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From calls to break up Big Tech to Florida’s latest anti-tech law, one thing is clear—America’s lawmakers and bureaucrats are looking to regulate the online world. Building on the momentum of the Facebook Oversight Board’s recent ruling on President Trump and Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Biden v. Knight Institute, alternative proposals like common carriage are gaining traction among conservative lawmakers looking for new regulatory solutions.More and more conservatives critique social media by arguing that websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are effectively the modern public square that shouldn’t have moderation practices built to balance online safety and free speech. So it’s only natural that a proposal like common carriage gained traction in the Trump presidency and has not lost momentum since. Just look at Sen. Hagerty’s 21st Century FREE Speech Act.Some conservative critics think treating these sites as common carriers ticks many of their boxes—less content moderation, less alleged anti-conservative bias, and more regulation of America’s tech companies. But they’re wrong. Not only is it an unconstitutional solution, its design to work around First Amendment jurisprudence will almost certainly make the internet worse, not better, for conservatives. Common carriage will inch the internet towards an online ecosystem devoid of family-friendly options and teeming with the worst humanity can offer— including the very content conservatives hate like pornography, indecency, and profanity.An attempt at common carriage regulation is unlikely to succeed in court—social media simply doesn’t fit the criteria necessary for this centuries-old designation. Derived from common law, common carriage was a way for the entire public to receive and transport goods and services deemed essential. When America started its own classification of common carriage in the 1800s, the principle of nondiscrimination was at the forefront of the discussion. American courts identify industries and businesses as common carriers if they do not distinguish between customers or decide what they will and will not carry.Nondiscrimination is a central feature of traditional common carriers, but it is not a feature of social media. Unlike the railroads and communications companies of the Gilded Age, social media relies on the ability to contextualize and discriminate between different content to provide useful information to users. Content moderation is at the center of that, providing websites the ability to balance free expression and online safety to maximize both and make the internet somewhere we want to spend time. Concerned parents shouldn’t have to wade through expletives, references to violence, and sexual content just to connect with their friends and family as well as protect their kids online.The ability to moderate is a feature, not a bug, of social media. This is not a matter of transporting goods and services from California to New York—in fact, it's not really a matter of transporting anything. Rather than transporting data like telecommunications businesses, social media hosts content. They offer a space online on which content is posted and established in perpetuity as part of internet history, more like a museum than a railroad. Therefore, ensuring a curated collection of high-quality posts is a key part of their business model, rather than simply serving as a conduit of communication.This is a matter of private forums and businesses with constitutional protections from government action under the Bill of Rights. Social media sites like any private businesses have First Amendment rights that prevent the government from coming in and forcing them to host speech they disagree with.Placing social media under common carriage regulations would fall counter to their First Amendment rights and ensure content moderation is effectively impossible as the incentive to maintain online safety disappears. And by taking away websites’ ability to moderate what gets posted online, the internet could easily become rampant with unwanted, offensive, and disgusting content, rendering many services unsafe for use at work or with family. That would only run counter to the founding values and family principles that conservatives seek to protect.By doing their utmost to ensure websites aren’t allowed to remove lawful but awful content, conservatives may feel like they’re fighting to defend the principles of free speech, but instead they are stifling the free speech rights of media companies and risking exposing the everyday American looking to connect with family, friends, and coworkers to the worst aspects of the internet.Conservatives, like all Americans, have the right to voice their concerns about the decisions made by social media platforms—and they should do so. But they shouldn’t mistakenly support actions that could put American families and kids in harms’ way online and that would undermine free expression and free enterprise. No matter how it’s sliced or diced, common carriage classification will force social media and the internet writ large to become a cesspool of filth, completely devoid of either conservative or family-friendly values. Treating social media like common carriers could lead to a staggering increase of content that conservatives actively work to mitigate like online harassment, the proliferation of pornography, and other explicit materials that undermine the conservative commitment to family values.Social media relies on the ability to discriminate between user-generated posts to succeed, actively not treating themselves like neutral transports of information or services like a common carrier would. With their longstanding practice of content moderation and their lack of a natural monopoly, the courts would simply be unlikely to categorize social media as common carriers. And we should be wary of categorizing websites for users of all ages as common carriers lest they become filled with offensive content even adults don’t want to engage with.By turning to common carriage in their crusade to fight alleged anticonservative bias, conservatives might not like the result—an internet that ignores the best it offers while proliferating the worst.Kir Nuthi is the Public Affairs Manager at NetChoice and a Contributor at Young Voices.

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So last week 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 kind of 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." Whitacre was effectively arguing that in addition to paying for bandwidth, tech giants should pay him a troll toll, just because.As we noted last week, this claim that technology giants (or anybody, really) gets a "free ride" when it comes to US telecom networks is laughable. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix all pay billions of dollars in total for undersea cable runs, massive cloud storage, transit routes, and content delivery networks. Hell, Google is even a residential ISP. That's on top of the money consumers, businesses, and Silicon Valley giants pay for their own bandwidth, which in the US is often some of the highest in the developed world thanks to regional monopolization and captured regulators (precisely like Carr).In reality, the argument that "big tech" gets a "free ride" has long been a flimsy proxy for telecom providers who believe it's their God-given right to get a cut of massive Silicon Valley ad revenues, even if that makes no coherent sense. It has popped up again and again for fifteen straight years, usually out of the mouths of those prodded into making it by telecom policy and lobbying organizations.So when it popped up again last week I was fairly sure it would be ignored. Until CNET grabbed Carr's column believing it was in good faith, and amplified it to even more people:

In case you've been living under a rock for all of 2021, following the January 6th mob attack at the Capitol, where then President Donald Trump went to social media and posted things that could be read as egging on his insurrectionist followers, Twitter and Facebook suspended Trump's accounts. A few weeks later, the still relatively new and untested Oversight Board that will review a few Facebook decisions agreed to review the Trump decision. In late April, it upheld the removal, but said that Facebook's decision being for an "indefinite" length violated the company's own policies, and told the company it needed to either put a time limit on it, or come up with an actual rationale for a permanent suspension.Last week, Facebook announced its response: the suspension would now be officially for two years -- but that doesn't mean Trump will automatically get his account back (just in time to ramp up his 2024 campaign...).

For some reason, the FBI is targeting readers of reporting on a shooting of FBI agents -- something that's both inexplicable and an oblique assault on the First Amendment rights of those targeted. The news service is fighting back, as Josh Gerstein reports for Politico.

