopsies a day.Radley Balko -- a longtime police accountability advocate -- has written a book about both of these men: "The Cadaver King and the County Dentist." Hayne only got his position because no one else stepped up to fill it. He certainly didn't have the credentials.

To be clear: Space X's Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service won't revolutionize the broadband industry. The service lacks the capacity to service dense urban or suburban areas, meaning it won't pose much of a threat to traditional cable and fiber providers. With a $100 monthly price tag and $500 hardware fee, it's not exactly a miracle cure for the millions of low-income Americans struggling to afford a broadband connection, either.That said: if you're currently one of the 42 million Americans who lacks access to any broadband at all, the service, capping out at 100 Mbps, is going to be damn-near miraculous (if you can afford it). It's also going to be a major competitive challenge to the companies that not only compete for rural broadband attention (like WISPs, cellular providers, and last-gen satellite providers), but are busy elbowing out one another at the trough to grab a slice of taxpayer subsidies. Understandably, many of these companies are trying to slow Starlink by any means necessary.Last month, ViaSat urged the FCC to investigate Space X's very real impact on scientific research via light pollution (a genuine problem regulators have done bupkis about so far). Since the 80s, satellite systems have had a baked in exemption from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), excluding their businesses from environmental review. As Amazon and Space X fling tens of thousands of low orbit satellites into space, ViaSat is suggesting that exemption be reversed. ViaSat's motivations here are entirely selfish. But at the same time this is a real problem they're not wrong about.Dish Network is also trying to slow down Starlink a bit more creatively by telling the FCC the company's broadband plans could cause interference in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band:

There's an ongoing trial in (of all places) Iowa that cuts to the heart of First Amendment protections for journalists. Andrea Sahouri, an award-winning journalist for the Des Moines Register, was arrested last May during a protest resulting from the killing of an unarmed black man by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin.Despite attempting to identify herself as a member of the press, Sahouri was hit with a tear gas canister, pepper sprayed, and arrested for "failure to disperse." According to Des Moines police, Sahouri wasn't wearing any press credentials, something that has been acknowledged by both Sahouri and her editor at the Register.However, it's also not clear at this point that any order to disperse had been given, making anyone -- much less a journalist -- subject to arrest for not immediately leaving the area. The lack of press credentials could be a problem, but it's also being argued Sahouri was known by officers and should have been recognized as someone covering the protest, rather than participating in it. Journalists generally aren't subject to orders to disperse.Her newspaper issued this statement in its editorial against her prosecution:

We've been highlighting a wide variety of state bills from Republican-led legislatures that all attempt to attack Section 230. Nearly all of them are blatantly unconstitutional attacks on the 1st Amendment. Somewhat incredibly, the latest one from Tennessee might not actually be unconstitutional. That doesn't mean it's good. In fact, it's not just incredibly stupid, but demonstrates that the bill's authors/sponsors are so fucking clueless that they have no idea what they're doing. In effect, they'd be banning the state from investing any money it holds. To spite Section 230.The bill -- which is House Bill 1441 and Senate Bill 1011 -- from Representative Tim Rudd and Senator Janice Bowling represent such a lack of understanding of how literally anything works that it should embarrass both elected officials and anyone who ever voted for either of them. The bill is pretty simple: it bans the state from investing in any entity protected by Section 230. The problem with this? Almost every single person and every single company is, in some way, protected by Section 230. So, in effect, the bill bans the state from investing any of its money.Let's dig in on the specifics. The bill is pretty short and sweet. Here's the key part:

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Ah, we were so young then. We excoriated the Obama administration for attacking and prosecuting whistleblowers at a faster clip than any other administration in history.This happened despite the fact Obama presided over some of the most historic leaks in history -- ones that kickstarted changes in surveillance programs and surveillance attitudes. The Obama Administration claimed to be the most transparent ever, but behind the scenes, it worked tirelessly to punish whistleblowers and leakers who were bringing actual transparency to entities that had long resisted it.The facts about the late, not-so-great Trump Administration are continuing to leak out. And Obama's enthusiasm for punishing professional and amateur transparency enthusiasts has been outdone by his successor -- a man who often engaged in leaking himself through his Twitter account. Here's Ken Klippenstein with the details:

To be clear, the US has always had a fairly pathetic definition of "broadband." Originally defined as anything over 200 kbps in either direction, the definition was updated in 2010 to a pathetic 4 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. It was updated again in 2015 by the Wheeler FCC to a better, but still arguably pathetic 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. As we noted then, the broadband industry whined incessantly about having any higher standards, as it would only further highlight the vast impact of monopolization.Unfortunately for them, last week, a bipartisan coalition of Senators wrote the Biden administration, urging it to adopt a more aggressive broadband definition. How aggressive? 100 Mbps in both directions:

Techdirt readers are by now all too familiar with how broken the DMCA takedown system is. But a recent post on TorrentFreak introduces us to some interesting new examples. It concerns the software review site ThinkMobiles. Apparently, it's a company registered in the Ukraine, and many of its authors seem to come from the region -- and nothing wrong with that. As TorrentFreak notes, ThinkMobiles is very protective of its articles. The Lumen database, which collects and analyzes requests to remove material from the Web, has 376 results for the company, representing many hundreds of potential takedowns. But TorrentFreak spotted that some of the most recent ones are particularly unusual:

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed and continues to change how life works for many of us in a variety of ways. We're learning just how underserved America is by our monopolistic broadband providers, for instance. Esports has come into fashion in ways never seen before as well. Work from home has become more normalized and school from home is the bane of parents everywhere, even when it's the best option available.And, with so much emphasis made on not traveling and on remaining socially distant, some had an idea to change how prospective university students perform the ritualistic "campus visit" during COVID times. The idea behind LiveCampusTours was to partner with local university students to provide a virtual tour of a school's campus and facilities.

There's a lot of competition for Worst Police Force in America. The NYPD is known for its casual approach to human life and its antagonistic approach to public records requesters. The Chicago PD operated its own black site to separate residents from their rights while interrogating them. The Pasco County Sheriff's Department thinks it should be in the business of turning students into criminals. The list goes on and fucking on.Enter the Vallejo (California) Police Department -- one that has apparently gamified the shooting of residents.