As a recent Techdirt article noted, the European Commission was obliged to issue "guidance" on how to implement the infamous Article 17 upload filters required by the EU's Copyright Directive. It delayed doing so, evidently hoping that the adviser to the EU's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), would release his opinion on Poland's attempt to get Article 17 struck down before the European Commission revealed its one-sided advice. That little gambit failed when the Advocate General announced that he would publish his opinion after the deadline for the release of the guidance. The European Commission has finally provided its advisory document on Article 17 and, as expected, it contains a real stinker of an idea. The best analysis of what the Commission has done, and why it is so disgraceful comes from Julia Reda and Paul Keller on the Kluwer Copyright Blog. Although Article 17 effectively made upload filters mandatory, it also included some (weak) protections for users, to allow people to upload copyright material for legal uses such as memes, parody, criticism etc. without being blocked. The copyright industry naturally hates any protections for users, and has persuaded the European Commission to eviscerate them:

There's a saying lots of cops and cop defenders use. It rhymes, so it's easy to remember and even easier to deploy carelessly anytime someone expresses doubts about excessive force or excessive sentencing.

Harpers has a giant and fascinating article by Barrett Swanson entitled The Anxiety of Influencers that has received some attention online. Most of the reactions are the kind of typical tut tutting about the existence of TikTok/Instagram influencers whose entire (quite short) careers as "influencers" are based on their ability to get famous on social media for influencing. I do understand why people -- especially older folks (a category I now inhabit myself) -- look down upon these stories and shake their heads and wonder "what has happened to the children these days?" However, I'm more in the camp of recognizing this kind of thing happens in every generation, and I don't begrudge kids these days from trying to chase a dream, even if it feels like a silly one to someone not of that generation. There will always be young people chasing dreams, and along with it old people complaining about the kids these days. I don't think that approach is particularly useful, so I'll just say that the article is an interesting window into some of the "collab houses" that have sprung up all over (though mostly in LA), full of kids trying to become famous as influencers.The reason this is here on Techdirt is one tiny bit of the article that touches on content moderation. At one point in the article, Swanson -- who deftly alternates between chronicling "the kids these days," envying some of their fame and attention, and recognizing just how preposterous all of this is -- is talking with Chase Zwernemann, who (perhaps somewhat incredibly) is one of the "adults" in the collab house space at a geezerly 21 years old, enabling him to be "VP of talent management" for what he and his colleagues want to suggest is an academy to produce influencers. And Chase appears to have some interesting views about the state of the world, and what he learns online.

Another leak investigation that involves the DOJ going after journalists' communications has been revealed. This would be the third time since Biden took office that subpoenas targeting journalists have had their gag orders removed, allowing the public to see what the DOJ was up to during Trump's unceremonious reign as president.The previous revelations involved journalists employed by the Washington Post and CNN. This one targets one of Trump's favorite media punching bags, the "failing" New York Times. This investigation dates all the way back to James Comey's last months as the head of the FBI, a position he was ousted from when he failed to show Trump the required amount of obeisance.

If you want to see what censorship is, let's take a look at Nigeria banning Twitter indefinitely in response to Twitter removing a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari that it believed violated the site's policies. The tweet was read to be a threat to brutally kill those engaging in attacks on public infrastructure, in particular police stations in Southeast Nigeria. Buhari's tweet harkened back to the way dissenters were dealt with during the Nigerian Civil War:

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The chair and ranking member of the House IP subcommittee that covers intellectual property is now asking the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate whether or not the Director of the Patent Office is pressuring the important Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to make certain decisions on the validity of patents. There's a lot of important background here, but it's all kind of fascinating how two big legal issues are coalescing in this result, in which the USPTO's own legal arguments may reveal how the Director has been unfairly influencing decisions. The two key points to understand are (1) the Inter Partes Review (IPR) process, and (2) questions about the constitutionality of certain appointments -- both of which are issues that we've covered for years, that seem deep in the weeds, but turn out to be quite important.First, we've got the IPR process. This was an effort that was put in place with the America Invents Act (AIA) back in 2012. It was a recognition (FINALLY) that the Patent Office was approving way too many bad and overly broad patents, that were then being abused to shake down companies. The fact that the USPTO was approving so many awful patents was a built in bug (or feature?) of the way the patent system works.The process for getting a patent is not truly adversarial. You have the party seeking the patent, and the examiner. Yet examiners were often judged on how many applications they dealt with, rather than the quality of the patents they approved. So there's no party arguing for why something does not deserve a patent. In theory, the examiner might do that, but the incentive structure there is broken as well. There is something called a "final" rejection from a patent examiner, but it's not actually final, since the party seeking the patent can continue to file renewed requests/appeals forever. And with the Patent Office getting heat for having too long a backlog, sooner or later, there are strong incentives for the examiner to just approve a patent to get it off his or her docket.Rather than fix the many inherent problems in this setup, the AIA introduced a compromise that was better than nothing. It would create this special PTAB, which anyone could use to challenge a previously granted patent. At that point (usually once someone started threatening or suing over a patent) then finally, there would be a more careful review, with an adversarial process, to examine whether or not the patent should have been granted in the first place. Patent trolls and their friends have hated the whole IPR process since it began and have tried a variety of ways to challenge it. In 2018, the biggest legal challenge to the whole IPR process was rejected by the Supreme Court, who said that of course the PTO can invalidate the patents it never should have granted.But that hasn't stopped the efforts by trolls and friends to invalidate the IPR process. The latest attempt is in the US v. Arthrex case, in which it is argued that the "judges" on the PTAB are unconstitutional for violating the Constitution's appointments clause. That case was heard by the Supreme Court a few months ago and a ruling should be coming soon.And that takes us to the other deep in the weeds issue we've talked about for over a decade: whether or not appointments to various quasi-legal tribunals within the executive branch violate the Constitution's appointments clause. The Appointments Clause says certain "principle officers" of the government, including judges, need to be nominated by the President and approved by the Senate. There have been questions for years about whether or not certain roles that were appointed by various department heads violated this clause. Back in 2012, for example, a court said that the Copyright Royalty Board nominations were unconstitutional (though the court then immediately worked around that issue with a sort of wink and a nudge).So, now the question at the heart of Arthrex is whether or not the PTAB judges are constitutionally appointed, since they're appointed not by the President with the consent of the Senate, but directly by the director of the Patent Office. And, in that case, the US government (defending the constitutionality of the PTAB judges) claimed that they were not principal judges, but rather "inferior officers" who could be appointed by the PTO director. That's all very interesting, but a key argument made by the government in defending that was that the PTO Director controls the PTAB judges, including how they decide cases.And while that may be necessary to prove that their appointments were constitutional under the Appointments clause, it rang some alarm bells because it sure as hell suggested that the PTAB might be deciding whether or not patents are valid not based on the evidence before it but based on what the PTO director wanted. And that would be a big problem.And, so that finally gets us to the latest bit of news, in which Reps. Hank Johnson and Darrell Issa, a bipartisan sort of odd-couple who head up the IP subcommittee are asking the GAO to look into whether or not the USPTO director is actually pressuring the PTAB judges into deciding the validity of patents one way or the other:

For years we've noted how a lack of competition means consumers across the country pay dramatically different prices for the same or worse service. For example a customer in Chattanooga, Tennessee can pay $70 or less for gigabit service, thanks to competition between Comcast and the regionally owned community broadband network.But live in any of the countless US markets that major broadband providers have neglected (despite decades of major subsidies, tax breaks, and the near-mystical promises surrounding mindless deregulation), and you're often facing the choice of either an apathetic telco with sluggish, neglected DSL, or, more likely, a regional cable monopoly (Charter or Comcast) that charges significantly more money thanks to regional monopolization.Over at Stop the Cap!, Phil Dampier recently showcased how the presence or absence of competition can even result in customers having to pay up to $40 more per month for the same or sometimes slower service. Not only that, users in more competitive markets enjoy longer promotion rates (often two years rather than just one). Even the fees charged by the regional monopoly (one major way they hit consumers with dramatically higher prices than advertised) are significantly higher at homes that lack any real competition:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PaulT on our post about a bizarre Washington Post opinion piece defending Florida's content moderation law, responding to parts of the op-ed and parts of our post:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, we were pleased to see a dearth of support for the Burr-Feinstein anti-encryption bill, but not so happy about the 4th circuit rolling back its warrant requirement for cell site location info. We were also watching the fallout from the second ruling in the Oracle/Google trial and digging into just what happened in an episode of our podcast. Meanwhile, an independent musician was suing Justin Bieber and Skrillex over a sample they didn't use, just as two recent rulings from around the world looked like they might clear the copyright barriers to sampling. And one court gave a very bad copyright ruling, saying that remastered old songs can get a brand new copyright.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, the copyright nonsense was widespread, with an EMI executive saying people should pay again to stream their own music, and both an industry lawyer and the RIAA talking about the supposed evils of the public domain. The push was on to criminalize more infringement too, with some senators seeking to make embedding videos a felony and the RIAA wanting to do the same for music subscription service password sharing. Amidst all this, we took a deep dive into why the PROTECT IP Act would break the internet.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, Canada was doling out entertainment industry propaganda to kids in the form of an embarrassing new character called Captian Copyright (who might have himself been engaging in infringement), while the industry was hard at work on the next generation of terrible DVD copy protection. We took a closer look at some easily-misinterpreted statements about net neutrality from the creator of BitTorrent, and at an early example of a still-ongoing tradition: fake public comments about net neutrality. But there was no need to worry about a lack of regulation, because AT&T's chairman promised they would absolutely definitely not violate net neutrality principles.

Earlier today the DC Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a public records case brought by Judicial Watch against Rep. Adam Schiff. In an odd way, the ruling may have opened up a way to get the full copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee's giant locked up report on the CIA's torture program. And someone -- namely journalist Shawn Musgrave along with public records lawyer extraordinaire Kel McClanahan -- has jumped up to try. But, first, some background.The case decided today goes back to the first House impeachment inquiry. In the impeachment inquiry report, the House Intelligence Committee, helmed by Schiff, released some phone records that it had obtained via a subpoena, showing some questionable phone calls, including ones connected to fellow Intel Committee member Devin Nunes (which, separately, Nunes later sued CNN about).This resulted in some fairly silly posturing, and then Judicial Watch, in standard Judicial Watch fashion, insisted that Schiff abused his powers in getting that subpoena, and sought to get the details of the subpoena via a public records request, saying that they had a "common law right of access" (conceptually similar to FOIA, but rather than using the rules under the FOIA statute, claiming a common law right to get the document).It's important to note that, normally, Congress is exempt from FOIA, so it's generally silly to make such requests. But, since this was done under the common law claim, rather than FOIA, it was seen as an end-run on the Congressional FOIA exemption. Last summer, the district court dismissed the lawsuit arguing that members of Congress have sovereign immunity and that these records are protected under the "speech and debate clause" of the Constitution, which protects against legal liability for things members of Congress say in the course of their duty.That takes us to today's ruling. It upheld the district court ruling, again saying that the speech and debate clause protects Schiff here:

Earlier today the DC Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a public records case brought by Judicial Watch against Rep. Adam Schiff. In an odd way, the ruling may have opened up a way to get the full copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee's giant locked up report on the CIA's torture program. And someone -- namely journalist Shawn Musgrave along with FOIA lawyer extraordinaire Kel McClanahan -- has jumped up to try. But, first, some background.The case decided today goes back to the first House impeachment inquiry. In the impeachment inquiry report, the House Intelligence Committee, helmed by Schiff, released some phone records that it had obtained via a subpoena, showing some questionable phone calls, including ones connected to fellow Intel Committee member Devin Nunes (which, separately, Nunes later sued CNN about).This resulted in some fairly silly posturing, and then Judicial Watch, in standard Judicial Watch fashion, insisted that Schiff abused his powers in getting that subpoena, and sought to get the details of the subpoena via a FOIA request.It's important to note that, normally, Congress is exempt from FOIA, so it's generally silly to make such requests. Last summer, the district court dismissed the lawsuit arguing that members of Congress have sovereign immunity and that these records are protected under the "speech and debate clause" of the Constitution, which protects against legal liability for things members of Congress say in the course of their duty.That takes us to today's ruling. It upheld the district court ruling, again saying that the speech and debate clause protects Schiff here:

Earlier today the DC Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a public records case brought by Judicial Watch against Rep. Adam Schiff. In an odd way, the ruling may have opened up a way to get the full copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee's giant locked up report on the CIA's torture program. And someone -- namely journalist Shawn Musgrave along with FOIA lawyer extraordinaire Kel McClanahan -- has jumped up to try. But, first, some background.The case decided today goes back to the first House impeachment inquiry. In the impeachment inquiry report, the House Intelligence Committee, helmed by Schiff, released some phone records that it had obtained via a subpoena, showing some questionable phone calls, including ones connected to fellow Intel Committee member Devin Nunes (which, separately, Nunes later sued CNN about).This resulted in some fairly silly posturing, and then Judicial Watch, in standard Judicial Watch fashion, insisted that Schiff abused his powers in getting that subpoena, and sought to get the details of the subpoena via a FOIA request.It's important to note that, normally, Congress is exempt from FOIA, so it's generally silly to make such requests. Last summer, the district court dismissed the lawsuit arguing that members of Congress have sovereign immunity and that these records are protected under the "speech and debate clause" of the Constitution, which protects against legal liability for things members of Congress say in the course of their duty.That takes us to today's ruling. It upheld the district court ruling, again saying that the speech and debate clause protects Schiff here:

Summary: Roblox is an incredibly popular online platform for games, especially among younger users. In 2020, it was reported that two-thirds of all US kids between 9 and 12 years old use Roblox, and one-third for all Americans under the age of 16. The games on the platform can be developed by anyone, as Roblox has set up a very easy environment, using the scripting language Lua, so that many of the games themselves are developed by Roblox’s young users.Given the target market of Roblox, the company has put in place a fairly robust content moderation program designed to stop content that the company deems inappropriate. This includes all kinds of profanity and “inappropriate” language, as well as any talk of “dating,” let alone sexual innuendo. The company also does not allow users to share personal identifiable information.The content moderation extends not just to players on the Roblox platform, but to the many game developers that create and release games on Roblox as well. Roblox apparently uses AI moderation from a company called Community Sift as well as human moderators from iEnergizer. Recent reports say that Roblox has a team of 2,300 content moderators.Given the competing interests and incentives, there are both widespread reports of adult content being easily available (including to children) as well as developers complaining about having their content, projects, and accounts shut down over perfectly reasonable content, leading to widespread complaints that the moderation system is completely arbitrary.Roblox is then left trying to figure out how to better deal with such adult content while simultaneously not upsetting its developers, or angering parents who don’t want their children exposed to adult content while playing games.Decisions to be made by Roblox:

Two years after cops killed Ronald Greene following a car chase, the Louisiana State Police have finally released the recordings. Greene led officers on a high-speed chase before being stopped, subdued, and ultimately killed. Here's how the State Police described it two years ago when it still had control of the narrative.

For many years we've written about the problems with the CFAA. That's the supposedly "anti-hacking" law, with both civil and criminal components, that makes it a violation to use a computer in a manner that "exceeds authorized access." Law enforcement and the courts in the past often (though not always) took an extremely broad read of "unauthorized access" in a such a manner that basically all sorts of cases that involved a computer included CFAA claims. And even if all the other claims fell away, the CFAA claims often lasted, which is why it has been dubbed "the law that sticks." Part of the underlying issue is that law enforcement and some courts wanted to read "unauthorized access" to include using a computer system you had legitimate access to, but for unauthorized purposes.Famously, this has included cases around not abiding by terms of service that were never read, seemingly benign password sharing, scraping your own data off a web page, and perhaps most troubling of all, downloading too many files.This week, the Supreme Court finally ruled on the CFAA and its limits in the Van Buren case, which we've covered before, including why the Supreme Court needed to push back on some courts' broad interpretation of the law.The case involved Nathan Van Buren, a former police sergeant who abused his access to law enforcement databases to run a search that he had no legitimate law enforcement reason for. Now, there are all sorts of reasons people should condemn Van Buren for abusing his power. But the key question in the case was whether or not doing so violated the CFAA and was a form of hacking because the access was unauthorized.Thankfully, the Supreme Court correctly rules that this particular use did not violate the CFAA. While it may have violated the police department's policies, that does not make it "exceed authorized access."Beyond that, though, the 6 to 3 decision is... well... a bit of a mess. It could have clearly stated that merely violating a policy while having full practical access to a computer system means there's no CFAA violation. And at times, it seems to suggest that's what it's saying. But it doesn't say that entirely clearly... and, in fact, there's a weird footnote (footnote 8) that seems to undermine that premise.

The corollary to "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" is that the thinner a public servant's skin is, the more damaging the outcome when they decide to abuse their power to get even.That's the story that's buried under this rather dry recitation by the US Department of Justice, which has brought federal charges against the police chief of a small Pennsylvania town.

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With various legislative efforts in Western democracies designed to force websites to take down perfectly lawful, but "awful" speech, it appears that more authoritarian countries are feeling even more emboldened to do more of the same. Case in point: Russia.Over the last few years Russia has been fairly aggressive in trying to control the internet, even to the point of exploring ways to cut itself off from the public internet (we assume that Russia's state sponsored trolling operations will retain their access).Obviously, Russia threatening internet companies isn't particularly new. We've had many, many, many examples of such efforts. However, the NY Times suggests that the latest crackdown is very much focused on the biggest internet providers: Google, Facebook, and Twitter:

Prodded by Congress, a few months back the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit, a $3.2 billion program designed to provide folks struggling economically during COVID a little extra help affording broadband. Under the program, users get a $50 discount off their broadband bill, a total that jumps to $75 for those living on tribal areas. As we've well covered, regional telecom monopolization and corruption results in Americans paying some of the highest prices in the world for broadband, a problem that hits low income consumers and marginalized communities the hardest.While the program does little to fix US broadband's bigger competition issue, it's certainly helping folks; roughly a million folks signed up the first week. And while the majority of the 825 participating ISPs are engaging in the program in good faith, it's not particularly surprising that some ISPs decided to try and game the system to make an additional buck. Charter, for example rejected users from signing up if they didn't agree to pay for a more expensive broadband tier once the program ends, which appears to violate the program rules.More problematic is Verizon, which got caught forcing users to sign up for even more expensive tiers if they wanted to apply to the program, resulting in some users being forced to pay more for broadband than if they'd never signed up for government help in the first place:

One of the curious aspects of Germany's surveillance activities is the routine use of so-called "state trojans" -- software that is placed surreptitiously on a suspect's system by the authorities to allow it to be monitored and controlled in real time over the Internet. The big advantage of this approach is that it lets intelligence agencies get around end-to-end encryption without needing backdoors in the code. Instead, the trojan sits at one end of the conversation, outside the encryption, which lets it eavesdrop without any problem. This approach goes back at least a decade, and now seems to be an accepted technique in the country, which is rather surprising given Germany's unhappy history of state surveillance and control during the previous century. The German government likes state trojans so much it wants to give the option to even more of its services, as Netzpolitik explains (original in German, translation by DeepL):

The saga that has been Twitch's last six or so months is long and somewhat varied, so you should go read up on our historical coverage if you're not familiar with it, but we need to at least preface this post with the origins of how Twitch's bad time began. What has been a tumultuous several months began when it absolutely freaked out over a flood of DMCA takedown notices it received, mostly from the music industry. In response to that, and without warning to its creative community, Twitch nuked a bunch of content from the platform, mostly ignored the outcry from its creators, and did very little to put anything in place that would keep such a disastrous situation from happening again.So of course it happened again. Twitch recently sent out an email that it had received roughly 1,000 additional DMCA takedown notices, almost all of them again over music playing in the background of recorded Twitch videos.