After a week of congressional hearings following a 16-month, bipartisan investigation into competition in the digital marketplace, it’s clear Republican and Democratic congresspersons alike are skeptical of Big Tech. That’s fine—healthy, even. But that doesn’t make rewriting antitrust legislation to allow Congress to pick winners and losers in the marketplace a good idea.A couple weeks ago, representatives on the House Committee on the Judiciary reconvened to discuss potential antitrust legislation and enforcement. Bipartisanship is usually a welcomed departure from petty politics, but last week, it may have established something far worse: consensus that antitrust laws should be rewritten to address Big Tech’s bigness. Without exception, all committee members expressed their desire to reign in the “gatekeepers,” but few considered the impact of their proposed solutions.During the hearing, congressmen levelled bold accusations against the so-called monopolies, from anticompetitive business practices to outright bullying. The most ironic of these criticisms came from Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal, who rightly highlighted a “nexus between inequality and antitrust law,” but erroneously attributed it to Big Tech. If limited access, higher prices, and worsening consumer experience afflict the digital marketplace, the culprit will be the committee’s antitrust actions — not technology companies.Representative Jayapal and her ilk are pursuing antitrust reform because of their growing disdain for large technology platforms. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are too big and too powerful — that’s certainly arguable. These companies are far from perfect, but the application of antitrust law necessitates more than dissatisfaction with market dominance. Antitrust is built on the “consumer welfare standard,” which evaluates business conduct in the context of consumer harm. This standard has become controversial in recent years, but nevertheless has prevailed since 1979. It remains vitally important to ensure that consumers remain the focus of antitrust action, while simultaneously discouraging arbitrary and heavy-handed government interference in the market.Though the committee and its witnesses highlighted many instances in which small businesses are worse off than their larger competitors, they failed to clearly identify consumer harm. Americans should not be swayed by any government offer to make some businesses more successful than others. Success should be determined by consumers and the market, not legislators on Capitol Hill.Consumer harm is, however, a likely consequence of antitrust action. Many committee members and their witnesses expressed support for data portability mandates, which, similar to Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, would require technology companies to provide users with access, copying, and transferring data capabilities. Data portability allows users to take their information from one platform and transfer it to a competing service, such as Twitter to Parler. This proposal received the most support because it’s innocuous. Unlike a telephone number, which still has value when transferred to another carrier, user data may not provide the same consumer power. For instance, if a consumer exports their data about buying preferences from Amazon, there isn’t much they can do with it. Another e-commerce platform may not be able to make use of the information, especially if it does not sell comparable merchandise. Most of these business silos will still exist, even if the digital barrier is broken down. As a result, data portability requirements will not be enough to reign in Big Tech.Their next solution, structural separation, would pack a bigger punch, but would simultaneously exacerbate inequality. These restrictions would prohibit large tech companies from operating in adjacent lines of business and force divestment where these lines are crossed. For example, antitrust regulators are entertaining the possibility of separating Amazon’s inventory storage and delivery business from the larger corporation. This would result in higher, inaccessible prices in a time when contact-free delivery serves vulnerable populations. Breaking up Big Tech would have significant consequences for consumers, especially those who are cost-conscious.These disastrous, unintended consequences have happened before. In 2012, to allay concerns about anti-competitive behavior from book publishers, Amazon was forced to raise the prices of its Kindle e-books. This had a real and burdensome effect, especially on young consumers. College students who struggle today to pay hundreds of dollars for their textbooks each semester were paying as little as $9.99 per book prior to antitrust enforcement..Line of business restrictions would also hamper human rights. Suppose Facebook is mandated by antitrust legislation to unwind its recent acquisitions. Facebook would need to sell WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging app used by human rights advocates and victims of totalitarian regimes. Since WhatsApp does not generate meaningful revenue, a sell-off would mean that it could no longer benefit from Facebook’s scale and may necessitate functional changes. This could manifest in the form of a paid subscription model, which would be less accessible, or the introduction of advertisements, which would compromise security for those who desperately need it.Antitrust will not create a fairer digital marketplace, but congressmen are still intent on using it to take down Big Tech. They’d like Americans to focus on gatekeeper power, but consumer welfare and equality are the real values on the line, and not in the way congressmen describe.Rachel Chiu is a Young Voices contributor who writes about technology and employment policy. Her writing has been published in USA Today, The American Conservative, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @rachelhchiu.

Back in December, the Copia Institute submitted comments to Senator Tillis, who wanted feedback on making changes to the DMCA. It was a tricky needle to thread, because there's a lot about the DMCA that could be improved and really needs to be improved to be constitutional. At the same time, having protection for platforms is crucial for there to be platforms, and we did not want to encourage anything that might lead to the weakening of the safe harbors, which are already flimsy enough. So our advice was two-fold: address the First Amendment problems already present with the DMCA, and check what assumptions were driving the reform effort in order to make sure that any changes actually made things better and not worse.None of that happened, however. The draft legislation he proposed earlier this year, called the Digital Copyright Act, or DCA, is so troubling we haven't even had a chance to fully explain how. But at least he invited public comments on it, so last week we submitted some.In short, we repeated our original two points: (1) as Mike wrote when it was originally unveiled the DCA, with its "notice and staydown" regime, has an even bigger First Amendment problem than the DMCA already does, and (2) the proposed DCA legislation is predicated on several faulty assumptions.One such assumption is that the DCA appears to regard Internet service providers as little more than parasitic enterprises that must only be barely tolerated, rather than the intrinsically valuable services that have given artists greater opportunities for monetization and developing audience reach. Indeed, it was the recognition of their value that prompted Congress to try to protect them with the safe harbor system in the first place, whereas the DCA would all but slam the door on them, crushing them with additional burdens and even weaker liability protections. Sure, the proposed legislation offers to throw them a few bones around the edges, but in major substance it does little more than put them and the expression they facilitate in jeopardy.And for little reason, because another significant misapprehension underpinning the DCA is that it helps creators at all. The DCA strengthens the power of certain copyright holders, certainly, but it doesn't follow that it necessarily helps creators themselves, who are often not the actual copyright holders. In fact, in certain art forms, like music, it is frequently the case they are not, and we know this from all the termination litigation where creators are having to go to great effort to try to recover the copyrights in their own works—and are not always succeeding.As we pointed out:

Remember Michael Pack? That's the Steve Bannon protégé who Trump appointed last year to head the US Agency for Global Media. USAGM is the organization that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting and the Open Technology Fund. It was an open secret that Pack was appointed to turn those widely respected, independent, news organizations into pure Breitbart-style propaganda outfits. He wasted little time causing a huge fucking mess, firing a ton of people in a manner so upsetting that even Republican Senators were concerned. It also turned out that many of the people he fired... he legally had no right to fire.In the fall, things got even more ridiculous as it came out that Pack had been investigating VOA journalists to see if they were "anti-Trump" and then moved to get more power to directly dictate how VOA should be reporting. One of President Biden's first official acts in office... was to fire Pack, who laughably claimed that his being fired was "a partisan act" that would harm the credibility of USAGM.Meanwhile, the latest story, as revealed by NPR, is that Pack spent millions of tax payer dollars investigating staff throughout the various organizations to try to come up with reasons they could be fired. This was in response to the courts pointing out he couldn't just randomly fire people in these organizations.

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John Oliver has demolished many institutions in his time (not literally, unfortunately, in most cases) as the host of HBO's Last Week Tonight. It's rare when a mainstream program chooses to address more esoteric matters often discussed at this website. But Oliver does it more than most and, for that, we truly appreciate him.His episode from last week dealt with drug raids. Our nation's drug warriors have decided any suspicion of non-violent crime should be met with an uber-violent response, possibly because they've watched just as many Hollywood movies as we have.When it comes to drugs and drug warrants, it's all hands on deck. Sometimes, law enforcement agencies are able to obtain no-knock warrants, which allow them to enter a residence without announcing their presence in order to "preserve evidence" and limit the possibility of a violent response.Let's handle the second thing first. There's a lot of evidence that suggests no-knock raids increase the possibility of a violent response because the first assumption a drug dealer might make is that a rival drug dealer/gang is raiding their house to end their lives, take their drugs, and grab a bit more profitable turf. Cops get killed. People get killed.Now, let's talk about the possibility of evidence being destroyed. We're talking about large amounts of drugs, paraphernalia, and weapons. As John Oliver points out, this is bullshit. Cops are raiding homes without announcing themselves to secure extremely minute amounts of evidence. And that's according to their own justifications:

As our recent Greenhouse policy forum on broadband made abundantly clear, COVID is shining a very bright light on US broadband dysfunction. The high cost of service, spotty coverage, slow speeds, and high prices are all being felt acutely in an era where having a decent broadband connection is the pathway to education, employment, healthcare, and opportunity. And after 25 years of US apathy to its telecom monopoly problem, COVID-19 is applying pressure on lawmakers and regulators in an entirely new way to do something about the 42 million without broadband, the 83 million under a monopoly, and the tens of millions who simply can't afford service due to limited competition.But it's not just high prices and spotty coverage that have proven to be an issue in the COVID era. In Kentucky, one of countless US states where local monopolies AT&T and Time Warner Cable (now Charter Spectrum) literally dictated state telecom policy for 25 years (with obvious results), a lack of broadband access is hampering the public's access to vaccines. Louisville, Kentucky high schoolers recently set up VaXConnect Kentucky to help seniors get access to their first and second shots. And they're finding themselves "surprised" to learn just how many people don't have access to a reliable, affordable connection:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a response to a Parler defender insisting that, with regards to the platforms many bans, you have to ask people who got banned why they really posted:

So far, we've featured ~THE GREAT GATSBY~, The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game, Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here in this series of posts about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. Today, we're taking a look at the winner of the Best Deep Cut category: Remembering Grußau by Max Fefer (HydroForge Games).Of all the entries this year, this game was the one that had the biggest emotional impact on our judges, with words like "moving" and "powerful" popping up repeatedly in their comments. The best description of Remembering Grußau is perhaps to call it a guided reflection on a piece of artwork — specifically, the 1925 painting of the same name by the Jewish surrealist painter Felix Nussbaum — and its meaning within the greater context of history, and the artist's life and eventual murder in the Holocaust. The game is simple, focused, and highly effective in prompting the player to meaningfully engage with the subject matter in a deeply personal way.A big part of how it accomplishes this is by inventively bridging the gap between digital and physical engagement. The game itself is built in Twine with very basic interactive fiction mechanics, but the player's most important action is taken offline: they are instructed to step away, write a letter to Nussbaum, fold it into an envelope, and keep it nearby for a day before returning to complete the game. When they do, they are asked to indicate the theme of the letter they wrote, and then given a response — but to see what that response is, you'll have to experience it for yourself.Remembering Grußau is somber and impactful, and it demonstrates that there are many different reasons that a growing public domain is important. We talk a lot about the radical, transformative ways new creators can make use of old material, but there's also great value on using new media to examine and explore old works in their pure, original form, introducing them to new people and uncovering new meaning within them. By focusing so closely and intensely on a single 1925 painting that isn't especially well known, and actively giving the player historical context and emotional prompts followed by a reflective task to complete, Remembering Grußau succeeds in doing this to an impressive degree, and is a worthy winner of the Best Deep Cut award.Play Remembering Grußau in your browser on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to Max Fefer/HydroForge Games for the win! We'll be back next week with another game jam winner spotlight.

Way back in 2013, a class action lawsuit started by ex-UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon resulted ultimately in the NCAA found to have violated antitrust laws. The antitrust bit comes from a waiver the NCAA forces student athletes to sign that removes their ability to be compensated for their names, images, or likeness (NIL). While this restriction has been in place at the NCAA for eons, this case came about due to O'Bannon discovering that he was represented in EA Sports' NCAA Basketball game in a "classic" team loaded into the game.The knock on effect to all of this was that 2010 was the last year EA Sports offered its college basketball game and 2013, the year the lawsuit came about, was the last year the company made its vaunted NCAA Football game. The reason given by the company was that schools were shying away from those games to avoid further lawsuits. For the next seven years, EA Sports stuck to professional sports.But now, in 2021, the company has announced that the college football series is back.

Summary: Almost any platform that allows users to create accounts eventually has to deal with questions of identity and impersonation. Many platforms set up systems like “verified” or “trusted” users for certain recognizable accounts. Others focus on real name policies, or trying to verify all users. But services often discover challenges that come with celebrity users and verification.While it’s one thing to do verified accounts on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram that are often used for promotion and connection, dating site verification is a bit different and more complicated. Setting up fake personas on dating sites to lure people into misleading relationships (for a wide variety of reasons) is so common that it led to the creation of a whole new term: catfishing. Many dating sites now take user verification quite seriously, not just to avoid catfishing issues, but for the safety and protection of their userbase -- who, by definition, are usually trying to meet someone new with the hope of getting together in person.Bumble is a popular dating app which was built up around the premise of being safer, and more responsive to the needs of female daters. The site includes a verification feature that requests the user upload selfie poses that match poses in photos sent to the user -- which are then reviewed by a team member. The idea is that if a user were faking images by pulling them from online profiles or generating them via AI, it’s much harder to match the pose.Apparently, however, this form of verification ran into a problem when the actress Sharon Stone decided to use Bumble to meet potential dates. Users who matched with her, perhaps understandably, had difficulty believing that a famous Hollywood star would be using a dating app like Bumble, and they reported the account. Staff reviewers at Bumble were (again, reasonably) equally suspicious of the account, leading them to suspend it.Bumble quickly restored the account, and did so in a good natured way, wishing her luck in “finding your honey.”Decisions to be made by Bumble:

FBI Director Chris Wray needs to shut the fuck up about encryption.Let me explain sum up:For years, consecutive FBI Directors have claimed encryption is preventing law enforcement from doing law enforcement. And for years, public records, efforts by researchers, and court documents have shown encryption isn't much of an impediment to investigations.Most importantly -- in the FBI's case -- the agency overstated the amount of locked devices in its possession for years while agitating for encryption backdoors. It turns out the FBI's "locked device" spreadsheet performed some faulty math, greatly misstating the number of locked devices in its possession. While the FBI said it has over 8,000 impregnable electronics allegedly preventing law enforcement from investigating crimes, the correct amount is expected to be less than a quarter of that.That discovery was made in May 2018. The FBI has yet to provide an accurate count of these devices.So. Shut. The fuck. Up.Wray is shameless and incapable of shutting the fuck up, even after the agency admitted to Congressional oversight it really didn't know how many locked devices it had or how often encryption actually prevented investigators from investigating.And yet, here's Chris Wray, leveraging the January 6th insurrection to complain about encryption yet again.There doesn't appear to be any lack of open source data capable of aiding the FBI in its investigation of this event. Hundreds have already been charged for their participation in the raid on the US Capitol building.This event has forced US law enforcement to admit domestic terrorism is an actual threat -- a threat propelled mainly by white extremists and others aligned with the pathetic ideal that white makes right. This threat includes far too many law enforcement officers, who have also aligned themselves with the same ideals. That's why it's been ignored for so long and that's why it's a much bigger problem now than it should be.But here's what Chris Wray has chosen to focus on with his allotted testimonial time before the Senate: encryption. Wray says it's a "lawful access" problem. And he begins with what can only be considered an overstatement of the threat, considering the FBI has done nothing but overstate the problem for years.

As I'm pretty sure most of you know, Rep. Devin Nunes has been filing a ton of blatant SLAPP lawsuits trying to silence criticism and mockery of him, as well as critical reporting. Kind of ironic for a guy who co-sponsored a bill to discourage frivolous lawsuits and who has regularly presented himself as a free speech supporter. What kicked off those lawsuits, somewhat incredibly, was a satirical Twitter account, @DevinCow (mocking Devin Nunes for repeatedly holding himself out as a "dairy farmer" from Tulare California when it turns out his family farm moved to Iowa years ago).You may also know that at the time Nunes sued the satirical cow for making fun of him online, the @DevinCow account had a grand total of 1,204 followers. Within a couple days, @DevinCow had 400k followers and had surpassed Nunes' himself. Today the Cow has 772k followers and is one of the most interesting Twitter accounts online, with a huge pasture of followers. Pretty incredible.What a lot of people don't realize is that the case against the cow is still going on, and Nunes and his lawyer, Steven Biss, have constantly gone to fairly extreme lengths just try to figure out who is behind the Cow account. The craziest of all was that Biss used a totally unrelated case, that did not involve Nunes, and then abused his subpoena powers to ask Twitter to reveal who was behind @DevinCow, despite the Cow being totally unrelated to the case. Biss and Nunes made up some nonsense about how the cow was connected, but it was clearly ridiculous, and a judge rejected it.Of course, that raised lots of concerns about whether or not Nunes might abuse other methods to try to uncover the cow. Freelance journalist Shawn Musgrave filed a FOIA request with the Justice Department and the FBI to see if Nunes might have sought to use either organization to try to uncover the Cow's identity. After all, Nunes was (incredibly) the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and would have greater access to the FBI and its surveillance tools than just about any other Congressional Representative. Musgrave made it abundantly clear in his FOIA that he was not seeking to identify the Cow and did not want any information that might reveal the Cow's identity. He just wanted to know if the DOJ or the FBI had sought to uncover the Cow's identity.However, the DOJ and FBI have failed to comply, so now Musgrave is suing the DOJ to try to get them to actually properly respond to the FOIA request.

(Thispiece overlaps a bit with Mike’s piece from yesterday, “Howthe Third-Party Cookie Crumbles”;Mike graciously agreed to run this one anyway, so that it can offeradditional context for why Google’s news can be seen as ameaningful step forward for privacy.)Privacy isa complex and critical issue shaping the future of our internetexperience and the internet economy. This week there were two majordevelopments: first, the State of Virginia passed a newdata protection law,the Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA), which has been comparedto Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation;and second, Googleannounced that itwould move away from all forms of third-party identifiers for Webadvertising, rather than look to replace cookies with newertechniques like hashes of personally identifiable information (PII).The ink is still drying on the Virginia law and its effective dateisn’t until 2023, meaning it may be preempted by federal law ifthis Congress moves a privacy bill forward. But Google’s actionwill change the market immediately. While the road ahead is long andthere are many questions left to answer, moving the Web beyondcross-site tracking is a clear step forward.We’rein the midst of a global conversation about what the future of theinternet should look like, across many dimensions. In privacy, onehuge part of that discussion, it’s not good enough in 2021 tosay that user choice means “take it or leave it”;companies are expected to provide full-featured experiences withmeaningful privacy options, including for advertising-based services.These heightened expectations—some set by law, some by themarket—challenge existing assumptions around business modelsand revenue streams in a major way. As a result, the ecosystem mustevolve away from its current state toward a future that offers aricher diversity of models and user experiences.Google’sPrivacy Sandbox, inparticular, could be a big step forward along that evolutionary path.It’s plausible that a combination of subscription services,contextual advertising and more privacy-preserving techniques forlearning can collectively match or even grow the pie for advertisingrevenue beyond what it is today, while providing users withcompelling and meaningful choices that don’t involve cross-sitetracking. But that can’t be determined until new services arebuilt, offered and measured at scale.Andsometimes, to make change happen, band-aids need to be ripped off. Byending its support for third-party identifiers on the Web, that’swhat Google is doing. Critics of the move will focus on theshort-term impact for those smaller advertisers who currently rely onthird-party identifiers and tracking to target specific audiences,and will need to adapt their methods and strategies significantly.That concern is understandable; level playing fields are important,and centralization in the advertising ecosystem is widely perceivedto be a problem. However, the writing has been on the wall for a longtime for third-party identifiers and cross-site tracking. Firefoxblocked third-party cookies by default in September2019; Apple’sSafari followed suit in April2020—Firefoxfirst made moves to block third-party cookies asfar back as 2013,but it was, then, an idea ahead of its time. And the problem wasnever the cookies per se;it was the tracking they powered.As forleveling the playing field for the future, working through standardsbodies is an established approach for Web companies to shareinformation and innovate collectively. Google’sengagement withthe W3C should,hopefully, help open doors for other advertisers, limiting anyreinforcement effects for Google’s position in Web advertising.Further,limits on third-party tracking do not apply to first-party behavior,where a company tracks the pages on its own site that a user visits,for example when a shopping website remembers products that a userviewed in order to recommend other items of potential interest. Whilefirst-party relationships are important and offer clear positivevalue, it’s also not hard to imagine privacy-invasive acts thatuse solely first-party information. But Google’s moves must becontextualized within the backdrop of rapidly evolving privacylaw—including the Virginia data protection law that justpassed. From that perspective, they’re not a delaying tacticnor a substitute for legislation, but rather a complementary piece,and in particular a way to catalyze much-needed new thinking and newbusiness models for advertising.I don’tthink it’s possible for Google to put privacy advocates’minds at ease concerning its first-party practices through voluntaryaction. To stop capitalizing totally on its visibility into activitywithin its network would leave so much money on the table Googlemight be violating its fiduciary duty as a public company to serveits shareholders' interest. If it cleared that hurdle and stoppedanyway, what would prevent the company from going back and doing itlater? The only sustainable answer for first-party privacy concernsis legislation. And that kind of legislation will struggle to befeasible until new techniques and new business models have beentested and built. And that more than anything is the dilemma I thinkGoogle sees, and is working constructively to address.Often,private sector privacy reforms are derided as merely scratching thesurface of a deeper business model problem. While there’s muchmore to be done, moving beyond third-party identifiers goes deeper,and deserves broad attention and engagement to help preserve goodbalances going forward.

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