Cops like cheap field drug tests. They don't like them because they're accurate. They like them because they're cheap. And since you get what you pay for, they're way cheaper (in the long run) then sending for a drug dog.Field drug tests are probable cause at $2 a pop. They're even more unreliable than drug dogs when it comes to correctly identifying drugs. That's why some prosecutors -- the nominal best friends of law enforcement -- are refusing to accept plea deals for drug charges stemming solely from field drug tests.Field drug tests have said donut crumbs, cotton candy, and honey are methamphetamines. They've said bird poop on a car's hood (!!) and bog standard aspirin are cocaine. Whatever a cop imagines to be drugs can usually be "confirmed" by the test kits they carry with them. Once the vial says it's drugs, the cops are free to search, seize, and arrest.Cops don't need to be this wrong about drugs. But there's no penalty for being this wrong. So, it continues. Prosecutors may have to drop a few cases when the drug lab says the supposed drugs aren't actual drugs, but plea deals tend to go into place before labs get around to testing the evidence. And that's if the evidence even makes its way to a lab. Cops aren't the best at paperwork, which is convenient when it's their word against yours. Even if a cop gets sued for turning non-contraband into contraband and drug charges, they're usually indemnified by the city they work for or granted qualified immunity for relying on what they thought was actual science.And, because no one seems too interested in ending the reliance on unreliable drug tests, this is the sort of travesty we've come to expect.

As you may have heard, Amazon recently reached a deal to buy MGM Studios for $8.5 billion, expanding its in-house content studio, which is already quite massive, given its efforts to build up its Prime Video streaming service. For a variety of reasons (notably, everything Amazon has done with Prime, as well as increasing video streaming competition from Disney, NBC Universal, Warner Media/Discovery, etc.), the deal isn't that surprising.I do wonder, however, if this deal brings Amazon a step closer to turning its back on the open internet. I mean, we already had Netflix join the MPA and start overreacting to piracy after being a good internet steward for many years. At this point, it seems like it may only be a matter of time until Amazon goes down that path as well -- though I'd hope they think better of it.That said, it is notable that MGM is not a member of the MPA. It somewhat famously left in 2005. So maybe that helps keep Amazon on a path of actually supporting the open internet, and remembering the rest of its business (and how much it relies on an open internet). Still, watching how much the internet and the entertainment business has converged over the past decade or so suggests that we might finally get a realignment on these issues. It would be nice if that came with Hollywood finally recognizing the open internet is not the enemy, rather than the new tech players turning their backs on the open internet... but I'm not at all confident that's how this will play out.

For years, AT&T worked tirelessly to erode its customers' legal rights, using mouse print in its terms of service preventing consumers from participating in lawsuits against the company. Instead, customers were forced into binding arbitration, where arbitrators, chosen and paid by the companies under fire, unsurprisingly rule in favor of companies more often than not. Initially, the lower courts derided this anti-consumer behavior for what it was, noting that however brutally flawed the class action is, binding arbitration, at least the way we let companies designed it, in many ways made things worse.But these lower court roadblocks quickly evaporated when the Supreme Court ruled in 2011 (Mobility v. Concepcion) that what AT&T was doing was perfectly OK. While lower courts saw this as an "unconscionable" abuse of consumer rights and the law, the Supreme Court bought into the ongoing myth that binding arbitration is a hyper-efficient, modern alternative to class actions. In reality, it shifted things to a form of binding arbitration that was costly, lopsided, and cumbersome for consumers, and less transparent for those used to visiting Pacer to dig up legal histories.Fast forward to a few years ago, when a growing number of companies and services (like Fairshake) began streamlining the arbitration process, making it easier and less expensive for consumers (and yeah, class action lawyers). This shifted the balance of power back toward consumers, and starting in 2018 or so companies like Uber, AT&T and Comcast began to complain they were being swamped with arbitration feuds. Now, a year later, even giants like Amazon are being forced to take consumer complaints back to the courtroom, in part because a system they constructed to dodge accountability is no longer helping them do that:

The Chicago Police Department is already seriously awful. Its reliance on software to decide who and where to police isn't making it any better. Predictive policing is only as good as the input data, and if the data is being input by police departments with long histories of biased policing, it's only going to generate algorithmic excuses for future biased policing.Law enforcement officials call predictive policing a game changer. In reality, it appears to be little more than a way to ensure some people -- due to the area they live in or the people they know -- endure endless harassment by law enforcement officers. The ideal is cities being steadily scrubbed of crime by proactive officers. The reality is officers making multiple visits a month to certain homes to issue tickets for uncut grass.And that's kind of a best case scenario, believe it or not. It can get far worse. The Chicago PD has been using predictive policing software for years and it hasn't given the department better cops or done anything to reduce the violent crime rate. But it has made people miserable. And it has made -- at least in one case examined in depth by Matt Stroud for The Verge -- one Chicago man the target of criminal violence.Robert McDaniel -- who was one of the first city residents to make the PD's "heat list" back in 2013 -- isn't a violent criminal. In fact, his criminal history consists of nothing more than pot possession and illegal gambling. But he made the list because of where he lives (a Chicago neighborhood in which 10 percent of the city's murders have taken place) and who he knows. But even the cops who informed McDaniel of his presence on the "heat list" weren't sure what to do with this data.

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It seems these days you can't mention anything to do with cryptocurrency without someone jumping in and insisting that cryptocurrency is a disaster for the environment. There are differing opinions on all of this, but a few years ago, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen set out to build a more "eco friendly" cryptocurrency called Chia. The basic idea was that, rather than using a proof-of-work system -- which involves using up a ridiculous amount of computing power, it would use a proof-of-space system, looking at how much hard drive space you're allocating. After many years of development, Chiacoin finally launched a few weeks ago. And, to pretty much prove the old axiom that there's no such thing as a free lunch, while it may not be directly wasting CPU cycles, it's impacted the world differently: by destroying the global hard disc supply chain, driving prices for hard disks through the roof -- leading people to point out that even if it's not wasting electricity like Bitcoin, it may be wasting hard drives. Some may challenge the question of whether or not this is wasteful (those hard drives are doing something...) but there are multiple reports of running Chia on SSDs is wearing them out in ridiculously short periods of time -- even to the point that some SSD makers are saying that using their hard drives for Chia will void the warranty. Yikes!All that said, this post is not so much about Chia's setup or its impact on the global supply chain for hard drives. It's about trademark bullying. You'd think that a company started by Bram Cohen -- someone all too frequently falsely accused of being responsible for music and video piracy from his BitTorrent days -- would be extra sensitive to coming across as an "IP bully" of any sort. And this is true of some of the other folks who work on Chia -- some of whom I know are Techdirt regulars.But, for whatever reason, Chia Networks has decided to be an obnoxious trademark bully. Chris Dupres, another Techdirt regular, started a blog to cover news about Chia Networks and ChiaCoin called The Chia Plot. It's got a bunch of interesting articles about what's been happening on the Chia front.And apparently the folks at Chia decided to threaten him with legal action.Last week, "the head of IP for the Chia Network," Belle Borovik (who appears to be a recent law school grad), sent Chia a legal nastygram, insisting that the site violated Chia's trademark. Admittedly, the letter was at least somewhat friendlier that your typical cease and desist or threat letter. It thanked Chris for educating the public about Chia, and asked him to get a license to use the Chia name, which it offered up on a "royalty free" basis.

Update: Perhaps due to all of the negative publicity this received, Stanford agreed to drop the investigation, and allow Wallace to go on with graduating. The original story remains below.Ah, the Federalist Society. It makes a big deal about how "cancel culture" is supposedly a "threat to liberty" but apparently that doesn't apply when someone makes fun of them. Nicholas Wallace is a 3rd year law student at Stanford Law, and a few weeks after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, Wallace decided to highlight that some prominent FedSoc members who were seen to have cheered on the riot at the Capitol. So he created an obviously satirical email mocking the Federalist Society and the types of events it normally holds and sent it to a Stanford Law listserv. In this case, Wallace made an invite for a fake FedSoc event, parodying standard FedSoc events, entitled: "The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection" and claimed that the main speakers at the event would be insurrectionist fist bumper Senator Josh Hawley and still under indictment for felony fraud Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton.The invite goes on to note:

The Supreme Court has been on a bit of roll lately. After years of making things worse for plaintiffs suing law enforcement officers over rights violations, the Supreme Court has begun reversing qualified immunity decisions finding in favor of the rights violators. It still has a lot of damage to undo from its decades of expansion of the qualified immunity doctrine but it's a start.A new, very short decision [PDF] from the Supreme Court reverses another blown call by an appellate court and restores some Fourth Amendment protections that decision stripped away.In March of last year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals decided to do something a little different: it extended the limits of the poorly defined "community caretaker" function to cover warrantless searches and seizures that involved someone's home. The decision it relied on -- Cady v. Dombrowski (1973) -- previously only covered vehicles already in law enforcement possession or on public roads.In that case, a man's wife called for a welfare check on her husband. The previous night, her husband had asked her to "shoot him now and get it over with." She left and he stayed in the house with the gun. When she couldn't reach him by phone the next day, she asked the police to check in with him.The police spoke to the man and expressed his wife's concerns. They then went to his house. He voluntarily departed via an ambulance to check in at the local hospital to see what help they could be in dealing with the mental breakdown he seemed to be experiencing. The officers took it upon themselves to enter the home and seize any guns they found. They did this despite the man (now hospitalized and posing no threat to anyone) expressly refusing to consent to this seizure.Too bad, said the First Circuit. The home is now a car and "community caretaking" function excuses the lack of warrant or express permission to take personal property.

There has been quite an uptick recently when it comes to the conversation around video game preservation. There are probably several reasons for this. First and most notably, the confluence of the trend toward the gaming public primarily purchasing digital games rather than shiny disks, and the emergence of the latest generation of video game consoles has brought the question of what happens to older games into stark relief for many in the gaming public. Second, America has been in something of a love affair over the last decade or so with all things "retro". And, finally, the concept of video games as works of creative art, rather than wastes of time to be sneered at, has found firm purchase within our society. All of this has combined to make the public much, much more interested in preserving antiquated video games. And, frankly, very disappointed at how often the gaming industry doesn't take preservation at all seriously.Well, it's happening again. In the near future, Electronic Arts will be shutting down the servers and online portions of several Need For Speed games.

Summary: Twitter users who made the mistake of tweeting out an innocuous word -- 'Memphis -- found themselves suspended from the service for 12 hours for apparently violating the terms of use.According to messages sent to suspended users, the use of the Tennessee city name violated prohibitions on posting personal information.The inadvertent damage quickly spread across Twitter as users trolled each other, trying to get unsuspecting accounts to tweet the suddenly-forbidden word. The apparent flaw in the auto-moderation system went unaddressed for several hours as more and more users found themselves temporarily prevented from using the service. Although some users noticed certain accounts (mainly verified ones) weren't being hit with bans, it affected enough users that the ripple effect was not only noticeable, but covered by many mainstream media outlets.The bans were lifted several hours later with no explanation from Twitter other than that an unspecified "bug" had resulted in tweets containing the word "Memphis" being removed and features limited for those accounts.That explanation was not entirely clear. Given the "Memphis" bug's link to alleged violations of Twitter's policies against posting other people's personal information, it was speculated the ban on a single city name may have been the result of an erroneously-completed form on the moderation side. Systems security professional SwiftOnSecurity took a plausible stab at the possible root cause of this improbable series of moderation events.

Thanks to the efforts of transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), residents of Chicago are learning more about the activities of their sworn protectors, the Chicago Police Department. Stuff the PD never wanted the public to see is now in the public's hands. The Chicago Sun Times has started digging into the stash provided by DDoS and has revealed the PD's secret drone program, paid for with off-the-books funds.

It's been quite a month for the former President, Donald Trump, and his attempts to speak out. Almost a month ago, Trump launced a Twitter-like blog, with very limited interactive features, a silly terms of service (which said they could moderate whatever they wanted, like every other site). As we noted, lots of people mocked it for being just a standard old blog, but it did make the point that despite what other social media platforms might do, Trump was not being "censored." He had lots of ways to speak up. Of course, after a couple of weeks, reports noted that the site wasn't getting very much traffic, we highlighted that this showed what the issue really was: Trump wasn't upset about a lack of ability to speak. He was upset about the lack of a free audience.As more and more reports came out about the dwindling traffic on the site, Trump (in standard Trump fashion) insisted that the site was actually getting huge traffic, even more than last year during the election:

Another court case prompted by the Snowden leaks has reached its conclusion. And the findings are that Snowden's revelations were accurate: the NSA's Five Eyes partners were breaking laws and ignoring people's rights when engaging in mass surveillance. That's just a natural side effect of grabbing communications and data in bulk and pretending it's lawful if you sort through it after you've already acquired it.

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Look, I get that the Opinion sections of major newspapers want to run a variety of opinions, and thus might do less fact checking than the news parts of the paper, but it still seems just bizarre that they let any ignorant fool post absolute nonsense with no attempt at providing facts or the reasons why the underlying assumptions the opinion piece is based on are just wrong. Henry Olsen is apparently a "conservative" columnist for the Post while also being involved in some think tank that has been whining about big tech and, bizarrely, apparently suggesting that God believes Republicans should stop Twitter from having rights or something. Anyway, Olsen's column claims that critics of Florida's social media bill "are wrong" and that's it's perfectly legit for a state government to tell a company how to handle speech on their websites.As you'll recall, Florida just signed its bad bill into law, and it's already being challenged in court, where the law is almost certain to be thrown out as unconstitutional.Olsen, though, is sure that the bill is perfectly fine and there are no constitutional problems with it at all. After reading the headline, I expected to see some legal citations or actual, you know, factual arguments. But... that's apparently not what the Washington Post gets out of Olsen. First, Olsen insists that even though the facts don't support the idea that there's anti-conservative bias in how social media is moderated, he can cherry pick two examples -- Donald Trump and James O'Keefe -- as proof that it must be true and that something needs to be done:

When the data doesn't go its way, the US broadband industry has a tendency to just make up data that does. That was certainly the case during the Trump tax cuts, when the industry claimed tax relief would create thousands of new, high paying jobs and boost broadband investment (that never happened). It was also the case during the net neutrality repeal, when the industry claimed that being freed from "burdensome regulation" (read: bare minimum levels of FCC oversight) would also result in job growth and a major spike in broadband investment (that never happened either.With the Biden administration planning a $100 billion $65 billion investment into broadband, major ISPs (AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter) are worried that some of that money could be used to boost broadband competition. After all, real data makes it abundantly clear this lack of competition directly results in Americans paying some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world. To do that, the Biden plan claims it will heavily support local community broadband efforts, often some of the only competition regional telecom monopolies see.To fight back against the plan, telecom policy and lobbying group US Telecom has been circulating industry reports proclaiming that US broadband is...actually super cheap, and getting cheaper:

The past year saw theInternet become a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2020also saw increased scrutiny of online content moderation, regulationof platforms and their effects on society. While recent headlineshave focused heavily on social media platforms, the conversation ismuch more complex: the future of the Internet as we know it dependson discussions and policies regarding intermediary liability -- thelegal rule that platforms should not be liable for the content postedby their users.Section 230 reform inthe U.S. and the proposed DSA and DMA in the European Union aredriving a new era of intermediary liability rule-making, and othercountries have followed suit: India recently updated guidelinesapplicable to intermediaries, and Mexico is discussing how to ensurefreedom of expression in social media platforms. Instead of lettingthe U.S. and Europe influence these debates, governments around theworld can learn important lessons from Brazil.With approximately 145million Internet users, Brazil has a large and growing digitaleconomy. There are around 10,000 ISPs operating in the country,broadband Internet is available to almost 90% of the population, andthe country's Internet Exchange Point, IX.br, is one of thelargest in the world. Brazil also has a strong tradition of Internetgovernance and policy. Since 1995, the country's"Multistakeholder Internet Steering Committee" (CGI.br)has provided technology and policy recommendations to stakeholdergroups to leverage the full potential of the Internet. In 2014, thecountry adopted an "Internet Bill of Rights,"which establishes rights and duties of individual and corporateusers, businesses and the government.Brazil has long been apioneer in sound Internet policies and regulation and holds one ofthe most influential laws regarding intermediary liability not onlyin Latin America, but the world. The Brazilian "Marco Civil daInternet", or Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, which wasapproved in 2014, introduced an intermediary liability regime builtupon almost two decades of practice and jurisprudence in the U.S.around CDA'sSection 230.However, Brazil decidedto deviate from the path enshrined in the 1996 U.S. legal order. TheMarco Civil law grants full immunity from liability to Internetaccess providers and clearly indicates that Internet infrastructureshould not be affected by issues pertaining to the upper layers(i.e., applications layer) of the network. This law adopts arestricted and residual approach: Internet application providers areonly held liable for third-party content in instances where they failto comply with specific judicial orders to render certain contentunavailable. As a general rule, private notice and take downnotifications are not accepted as a means to trigger the liabilitysystem comprised in the Marco Civil. The rule however does not applyto non-consensual dissemination of intimate images and mattersaffecting intellectual property - the latter being subject to aspecialized regime.Perhaps the mostimportant difference between Marco Civil and Section 230 is thatBrazil has deliberately decided not to copy the "Good Samaritan"clause, meaning that the 'protection' provided by theMarco Civil in Article 19 does not grant any immunity to contentmoderation practices adopted by Internet application providers.While the U.S. systemencompasses ante-hoc immunity for liability from third-party contentand also for a company's own good-faith behavior vis-à-vis itsusers, the Brazilian system covers only third-party content. InBrazil, there is no ante-hoc immunity whatsoever for harms caused bythe decisions and measures taken by Internet application providers.For instance, Google was recently forced to pay compensation for"authenticante-hoc censorship" when it applied its termsof service to remove videos from a Civil Society organization'sYouTube channel. What in the U.S. would be solved by the applicationof the "Good Samaritan" clause, in Brazil had a differentoutcome.Why should we careabout Brazil's Marco Civil and why now? Around 90% of Internetusers are outside the U.S. and the narrow application of the Section230, as well as the full immunities it grants, might no longer workto guide Internet policy development elsewhere (especiallyconsidering the complex and diverse discussions related to the scopeof Freedom of Speech). Also, the various proposed reforms to Section230 in the U.S. have spilled over to other countries in verydangerous ways, including in Brazil. In their fight against Big Tech,some politicians in Brazil -emulating the behavior of US politicians-have proposed to suppress immunities that do not really exist in ourlegal order (as our overarching liability regime already coversissues such as the wrongful suppression of content by applicationproviders). So, in addition to being a waste of time, these attemptsare counterproductive as the country could take steps backward inInternet policy and regulation. .The partialintermediary liability adopted by the Brazilian Marco Civil createdobstacles for extrajudicial requests for content removal thatthroughout the 2000s helped foster legal uncertainty and very littletransparency and accountability from platforms. By granting Internetapplications with immunity solely for third-party behavior andcontent (and not for their own behavior and practices), Marco Civilcontributed to increased legal predictability and fostered innovationin Brazil, as shown in by astudy commissioned by the Internet Society.The current landscapeof platform and intermediary liability rulemaking marks an ethoschange from previous decades. In the past, it was imperative toavoid regulating or harming the Internet through overregulation.Today regulation is no longer a taboo. However, regulation must bewise, principled-based and aimed at the correct target in the complexdigital ecosystem.Regulatorsmust resist adopting policies thatpenalize the behavior of social media platforms asthey ultimately punish all users whopost content on these platforms.Rules aimed at social media platforms will end up impactingother types of applications for the mere fact that they operate onthe same layer of the Internet. Any regulation that forces Internetinfrastructure providers to enter the business of content moderationwould be dangerous. The consequences for freedom of expression,innovation and a dynamic digital economy would be significant.How governments decideto address intermediary liability in the near future is critical forusers and for the Internet. We face a critical juncture where we caneither get this right or get it wrong. Learningfrom Brazil's Marco Civil law is a step in the right direction.Bruna Martins dosSantos is Advocacy Coordinatorfor DataPrivacy Brazil Research and DiegoCanabarro is Senior Policy Manager for the InternetSociety.

Over the weekend there was a bit of a reasonable fuss raised after Ars Technica noted that all of the various Amazon connected devices (including Alexa, Echo, Ring, etc.) would become part of a mesh network called Amazon Sidewalk, in which the devices would be sharing a tiny tiny bit of bandwidth across the network of devices. The idea behind the mesh network is kind of cool, and there are some clear benefits to using it.But, of course, this is Amazon we're talking about -- a giant company, and the method of rolling this out seems to have caught a ton of people by surprise: namely opting everyone into the program with a short timeline to opt-out. That seems less than ideal. Lots of privacy folks are concerned, in general, with two aspects of this: the fact that people may be suddenly sharing data with their neighbors without necessarily realizing it, and the tie-in to Amazon, which is (again) a large company that tends to collect quite a bit of data on people. To its credit, Amazon released a pretty comprehensive whitepaper exploring the privacy and security protections they've built in to Sidewalk, and my guess is that for many consumers the benefits of easier setup and better connectivity via Sidewalk will seem worth it to them.The real issue, then, is forcing everyone into the network. Obviously, it's no surprise why this was done. A mesh network really only works if you have enough nodes on the network to make it useful. So it makes sense that Amazon would want as many of the devices to be on the network on day one as possible. However, given the company and the public scrutiny it has received of late, it seems like it should have anticipated these concerns a lot more, pushed for an opt-in setup (perhaps with incentives), rather than jumping to the "hey, we're adding this automatically" approach.While it's possible that Amazon is betting that the concerns over this will blow over, and having so many nodes on the network will make it worthwhile to take the short-term heat, it still surprises me that the big internet companies don't take more steps to alleviate these kinds of concerns up front, including taking a more cautious approach. But, perhaps that's why I don't run a giant internet company.

Earlier today, we announced the release of an open source playkit for Money City, our new game about the future of money that was designed and run for MozFest 2021. For this week's episode of the podcast, Mike is joined by two of the people who commissioned the game — Erika Drushka and Chris Lawrence from Grant For The Web — as well as our game design partner, Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play, to talk more about Money City and using games to explore serious topics and generate useful ideas.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.

Back in 2015, frustration at John Deere's draconian tractor DRM helped birth a grassroots tech movement dubbed "right to repair." The company's crackdown on "unauthorized repairs" turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists, after DRM (and the company's EULA) prohibited the lion's share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned. These restrictions only worked to drive up costs for owners, who faced either paying significantly more money for "authorized" repair (which for many owners involved hauling tractors hundreds of miles and shelling out thousands of additional dollars), or toying around with pirated firmware just to ensure the products they owned actually worked.Six years later and this movement is only growing, thanks in large part to farmers who are tired of getting ripped off:

Polk County, Iowa prosecutors are making a name for themselves. And that name is "Enemy of the First Amendment." Earlier this year, Polk County prosecutor John Sarcone tried and failed to convict a Des Moines Register journalist for attending a protest and attempting to comply with conflicting orders from law enforcement.According to the prosecutor, journalist Andrea Sahouri failed to disperse when ordered to, even though other cops at the same scene were simply telling people to "protest peacefully." Sahouri was attempting to document the protest and was arrested as she was moving away from the epicenter of the protest. This attempt to turn First Amendment protected activity into a crime failed and the prosecutor took a rather humiliating loss in a very public fashion.Another prosecutor from the same office -- Thomas Miller -- has just suffered a similar, very public loss. Activist Viet Tran was arrested last summer after he shared a Des Moines Police Department bulletin with journalists during a televised interview. The PD claimed the document was super-secret and not shareable without committing a crime. The bulletin contained information about protesters targeted by the PD, including some who had vandalized a police car.The prosecutor (along with the PD) attempted to turn the sharing of public interest info with journalists into a felony charge: unauthorized dissemination of intelligence data. Normally, that sort of charge would only be leveled at the person who had shared it with someone who did not have authorization to view it, like whoever leaked it to Tran. Tran isn't a police officer, so his acquisition and sharing shouldn't be a crime. But that's not how the prosecutor's office saw it. And, in keeping with the First Amendment shredding vindictiveness of this whole debacle, the PD never asked the journalist Tran shared the document with to remove it from her Twitter feed.Following a failed attempt to keep Tran locked up until his trial by spiking his bail to $20,000 (rather than the usual $3,000 for Class D felonies), the prosecutors' office has earned its second straight loss in the same case. The court said that even if the government was right about this seeming misuse of "unauthorized dissemination" charges, it was wrong about the document's contents.

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I keep pointing out that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. There are always going to be mistakes. And lots of them. We've spent years highlighting the many obvious mistakes that websites trying to make moderation decisions on thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pieces of content are going to make every day. It's completely natural for those who are on the receiving end of obviously bogus suspensions to take it personally -- though there does seem to be one group of people who have built an entire grievance complex on the false belief that the internet companies are targeting them specifically.But if you look around, you can see examples of content moderation "mistakes" on a daily basis. Here's a perfect example. Dr. Matthew Knight, a respiratory physician in the UK, last week tweeted out a fairly uncontroversial statement about making sure there was adequate ventilation in the hospitality industry in order to help restart the economy. At this point, the scientific consensus is very much that good ventilation is absolutely key in preventing COVID transmission, and that the largest vector of super spreader events are indoor gatherings with inadequate ventilation. As such this tweet should be wholly uncontroversial: