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Earlier this month, it was reported that the "rule of law" Trump administration was (yet again) violating the law. In this particular case, Trump appointee Michael Pack -- the CEO of the US Agency for Global Media -- was breaching a codified "firewall" to target Voice of America reporters he believed were too critical of Trump and his actions.The "firewall" was erected to prevent exactly what Pack was doing. It was supposed to allow VOA reporters to act independently, rather than be subjected to the whims of presidential administrations. Breaching the firewall allowed Pack and the White House to control the narrative by sidelining or targeting journalists who expressed anti-administration sentiments elsewhere. Specifically cited were "retweets" and "likes" of social media posts criticizing Trump, as well as certain VOA pieces that highlighted the negative aspects of administration efforts.Apparently, the problem was the law, not the lawbreaking. As NPR reports, Michael Pack has removed the law that prevented him from meddling in the day-to-day operation of Voice of America. It was done like most unseemly moves by governments are done: late in the day during a very busy news cycle.

Mere days ago, we discussed the bonkers path Twitch chose for itself in dealing with a flood of DMCA takedowns issued by the RIAA. The whole episode screamed of panic. Rather than dealing with DMCA takedowns via the normal method -- taking down the content, providing the content maker with a path for a counternotice, and then putting the content back if no lawsuit was filed -- , Twitch, instead, took the extraordinary action of simply and permanently nuking the videos in question. It then, rather brazenly, informed the content maker it had done so and advised them to "learn about copyright law." In fact, given its actions, there is some question as to whether or not this is all enough to have lost Twitch its safe harbor protections.Regardless, it would be an understatement to suggest that this pissed off the Twitch community. The public backlash was both swift and severe, with content producers openly wondering if it was time to march off to a different platform entirely. Well, the very next day, Twitch began teasing a new offering coming in November and promoted this tease by releasing a sought after emote to all Twitch users.

So Quibi, the Hollywood dream of creating a new "professional" video streaming service by throwing $1.75 billion at Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman and hoping they could create something, lasted all of 199 days before announcing that it was throwing in the towel (even though it apparently still has a chunk of that cash on hand, which it will be handing back to some investors). As we noted when it launched, Quibi is the perfect example of Hollywood thinking about the internet. It overvalued the content (and believed that you got the best content by throwing money at big names), and completely undervalued the internet and the fact that the killer application of the internet is community and communication.For decades now, we've pointed out time and time again that Hollywood seems to view the internet through the lens of their existing industry -- one built up with a few giant gatekeepers who "greenlight" what content gets made -- and that the content they pick must be financed with ungodly sums of money. I'm reminded of the former NBC exec who quizzed me years ago about how to make sure his company could keep making $200 million movies. As I've noted repeatedly in the 15 years since I was challenged over that, the whole question is wrong. No one in the tech industry demands that others explain "how do we keep making $5,000 computers." The industry looks at how best to serve customers -- and often looks for creative ways to do it cheaper and more efficiently, rather than just setting a cost and tossing cash into it.Quibi was the result of this kind of hubris: taking the Hollywood approach to an internet world. And it showed.As James Surowiecki highlights in his own post-mortem, Quibi is basically the opposite of what a compelling internet service is because it relies on the idea of the brilliant visionary anointing the best content, rather than letting it bubble up via the wisdom of the crowds.I find it notable that Quibi shut down the week that there was a flood of stories (and TV commercials) featuring Nathan Apodaca, the Idaho potato farmer who's random TikTok video of himself on a skateboarding heading into work (after his truck broke down) while drinking cranberry juice from a giant bottle and singling along to Fleetwood Mac went super viral. It was also a "quick bite" video, but it was basically the anti-Quibi. That one random video going viral has even brought Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" back onto the charts 43 years after the song came out.That's the power of the internet. It allows anyone to create. It allows anyone to share. And out of all of that, it allows some amazing content to bubble up, because tons of people like it -- and not because some super rich Hollywood dude decides "this is what the people want."

Last month we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous situation in which the DOJ sought to insert itself into the long-running defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump. As we noted, Carroll's defamation claims seem fairly weak. They're part of a pattern of somewhat sketchy defamation claims in which someone accuses someone of something awful, and then the accused person denies it -- and the accuser says the denial is defamation.In this case, Carroll claims that Trump sexually assaulted her years ago. Trump denied even knowing her. She sued for defamation. Again, the case seems pretty weak and I think Trump has a decent chance of winning. However, despite trying, Trump and his personal lawyers failed to stop the discovery process, in which she's seeking a sample of his DNA as part of proving her case. At that point, the DOJ stepped in, citing the Westfall Act, which requires the DOJ to step in and take over cases if the Attorney General "certifies" that the actions being sued over were done by a federal employee while "acting within the scope of his office or employment." And the key bit here: because of sovereign immunity, you cannot sue the federal government for defamation. So if the court allowed the DOJ to step in, in place of the President, the case would then need to be dismissed immediately.And, thus, the argument the DOJ made was that Trump denied sexually assaulting Carroll... as part of his job as President of the US. As we pointed out in our original post, there were all sorts of reasons why this was ridiculous. Ken White did point out that there are some rulings on the books saying that politicians answering questions from the press about their personal lives is part of their job description, and thus it was possible that a judge might actually side with the DOJ.However, the judge did not do that at all. In a 61 page, very detailed ruling, Judge Lewis Kaplan (last seen here berating copyright troll Richard Liebowitz) rejected basically every last bit of the DOJ's argument. He did so on two key grounds. There was the reason that lots of us expected: that denying you sexually assaulted someone is not part of the job of being President:

It's been more than a half-decade since it made headlines, but the NSA's hardware manipulation programs never went away. These programs -- exposed by the Snowden leaks -- involved the NSA compromising network hardware, either through interception of physical shipments or by the injection of malicious code.One major manufacturer -- Cisco -- was righteously angered when leaked documents showed some of its hardware being "interdicted" by NSA personnel. It went directly to Congress to complain. The complaint changed nothing. (Cisco, however, changed its shipping processes.) But even though the furor has died down, these programs continue pretty much unhindered by Congressional oversight or public outcry.One legislator hasn't forgotten about the NSA's hardware-focused efforts. Senator Ron Wyden is still demanding the NSA answer questions about these programs and give him details about "backdoors" in private companies' computer equipment. The DOJ and FBI may be making a lot of noise about encryption backdoor mandates, but one federal agency is doing something about it. And it has been for years.Not only has the NSA installed its own backdoors in intercepted devices, it has been working with tech companies to develop special access options in networking equipment. This allows the agency to more easily slurp up communications and internet traffic in bulk. Senator Wyden wants answers.

We've noted for years that broadband usage caps are bullshit. Leaked ISP documents and public executive statements have repeatedly made it clear that usage caps and overage fees are just glorified price hikes on the backs of captive customers, only made possible due to industry monopolization (and the regulatory capture and Congressional corruption that lets them get away with it).This was a problem for decades, made worse during a crisis in which broadband is essential for survival (health care, work, remote learning). The Trump FCC made some performative, empty gestures toward this problem earlier this year when it announced an entirely voluntary pledge with ISPs, who agreed they'd temporarily stop charging late fees or imposing usage caps. Many ISPs not only ignored their promise, but it was only a few months before most ISPs returned to business as usual, namely ripping off captive customers with spurious fees and surcharges thanks to the accountability vacuum its net neutrality repeal created.Apparently trying to "help" shed some light on the problem, the Wall Street Journal this week penned a piece discussing usage caps and how they impact ordinary people. Unfortunately, half the story is filled with bullshit industry claims that simply aren't true. Like here, where the Journal amplifies a purported expert who tries to claim that usage caps are necessary to recoup network investment costs:

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While much of yesterday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing was focused on the pointless grievances and grandstanding of sitting Senators, there was a bit of actual news made by Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. As we discussed earlier this week, Zuckerberg agreed for the first time that he was in support of Section 230 reform, though he declined in his opening remarks to specify the nature of the reforms he supported. And while the original draft of Jack Dorsey's opening testimony suggested full support of 230, in the given remarks he also suggested that Twitter would support changes to Section 230 focused on getting companies to be more transparent. Later in the hearing, during one of the extraordinarily rare moments when a Senator actually asked the CEOs how they would change 230, Zuckerberg also focused on transparency reports, before immediately noting that Facebook already issued transparency reports.In other words, it appears that the "compromise" the internet companies are looking to throw to a greedy Congress regarding Section 230 reform is "transparency." I've heard from a variety of policymakers over the last few months who also seem focused on this transparency issue as a "narrow" way to reform 230 without mucking up everything else, so it seems like mandating content moderation transparency may become "a thing."Mandating transparency, however, would be a dangerous move that would stifle both innovation and competition.Cathy Gellis has covered this in detail in the past, and I addressed it in my comments to the FCC about Section 230. But it seems like we should be a little clearer:Transparency is important. Mandated transparency is dangerous.We've been celebrating lots of internet companies and their transparency reports going back to Google's decision nearly a decade ago to start releasing such reports. Over time, every large internet company (and many medium ones) has joined the bandwagon. Indeed, after significant public pressure, even the notoriously secretive giant telcos started issuing transparency reports as well (though they often did so in a secretive manner that actually hid important details).So, at the very least, it certainly looks like public pressure, good business practices, and pressure from peers in the industry have already pushed the companies into releasing such reports. On top of that, many of the internet companies seem to try to outdo each other in being more transparent than their peers on these reports -- which again is a good thing. The transparency reports are coming and we should celebrate that.At the very least, though, this suggests that Congress doesn't need to mandate this, as it's already happening.But, you might say, then why should we worry about mandates for transparency reports? Many, many reasons. First off, while transparency reports are valuable, in some cases, we've seen governments and government officials using them as tools to celebrate censorship. Governments are not using them to better understand the challenges of content moderation, but rather as tools to see where more censorship should be targeted. That's a problem.Furthermore, creating a "baseline" for transparency reports creates two very large issues that could damage competition and innovation. First, it creates a clear compliance cost, which can be quite burdensome for new and smaller websites. Facebook, Google and Twitter can devote people to creating transparency reports. Smaller sites cannot. And while you could, in theory, craft a mandate that has some size thresholds, historically that leads to gaming and other tricks.Perhaps more importantly, though, a mandate with baseline transparency thresholds locks in certain "rules" for content moderation and creates real harm to innovative and different ideas. While most people seem to think of content moderation along the lines of how Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter handle it -- with large (often outsourced) content moderation teams and giant sets of policies -- there are many, many other models out there as well. Reddit is a decently large company. Yet it handles content moderation by pushing it out to volunteer moderators who run each subreddit and get to make their own content moderation rules. Would each subreddit have to release its own report? Would Reddit itself have to track how each individual subreddit is moderated and include all of that in its report?Or how about Wikipedia? That's one of the largest sites on the internet, and all of its content moderation practices are already incredibly transparent, since every single edit shows in each page's history -- often including a note about the reasoning. And, again, rather than being done by staff, every Wikipedia edit is done by volunteers. But should Wikipedia have to file a "standardized" report as well about how and why each of those moderation decisions were made?And those are just two examples of large sites with different models. The more you look, the more alternative moderation models you can find -- and many of them would not fit neatly into any "standards" for a transparency report. Instead, what you'd get is a hamfisted setup that more or less forces all different sites into a single (Facebook/YouTube/Twitter) style of content moderation and transparency. And that's very bad for innovation in the space.Indeed, as someone who is quite hopeful for a future where the content moderation layer is entirely separated from the corporate layer of various social media sites, I worry that mandated transparency rules would make that much, much more difficult to implement. Many of the proposals I've seen to build more distributed/decentralized protocol-based solutions for social media would not (and often could not) be fit into a "standardized" model of content moderation.And thus, creating rules that mandate such transparency reporting for companies based on the manner in which those three large companies currently release transparency reports would only serve to push others into that same model, creating significant compliance costs for those smaller entities, while greatly limiting their ability to experiment with new and different styles of moderation.

On Wednesday morning the Senate Commerce Committee held a nearly four hour long hearing ostensibly about Section 230 with three internet CEOs: Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Sundar Pichai from Google, and Jack Dorsey from Twitter. The hearing went about as expected: meaning it was mostly ridiculous nonsense. You had multiple Republican Senators demanding that these CEOs explain why they had taken actions on certain content, with some silly "whataboutism" on other kinds of content where action wasn't taken. Then you had multiple Democratic Senators demanding these CEOs explain why they hadn't taken faster action on pretty much the same content that Republicans had complained some action had been taken on.The shorter summary was that Republicans were demanding that their own lies and propaganda should be left alone, while Democrats demanded that lies and propaganda should be removed faster. Both of these positions are an anathema to the 1st Amendment, and the people advocating for them on both sides should be embarrassed. While each platform has the right, under the 1st Amendment, to host or not host whatever speech they want, based on whatever policies they set, Congress cannot and should not, be in the position of either telling companies what content they need to host or what content they must take down. And yet, we saw examples of both during the hearing. On the Democratic side, Senators Markey and Baldwin, among a few others, pushed the companies to take down more content. This is extremely troubling on 1st Amendment grounds. On the Republican side, many, many Senators demanded that certain content should be unblocked -- in particular the NY Post's Twitter account.And there were a few (very limited) good points from both sides of the aisle. Senator Brian Schatz noted that the entire hearing was being done in bad faith by Senate Republicans to try to bully the companies into not removing disinformation in the final week of the election. He noted that, while he had many questions for the three CEOs, he would not participate in this "sham" by asking questions during this particular hearing. Kudos to him. On the Republican side, Senator Jerry Moran noted that changes to Section 230 were the kinds of things that the three companies before the Committee could handle, but which would hamstring smaller competitors (to be fair, Jack Dorsey made this point in his opening testimony as well).But I wanted to focus on some specific grandstanding by a few key Senators who made particularly ridiculous statements. And, I will point out upfront that these all came from Republicans. I'm not pointing that out because I'm "biased" against them, but because of the simple objective fact that it was these Republican Senators who made the most ridiculous statements of the day. The key theme between them was a ridiculous sense of grievance, and a false belief that the company's moderation practices unfairly targeted "conservatives." Except nearly all of them assumed that because more Republicans were moderated, that was proof of bias -- and not the idea that, perhaps, Republicans do more things that violate the policies of these companies. In the same manner that I'm picking on mostly Republican Senators here, that has more to do with their own actions, than any personal "bias."What was most frightening, however, in the comments from these Senators is how at home they would have been in the days of Joseph McCarthy. Multiple Senators demanded to know about the personal ideological viewpoints of people who worked for these companies. Both Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg correctly pointed out that they do not ask their employees about their political leanings (Pichai stated that they hire from all over, implying that there was a diverse ideological pool within their workforce).It is stunning and dangerous for Senators to be demanding to know the political leanings of employees at any particular company. Senators Mike Lee, Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn all asked questions along these lines. Lee, who historically has been aligned with libertarian viewpoints, completely misrepresented the content moderation policies of these companies and insisted that they disproportionately target conservatives. They do not. If conservatives are violating their policies more than others, then that's on those people violating the policies, and not on the policies themselves. Lee also fell into the ridiculous myth that Google's policies directly targeted conservatives in demonetizing The Federalist. As we've discussed multiple times, that's utter bullshit. We received identical treatment to The Federalist. So did Slate and Buzzfeed. Lee, ridiculously, argued that the companies saying -- accurately -- that they do not target moderation decisions based on ideology perhaps violated laws against "unfair or deceptive trade practices." Basically because Lee falsely believes these companies target conservative speech (because he's so deep in his own filter bubble he doesn't even know it hits others as well), that they're engaging in deceptive practices.Lee demanded that each company list "left leaning" accounts that had received similar treatment, and the various CEOs promised to get back to him, but this was a nonsense argument.However the most ridiculous part of Lee's grandstanding was his disingenuous framing of content moderation. He started asking about how these companies "censor" content. In the past, we've discussed how moderation and censorship differ, but Lee stretched the definition to insane levels:

The DHS's hunger for data cannot be satisfied by mandatory facial scanning at airports, cellphone scraping at border checkpoints, or the dozens of government databases crammed full of personal info it has access to. It needs more. So, it's asking for more. More mandatory collection of biometric info from millions of people, including US citizens.The EFF is asking the government to dump this program. It has sent its comment [PDF] on the DHS's proposal, something it had to squeeze in during the agency's truncated comment period. The EFF notes this is not only unusual, but seems calculated to limit public objection to its sweeping, expansive data-hoovering plan.

If it seems like there are more stupid trademark battles per capita fought in the restaurant industry, it's not because you're crazy. It's very much a thing. Whether it's Taco John's wanting to own "Taco Tuesday", McDonalds insisting only it can call a fish sandwich a "filet o' fish", or two Brazilian restaurants fighting over the rights to use image of a fire in their logos, the common theme you should notice is how these battles are all over things that are descriptive or generic. And, yet, these fights rage on.Take, for instance, a burger joint in Texas sending a cease and desist notice to another burger joint in Texas for daring to use the word "juicy."

Summary: In almost every country in which it offers its service, Facebook has been asked -- sometimes via direct regulation -- to limit the spread of "terrorist" content.But moderating this content has proven difficult. It appears the more aggressively Facebook approaches the problem, the more collateral damage it causes to journalists, activists, and others studying and reporting on terrorist activity.

Representatives Malinowski and Eshoo and have introduced a Section 230 amendment called the “Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act” (PADAA). The title is somewhat of a misnomer. The bill does not address any danger inherent to algorithms but instead seeks to prevent them from being used to share extreme speech.Section 230 of the Communications Act prevents providers of an interactive computer service, such as social media platforms, from being treated as the publisher or speaker of user-submitted content, while leaving them free to govern their services as they see fit.The PADAA would modify Section 230 to treat platforms as the speakers of algorithmically selected user speech, in relation to suits brought under 42 U.S.C. 1985 and the Anti-Terrorism Act. If platforms use an “algorithm, model, or computational process to rank, order, promote, recommend, [or] amplify” user provided content, the bill would remove 230’s protection in suits seeking to hold platforms responsible for acts of terrorism or failures to prevent violations of civil rights.These are not minor exceptions. A press release published by Rep. Malinowski’s office presents the bill as intended to reverse the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit’s ruling in Force v. Facebook, and endorses the recently filed McNeal v. Facebook, which seeks to hold Facebook liable for recent shootings in Kenosha, WI. These suits embrace a sweeping theory of liability that treats platforms’ provision of neutral tools as negligent.Force v. Facebook concerned Facebook’s algorithmic “Suggested Friends” feature and its prioritization of content based on users’ past likes and interests. Victims of a Hamas terror attack sued Facebook under the Anti-Terrorism Act for allegedly providing material support to Hamas by connecting Hamas sympathizers to one another based on their shared interests and surfacing pro-Hamas content in its Newsfeed.The 2nd Circuit found that Section 230 protected Facebook’s neutral processing of the likes and interests shared by its users. Plaintiffs appealed the ruling to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The 2nd Circuit’s held that, although:

When it comes to the goal of ensuring all Americans have affordable and reliable Internet access, we are pretty much stalled. Sure, the FCC will make noise every year about our quest to bridge the digital divide, but it has focused solely on for-profit private solutions. And while there are many hundreds of good local companies making important local investments, the FCC has tended to throw the most money at the few extremely big ones (the same big ones that are on the other side of the revolving door at the FCC for most employees, whether staff or political appointees.)In response to the pandemic, companies like Charter and AT&T have been on their best behavior and done their best to extend connections more widely than they did in normal times. It was far from good enough, and culminated in AT&T asking for billions more in subsidies than it was already getting. Tens of millions of Americans are not particularly attractive to the big ISP monopolies, either because they live in more rural areas or low-income neighborhoods of cities.We need better broadband policies — but we have to learn from what is actually working. Second, we should never write another check to AT&T or bankrupt disasters like Frontier and Windstream. Third, thoughtful, practical solutions moving ahead will need to address the broadband gap in whatever form it takes. As NDIA notes, broadband policy that focuses solely on the infrastructure challenge is structurally racist — it ignores the needs of millions of families of color in urban areas that face other obstacles to getting online.Community networks are commonly assumed to be best at connecting those neglected families, and many are showing their worth during this Covid-19 pandemic. But Covid-19 is just the latest piece of evidence that these types of networks should play a much larger role in expanding competition more generally — whether they take the form of municipal networks, cooperative-owned networks, or take some other non-profit form.For those living in areas covered by electric cooperatives, there are plenty of recent examples which can provide local leaders inspiration and offer lessons learned. For example, 15 out of 25 electric co-ops in Mississippi are currently pursuing fiber projects that will connect tens of thousands over the next handful of years. 35% of residents in the state lack basic broadband, but $65 million in CARES funding is bringing fiber to folks with nothing today.Other electric cooperatives have also stepped up to the plate. OzarksGo, based in Arkansas, responded to the public health crisis by wiring fiber to Wi-Fi hotspots on parked school busses last spring to help community members with no access get online. The New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, after a rousing local organizing campaign by local residents citing COVID, in part, saw its board vote unanimously to create a separate entity to pursue broadband after previously refusing to.City-owned networks also provide an abundance of examples. North Carolina’s Greenlight network, operated by the city of Wilson, has developed several programs to connect those commonly left behind. This includes offering 40 Megabit per second (Mbps) symmetrical connections to families in public housing for $10/month, and a flexpay program to give anyone a pay-ahead option that is essential for families with bad credit or irregular income. Greenlight also accepts cash, essential for the unbanked. All of these programs have remained in place or expanded since last spring. When the pandemic hit, Greenlight also accelerated its lifeline approach, keeping people connected with a basic option for $10/month.Chattanooga again made national news in July when it unveiled an initiative called HCS EdConnect to provide free 100Mbps symmetrical Internet access to every student in the Hamilton County School District on free or reduced lunch. That’s 17,700 homes and 32,000 students, and the initiative has pledged to keep those connections free for the next ten years. The $15 million project serves as a case study in decisive action, thoughtful municipal leadership, local investment, and fundraising by all involved: Hamilton County Public Schools, municipal network EPB Fiber, nonprofit The Enterprise Center, and city and county governments. The first large chunk of students has already been connected.Covid-19 has amped up growth in community networks. In San Rafael, California, a coalition between local government, Marin County, and the nonprofit Canal Alliance came together initially in a bid to get students online for the upcoming school year, but the effort quickly turned into a free Wi-Fi network for the entirety of the Canal neighborhood. Residents there make up the backbone of the area’s service economy and have some of the worst Internet access options in what is otherwise among the wealthiest counties in the state. The city plans to keep it online and free indefinitely.The same thing is happening in McAllen, Texas, with the city’s IT department spearheading an effort to put 5,000 access points around the city of 140,000 on water towers and power poles, with dozens of neighborhoods already blanketed in free Wi-Fi. Like in San Rafael, all residents of McAllen will enjoy the benefits of the public network forever, with the city committing to maintaining it with a regular budget appropriation from here out.And over the summer in Champaign, Illinois, when it became clear that hundreds of District 4 students on the north side of town in Shadowwood Mobile Home Park were unable to attend classes because they lacked Internet access, the city partnered with local broadband provider i3 and wireless hardware manufacturer Mesh++ to solve the problem. Solar-powered Wi-Fi routers were installed on power and light poles to create a free, neighborhood-wide wireless network so that more than 250 students could log on and access course content and join live classes via Zoom. Champaign, too, plans for their network to be permanent, and is pursuing similar projects in apartment housing in other parts of town.San Rafael, McAllen, and Champaign are by no means alone, with similar efforts unfolding in Cleveland, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, San Antonio, Texas, and elsewhere. These should be celebrated, but we can still do better. The networks can be more ambitious - like Wilson and Chattanooga — and more numerous.The Barriers to Community Broadband TodayFirst, 19 states have laws on the books which significantly restricts the ability of communities to build networks responsive to their needs, even though we know this results in slower broadband adoption. The HEROES Act would eliminate these barriers, but it remains stalled in the U.S. Senate. If Democrats take the Senate, they say they will wipe out these barriers, but the big monopolies are undoubtedly undermining that determination as you read this.Second, the federal government should invest more money, more intelligently in the effort. While a good chunk of the first round of the USDA’s ReConnect Program grants went to cooperatives and other municipal networks working to expand Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks, it’s not enough. ReConnect has given out a little more than $800 million in funds, but the need is far greater and it is focused solely on areas where no broadband is physically available. Far more people are stuck in areas with networks that are too expensive for their income. The upcoming RDOF auction will give cooperatives a shot at billions in subsidies, but there is no program for the millions of low-income families that need affordable options.Third, and perhaps most importantly, we see a lack of ambition, commitment, and imagination by local communities in solving the problem. AT&T demands more subsidies while withdrawing its services in rural areas, and Mississippi asks why nearly $300 million in subsidies didn’t improve access for most. But most local government officials still think AT&T or their state or the federal government will suddenly recognize decades of failure and swoop in to connect local businesses and residents.Communities have to step up. Recognizing the value of local action alone isn’t enough. Elected officials and community stakeholders will have to confront the above obstacles and an array of others as well. If the states or federal government actually offer help, it will most likely be financial aid to local efforts, not a magic button that doubles the rate of connectivity in the United States.There are a wide variety of models, and the Covid-19 pandemic has provided renewed popular support for better networks. In some cases, local officials have recognized the need for, at the minimum, a local plan. But in most cases, local residents need to push their local government to investigate the options. The Michigan Moonshot effort offers both a playbook and plenty of background information, templates, and more. There is no better time to start organizing locally for better networks.Christopher Mitchell is the Director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative whose work focuses on telecommunications — helping communities ensure the networks upon which they depend are accountable to the community. He is a leading national expert on community broadband networks.Ry Marcattilio-McCracken is a Senior Researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, where he writes about municipal networks, cooperatives, and broadband policy around the United States.

The DOJ really wants to make El Presidente's antifa dreams come true. The anti-police brutality protests have been cast by the administration as a leftist conspiracy to… um… demand better policing and better police officers. In addition to sending federal officers to clamp down on unrest in "Democratic" cities, the FBI has been sending analysts to crack phones taken from protesters in hopes of finding some sort of antifa org chart the feds can use to dismantle this "group."If you think it's weird a free world government would be obsessed with tracking down people fighting fascism, you're not alone. Seems like the time and effort would be better utilized to neutralize the threat posed by homegrown extremists, many of whom align themselves with white supremacist movements. But this is what this Administration is diverting resources to, even when available evidence suggests the antifa movement isn't filled with dangerous individuals.More evidence suggests the government might want to focus on another loose assortment of anti-government individuals: the so-called "Boogaloo Bois." If antifa is a collective in the loosest definition of the word, the Boogaloo Bois are similarly unstructured. Small groups exist but there's no organizational head to bring down or nationwide structure to dismantle. While the president complains about "violent" BLM/antifa protesters, real violence is being perpetrated by actual anarchists Trump has never criticized publicly.

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Last month we wrote about Zoom blocking an online event by San Francisco State University because one of the speakers was Leila Khaled, a Palestinian activist/politician. 50 years ago she was involved in two airplane hijackings. As I noted in the post, this blockade was somewhat different than social media companies doing content moderation. Zoom is not hosting content, but rather just transmitting it, and thus is more akin to telecommunications infrastructure, and that raises significantly more questions about what it means when it starts reviewing the content of calls.Indeed, because of this move, a series of online seminars were setup to discuss this very issue -- and they were done on Zoom. The company apparently got wind of one such event at NYU and refused to let it happen:

What does it look like when Trump's swamp devours itself? Look no closer than a battle between Peter Thiel backed Rivada Networks and incumbent telecom giants AT&T and Verizon.Last week, anonymous "senior administration officials" told CNN that Rivada was lining up to grab potentially tens of billions in extremely valuable middle band spectrum via a no bid contract. The sources told the outlet that Rivada, which is financially and politically backed by Trump/GOP allies like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Thiel, is pushing to bypass the normal FCC approval process to gain access to a massive windfall:

The FBI is still creating terrorists -- finding loud-mouthed online randos to radicalize by hooking them up with undercover agents and informants seemingly far more interested in escalating things than defusing possibly volatile individuals.The Ninth Circuit Court has, fortunately, decided to roll back a ridiculous sentencing enhancement added to another one of the FBI's homegrown extremists. The terrorism enhancement in this case was triggered by this: the defendant's opening of six social media accounts for alleged ISIS sympathizers.The details of the case -- contained in the court's reversal [PDF] of the sentencing enhancement -- show Amer Alhaggagi was a bit of a troll. The son of Yemeni immigrants, Alhaggagi was born in California but spent a lot of his life traveling back and forth to Yemen to spend time with his mother. He was raised in a Muslim home but that upbringing didn't really make him a Muslim. He didn't seem to have much interest in adhering to the religion's rules and instead drifted towards the internet, where he developed a "sarcastic and antagonistic persona."This is how things were going before the FBI got involved:

While we've covered the growth of esports throughout the world for some time, it's also true that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in that growth accelerating with incredible speed. Back in March and April, when states began shutting down because we had -- checks notes -- 20k to 30k new COVID cases per day, esports really took off. Due to shut downs, IRL professional and college sports shut down too. The result is that Americans who thirst to watch competition dove headlong into esports broadcasts, with participation and viewership clipping at 20% growth month over month. An entire economy sprung up around the industry as well, with streaming companies and broadcasters catching up to the sudden rise in interest.But if you thought this was a uniquely American thing, you're wrong. And if you think that this wave is going to crest once we're all putting vaccine needles in our arms, I think you're wrong about that, too. An Indian sporting news site recently did an interview with the CEO of Skyesports, a prominent esports company in India. While you will have to forgive some translation wonkiness in them, two questions and answers jumped out at me as I read the interview. The first was about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on esports' growth in India.

This shouldn't be much of a surprise, unfortunately, but it appears that once again Facebook is the first to crack under political pressure, and has decided to sell out the open internet and free speech online. In testimony Mark Zuckerberg is planning to give tomorrow to the Senate Commerce Committee, he's going to say a few nice things about Section 230, immediately followed by him saying the company now supports reforming the law. The praise for Section 230 is accurate, but it doesn't much matter when he takes it back immediately:

With the pandemic spurring a mass switch to remote working for many people, especially those at tech companies that were among the earliest adopters of the trend, discussions about the uncertain future of Silicon Valley have resurfaced. This week, tech reporter and VC partner Kim-Mai Cutler joins the podcast to discuss whether the pandemic-driven changes in how we work will drive a mass-exodus from California and threaten its status as an innovation hub.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Just about a year ago the courts partially upheld the FCC's hugely unpopular net neutrality repeal. But it also kicked some aspects of the repeal back to the FCC. Most notably, the courts stated the Ajit Pai FCC couldn't ban states from protecting consumers if the FCC is no longer interested in doing so. The courts also noted that the FCC (surprise!) did little to no research into how the repeal would impact public safety or efforts to bridge the digital divide (the latter being kind of important in a massive pandemic in which affordable access is essential to survival) and urged the agency to try again.Knowing full well the polls suggest their good times may soon be coming to an end, the FCC this week voted along party lines (pdf) to ignore the court's complaint, pat itself on the back for a job well done, and double down on its Orwellian-titled "Restoring Internet Freedom" repeal. With no changes to it whatsoever:

Nearly a year ago, Sacha Baron Cohen presented a polemic speech to the Anti-Defamation League about how Facebook was evil for refusing to take down (loosely defined) "bad stuff" on their platform. We wrote a fairly thorough rebuttal, while simultaneously suggesting that SBC misunderstands his own comedy -- which is often held up as revealing the inner prejudices of the people he parodies. While that may be true in some cases, I think the stronger argument is that in many cases, the people playing along with his schtick are simply trying to be nice to the awkward idiot that SBC is playing in front of them. In non-consequential social interactions, this is how many people will reasonably act. Rather than lecturing the idiot on why what he's saying is ignorant bigotry, they'll just humor him. Under this interpretation, many of the people SBC confronts are not ignorant, bigoted hicks, but people trying to be nice and humoring him.His own take on Facebook is similarly blinkered. And, with his latest Borat movie, he's taking aim at Facebook with part of the film. We won't get into that, but I do want to note this bit of irony. A few weeks back Baron Cohen again trashed Facebook, in the pages of Time Magazine, demanding that the company do more to block conspiracy theories and misinformation. Time Magazine illustrated the story with a photograph of someone wearing a facemask that says "COVID-19 Is A Hoax" as the primary image ( I will leave aside the question of why someone who believes it's a hoax would still wear a mask, but that's a separate issue.)Of course, when you post something to Facebook, it will usually take the primary image and attach it to the story. So if you posted Baron Cohen's article, the image would be of the guy with that facemask, claiming that the pandemic is a hoax.So Facebook blocked people from linking to the article.In other words, Facebook did exactly what Baron Cohen has been demanding they do for a year now: to block information on hoaxes and conspiracy theories. You'd think that this would make him happy. But, no. It just made him mad:He demanded they take down certain content, and they did. And yet he's mad because it's his content.Of course, it also demonstrates just how little he understands about how content moderation works in practice. Baron Cohen is obviously intelligent. I just wish he'd actually talk to an expert on content moderation to understand how this works. Or maybe just listen to that Radiolab episode about Facebook's content moderation, to understand that him saying "hire more humans to moderate and fact check" is still missing the point. Facebook has hired more humans to moderate and fact check.At last count, the company has 15,000 content moderators in the US alone (and many more overseas). But, in order to moderate reasonably across that many users, they need standard rules. And those rules on COVID-19 likely include something along the lines of "we don't allow posts claiming it's a hoax." It's kind of ridiculous to say that they should add an exemption "if an angry comedian is illustrating his ignorant article about our practices with such a picture."If he expects the company to be quick enough to block conspiracy theories and misinformation, then it's literally impossible to expect that every one of those people can take the time to read through all the details, understand the cultural context of his article, recognize that the photo attached to the article is being used to (incorrectly and misleadingly) make a point, and then decide that this makes it okay. Because if every content moderation decision had to go through that process, it would take fucking forever, and Baron Cohen would be even more upset because more conspiracy theories and hoaxes would remain online because the moderators are spending all this time learning about how Baron Cohen is making a point against hoaxes, rather than trying to perpetuate a hoax.Either way, Sacha Baron Cohen's freak-out here is yet another example of the Masnick Impossibility Theorem in practice. Content moderation seems so simple until its your content that's being moderated.

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This Administration -- like the one before it -- isn't a fan of leaks or whistleblowing. This Administration seems to be leakier than most, possibly due to the Commander-in-Chief's vindictive shit-canning of anyone insufficiently deferential. When distrust abounds, the leaks will flow.The Administration would like these leaks to stop. To accomplish this, it has tried several things -- most of them legally-questionable. During his stint at the DOJ, Jeff Sessions suggested subjecting every National Security Council staffer to a polygraph test to sniff out who had leaked transcripts of Oval Office phone calls. The State Department issued a memo warning its employees about the dangers of leaking, including the possibility of prosecution. The memo against leaks was promptly leaked. The DHS has decided to focus its attention on exterior "threats:" namely, journalists who publish leaks. The First Amendment is apparently secondary to leak stoppage.The DHS is still struggling with leaks. And it's struggling to contain its struggles with leaks. Earlier this month, a memo demanding employees report leaks, leakers, and anything else they might think is suspicious was leaked to journalists.

Late on Friday news came out that Facebook had sent a cease and desist letter to researchers at NYU working on the Ad Observatory project. At issue was that the project had asked people to install a browser extension that would share data back to NYU regarding what ads they saw. Facebook -- responding to significant criticism -- has put forth an ad library that allows researchers to search through what ads are being shown on Facebook and who is behind them (which is good transparency!), but it does not show how those ads were targeted. This is what the researchers at NYU were trying to collect data on. And that is a reasonable research goal.Facebook has argued that this is a breach of Facebook's terms of service -- though it does seem notable that this is coming out right around the same time that these very same researchers discovered that Facebook's promise to properly label political ads isn't working so great (it's a tangent, but this is why promising to label political ads may be problematic in the first place: you're going to miss a bunch, especially on a platform this big).The Knight 1st Amendment Center at Columbia is representing the researchers and is condemning this move (and the researchers are refusing to comply with the cease-and-desist). Here's the Knight Center's litigation director Alex Abdo:

The CBP and ICE likely have loads of misconduct records. Not that they mean much. These records are compiled and stashed someplace where it's inconvenient to find them for FOIA requesters. No one at the CBP or the DHS seems to have much interest in punishing misconduct, much less investigating it, so the records are far from complete and tend to be rubberstamped with EXONERATED.The records do exist and the public should be able to access them. But DHS agencies do everything they can to keep these records and the public separated. Responses are dragged out to the point of litigation and then the litigation gets dragged out for as long as possible in hopes of deterring not only the requester suing, but others who might think about asking the agency for records.The CBP wants to make its refusal to part with misconduct records a feature, rather than an all-too-common federal agency bug. It has asked the National Archive to treat many of its misconduct records as "temporary," giving it permission to discard these as soon as possible rather than having them preserved for posterity.

Last month we had a post about wolf kink erotica writer Addison Cain (pen name) and her abuse of the DMCA which we had first written about in May, but which came up again after YouTuber Lindsay Ellis did a fantastic video analyzing the entire case. If you haven't seen that, here it is:The reason we wrote about it again last month was that after Ellis posted her video, a lawyer named Tynia Watson had sent Ellis what appeared to be one of the stupidest legal threat letters I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot). Ellis only revealed a brief portion of that letter, but that was enough.Now, in a new video, Ellis describes all of the nonsense that has happened since then, which goes super deep in the weeds on a variety of things. You can watch the whole thing here:I'm not going to go over everything in the video because (1) you should watch it and (2) a bunch of it is super crazy and I don't even want to start to think about figuring out how to explain all of the background necessary. Instead, I'm just going to focus on the legal threats of Tynia Watson, who is, somehow, an actual lawyer, meaning she should fucking know better than to send such bullshit conspiracy-theory laden emails to basically everyone.As we noted, the original letter from Watson seemed to be claiming both copyright infringement (on the basis that Ellis quoted a few short segments in an obviously fair use manner) and "numerous false statements" that I could see no evidence of. In fact, Ellis' reporting got me to go back and read through a whole bunch of documents in one of the lawsuits that the video was about, and discover how Cain had insisted, repeatedly, that it was her publisher who filed the lawsuits and she had nothing to do with it -- though in discovery in a different lawsuit, it came out that Cain was in the driver's seat through much of this, telling her publisher to send the (bogus) DMCA notices, and then later telling her publisher how she was going to "hide behind" them. In fact, Cain got dismissed from one of the lawsuits on the basis that the DMCA notices were all sent by the publisher. That's kind of a big deal.Anyway, Watson then started sending more threat letters, including to Patreon and YouTube, to try to get the video taken down. Any real copyright (or defamation) lawyer should be embarrassed that Watson is also a lawyer, because these letters are... bad. You can see them in the video (so I don't have full copies to post here, as I normally would). First, Watson sent a takedown to... Patreon. Even though the video was hosted at YouTube. Ellis, like many YouTubers and podcasters, uses Patreon as a revenue source, but there's little reason to target them for copyright infringement other than being vindictive. Patreon told Ellis to go through the standard counternotice process, but did ask her to remove the link to YouTube from her Patreon post for the requisite 10 days under the DMCA to retain its safe harbors (and then relink the video). But then it also told Ellis that if this did go to court, it would totally back her up (FWIW, Patreon has some great people who work on this stuff, so I'm not surprised to see them stand behind their user like that).Then, YouTube notified her that it had also received a takedown from Cain. YouTube went even further and said that it didn't see how the video was infringing at all, and had rejected the takedown demand. Ellis seems surprised about this and says that she's never heard of YouTube not complying with a takedown, but it actually happens reasonably often. Despite all the mess with things like ContentID, YouTube's legal team does take fair use seriously, and especially on high profile videos is pretty quick to push back on censorial thuggish bullshit takedowns.Ellis then has a fun narration of the takedown letter that Cain sent to YouTube, which the company passed on. It's... stunningly stupid. Here's a key clip that I want to post here just to make sure that everyone can see just how incredibly stupid it is:

As many of you probably saw last week, Twitch decided to delete a ton of videos in response to DMCA takedown claims (which most people believe came from the RIAA). As we pointed out earlier this year, the RIAA had started flooding Twitch with DMCA takedowns over background music used in various streams. The whole thing seemed kind of silly, and now it appears that Twitch (despite being owned by Amazon and having some pretty good lawyers) was caught without a plan.And that manifested itself in the way it handled these takedowns. Rather than the standard process -- taking the content down, letting the user counternotice, and then potentially putting it back up 10 days later if no lawsuit was filed -- Twitch decided to just totally wipe those files out and not even leave an option open to users to counternotice.The key bit:

Here’s an idea for a business model. Instead of using valuable spectrum to close the digital divide by opening it for everyone to use, get the FCC to give us exclusive use for free. Next, convince states and the federal government that rather than build broadband networks to the disconnected in rural America, they should build out our network (also at no cost to us). Then we will use this network to harvest everyone’s driving information while serving up advertisements and other commercial services. In order to persuade taxpayers to support it, we’ll pretend the network is “absolutely essential” to preventing car accidents, despite the recent development of superior technology. To really sell the idea, we’ll label this piece of spectrum the “Safety Band.”Welcome to the auto industry business plan for the 5.9 GHz band, 75 MHz of spectrum originally allocated to the auto industry for free back in 2004. However, the FCC is now proposing to reclaim 45 MHz of this for much-needed rural broadband and Wi-Fi 6 to better connect America. This would leave 30 MHz for intelligent traffic management and auto safety technologies, but would not leave any space available for the auto industry’s commercial applications.Needless to say, the auto industry opposes this tooth and nail, and has enlisted the help of the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to block the FCC’s effort to help close the digital divide. Additionally, the auto industry has consistently opposed efforts by consumer groups to have the FCC prohibit commercial uses and impose privacy protections on the band. Americans will be far better served -- and much safer on the road -- if the FCC follows through on its plan to repurpose the commercial part of the auto industry’s “safety band” for other uses.A Brief History of 5.9 GHz – From “Safety Band” to $afety BandFor nearly two decades, the auto industry has pushed the idea of wireless “intelligent traffic” systems as a means of promoting safety. At the same time, however, the auto industry has made it equally clear to investors and equipment designers that the industry intends to use this network for commercial purposes as well. In 2004, the FCC adopted the auto industry plan to take 75 MHz of spectrum and reserve it exclusively for “Dedicated Short-Range Communications” (DSRC) for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) (and generically “V2X”) communications. However -- unlike other bands reserved for public safety purposes at the time -- the FCC permitted the auto industry to use these reserved frequencies for commercial purposes as well as safety purposes. The FCC restricts only two channels (totaling 20 MHz) to “collision avoidance” and “safety-of-life” applications, leaving the bulk of the spectrum available for commercial use.Despite support from the auto industry, DSRC technology failed to catch on in the market.There were many reasons for this. For one thing, V2X technologies only work to avoid collisions if the other car has a compatible V2X technology. This makes it absolutely useless against existing cars, pedestrians, bicyclists, or even stray deer. Other technologies, like LIDAR, do a much better job avoiding collisions, which is why these technologies caught on in the market and DSRC remains virtually undeployed. The auto industry responded to this market rejection by persuading the NHTSA to start a rulemaking to require DSRC in every new car whether consumers wanted the technology or not, and convincing federal and state agencies to invest hundreds of millions of dollars building DSRC “safety networks” for the auto industry to use for free. (The Trump Administration killed the DSRC rulemaking as part of its general deregulatory agenda in 2017.)Reclaiming 5.9 GHz for Rural Broadband and Gigabit Wi-Fi to Connect AmericaThe FCC began a set of proceedings in 2013 to expand the spectrum available for unlicensed uses with a particular eye toward expanding the 5 GHz band generally. For technical reasons, expanding existing bands creates huge advantages for increasing available bandwidth. The FCC hoped to expand the unlicensed portions of the 5 GHz band to enhance the ability of rural wireless internet service providers (WISPs) using the existing 5.8 GHz unlicensed band to offer real broadband in rural America, and creating the capacity for gigabit Wi-Fi in people’s homes. The FCC initially tried to work with the auto industry and NHTSA to find a way for unlicensed sharing to co-exist on a non-interfering basis with DSRC. That, to put it mildly, did not go well.After nearly 20 years of waiting for the auto industry to make use of the 5.9 GHz band, and spending five years trying to work with the auto industry on a win-win solution, the FCC finally had enough. A unanimous FCC voted last December to propose simply taking away the 45 MHz of spectrum that the auto industry wants for commercial uses, leaving the auto industry with the 30 MHz needed to do actual safety and collision avoidance. (As the FCC noted, this 30 MHz is approximately what both Japan and the European Union allocate for similar technology.) The FCC proposal would also open the 30 MHz safety band to other V2X technologies, such as LTE-based V2X, that use existing mobile networks.Needless to say, the auto industry did not take this lying down. Lobbyists have pressed the “safety band” argument consistently, while acting offended whenever someone points out that 30 MHz leaves them plenty of spectrum for actual highway safety uses if the industry just drops the commercial aspect. Of course, the auto industry says it’s “not about the money.” The industry claims it just expects even more awesome safety features at some indefinite time in the future and therefore requires all 75 MHz of spectrum for when that magical day arrives. In the meantime, though, the auto industry argues it might as well use the extra 45 MHz of spectrum for collecting people’s personal driving information and serving them personal ads -- solely in the name of efficiency, of course.For the Auto Industry, It’s About the Money -- Not Saving LivesAs the old adage goes, when someone says, “it’s not the money, it’s the principle,” you know it’s about the money. In 2016, Public Knowledge -- joined by a number of other public interest organizations -- asked the FCC to prohibit commercial operation on the entire DSRC service and to impose privacy rules preventing the auto industry from using the information it collects from consumers for commercial purposes.For the last four years, the auto industry has refused a non-commercial condition on a band that the industry itself claims is strictly for safety, arguing that it’s the “principle of the thing” that forces them to reject the condition. Likewise, while repeatedly affirming a deep and sincere commitment to protecting customer privacy, the auto industry refuses to accept any limitations on information collected outside the dedicated public safety channels. As one lobbyist for the industry put it: “On the commercial side, it’s whatever the privacy policy of the application provider is. . . . like Facebook.”Furthermore, although publicly defending the V2X as a life-saving technology, the auto industry has pressed developers to include commercial applications in equipment and as an explicit part of the business case for adopting the technology. Even NHSTA, the regulator-turned-advocate for the auto industry, touts the commercial uses of DSRC and other V2X technologies.As the FCC draws closer to a decision, expect to hear more from the auto industry and its surrogates about how the “safety band” saves lives while Wi-Fi just streams Netflix and cat videos. As hopefully everyone has learned in the current pandemic, access to broadband absolutely saves lives. Reclaiming 45 MHz from the 5.9 GHz band will help bring real broadband to rural America and to everyone dependent on Wi-Fi hotspots for access. The auto industry will still have plenty of dedicated spectrum for an actual safety band -- it just won’t be a $afety band.Harold Feld is Public Knowledge’s Senior Vice President. For more than 20 years, Feld has practiced law at the intersection of technology, broadband, and media policy in both the private sector and in the public interest community. Feld has an undergraduate degree from Princeton University, a law degree from Boston University, and clerked for the D.C. Court of Appeals.

Here’s an idea for a business model. Instead of using valuable spectrum to close the digital divide by opening it for everyone to use, get the FCC to give us exclusive use for free. Next, convince states and the federal government that rather than build broadband networks to the disconnected in rural America, they should build out our network (also at no cost to us). Then we will use this network to harvest everyone’s driving information while serving up advertisements and other commercial services. In order to persuade taxpayers to support it, we’ll pretend the network is “absolutely essential” to preventing car accidents, despite the recent development of superior technology. To really sell the idea, we’ll label this piece of spectrum the “Safety Band.”Welcome to the auto industry business plan for the 5.9 GHz band, 75 MHz of spectrum originally allocated to the auto industry for free back in 2004. However, the FCC is now proposing to reclaim 45 MHz of this for much-needed rural broadband and Wi-Fi 6 to better connect America. This would leave 30 MHz for intelligent traffic management and auto safety technologies, but would not leave any space available for the auto industry’s commercial applications.Needless to say, the auto industry opposes this tooth and nail, and has enlisted the help of the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to block the FCC’s effort to help close the digital divide. Additionally, the auto industry has consistently opposed efforts by consumer groups to have the FCC prohibit commercial uses and impose privacy protections on the band. Americans will be far better served -- and much safer on the road -- if the FCC follows through on its plan to repurpose the commercial part of the auto industry’s “safety band” for other uses.A Brief History of 5.9 GHz – From “Safety Band” to $afety BandFor nearly two decades, the auto industry has pushed the idea of wireless “intelligent traffic” systems as a means of promoting safety. At the same time, however, the auto industry has made it equally clear to investors and equipment designers that the industry intends to use this network for commercial purposes as well. In 2004, the FCC adopted the auto industry plan to take 75 MHz of spectrum and reserve it exclusively for “Dedicated Short-Range Communications” (DSRC) for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) (and generically “V2X”) communications. However -- unlike other bands reserved for public safety purposes at the time -- the FCC permitted the auto industry to use these reserved frequencies for commercial purposes as well as safety purposes. The FCC restricts only two channels (totaling 20 MHz) to “collision avoidance” and “safety-of-life” applications, leaving the bulk of the spectrum available for commercial use.Despite support from the auto industry, DSRC technology failed to catch on in the market.There were many reasons for this. For one thing, V2X technologies only work to avoid collisions if the other car has a compatible V2X technology. This makes it absolutely useless against existing cars, pedestrians, bicyclists, or even stray deer. Other technologies, like LIDAR, do a much better job avoiding collisions, which is why these technologies caught on in the market and DSRC remains virtually undeployed. The auto industry responded to this market rejection by persuading the NHTSA to start a rulemaking to require DSRC in every new car whether consumers wanted the technology or not, and convincing federal and state agencies to invest hundreds of millions of dollars building DSRC “safety networks” for the auto industry to use for free. (The Trump Administration killed the DSRC rulemaking as part of its general deregulatory agenda in 2017.)Reclaiming 5.9 GHz for Rural Broadband and Gigabit Wi-Fi to Connect AmericaThe FCC began a set of proceedings in 2013 to expand the spectrum available for unlicensed uses with a particular eye toward expanding the 5 GHz band generally. For technical reasons, expanding existing bands creates huge advantages for increasing available bandwidth. The FCC hoped to expand the unlicensed portions of the 5 GHz band to enhance the ability of rural wireless internet service providers (WISPs) using the existing 5.8 GHz unlicensed band to offer real broadband in rural America, and creating the capacity for gigabit Wi-Fi in people’s homes. The FCC initially tried to work with the auto industry and NHTSA to find a way for unlicensed sharing to co-exist on a non-interfering basis with DSRC. That, to put it mildly, did not go well.After nearly 20 years of waiting for the auto industry to make use of the 5.9 GHz band, and spending five years trying to work with the auto industry on a win-win solution, the FCC finally had enough. A unanimous FCC voted last December to propose simply taking away the 45 MHz of spectrum that the auto industry wants for commercial uses, leaving the auto industry with the 30 MHz needed to do actual safety and collision avoidance. (As the FCC noted, this 30 MHz is approximately what both Japan and the European Union allocate for similar technology.) The FCC proposal would also open the 30 MHz safety band to other V2X technologies, such as LTE-based V2X, that use existing mobile networks.Needless to say, the auto industry did not take this lying down. Lobbyists have pressed the “safety band” argument consistently, while acting offended whenever someone points out that 30 MHz leaves them plenty of spectrum for actual highway safety uses if the industry just drops the commercial aspect. Of course, the auto industry says it’s “not about the money.” The industry claims it just expects even more awesome safety features at some indefinite time in the future and therefore requires all 75 MHz of spectrum for when that magical day arrives. In the meantime, though, the auto industry argues it might as well use the extra 45 MHz of spectrum for collecting people’s personal driving information and serving them personal ads -- solely in the name of efficiency, of course.For the Auto Industry, It’s About the Money -- Not Saving LivesAs the old adage goes, when someone says, “it’s not the money, it’s the principle,” you know it’s about the money. In 2016, Public Knowledge -- joined by a number of other public interest organizations -- asked the FCC to prohibit commercial operation on the entire DSRC service and to impose privacy rules preventing the auto industry from using the information it collects from consumers for commercial purposes.For the last four years, the auto industry has refused a non-commercial condition on a band that the industry itself claims is strictly for safety, arguing that it’s the “principle of the thing” that forces them to reject the condition. Likewise, while repeatedly affirming a deep and sincere commitment to protecting customer privacy, the auto industry refuses to accept any limitations on information collected outside the dedicated public safety channels. As one lobbyist for the industry put it: “On the commercial side, it’s whatever the privacy policy of the application provider is. . . . like Facebook.”Furthermore, although publicly defending the V2X as a life-saving technology, the auto industry has pressed developers to include commercial applications in equipment and as an explicit part of the business case for adopting the technology. Even NHSTA, the regulator-turned-advocate for the auto industry, touts the commercial uses of DSRC and other V2X technologies.As the FCC draws closer to a decision, expect to hear more from the auto industry and its surrogates about how the “safety band” saves lives while Wi-Fi just streams Netflix and cat videos. As hopefully everyone has learned in the current pandemic, access to broadband absolutely saves lives. Reclaiming 45 MHz from the 5.9 GHz band will help bring real broadband to rural America and to everyone dependent on Wi-Fi hotspots for access. The auto industry will still have plenty of dedicated spectrum for an actual safety band -- it just won’t be a $afety band.Harold Feld is Public Knowledge’s Senior Vice President. For more than 20 years, Feld has practiced law at the intersection of technology, broadband, and media policy in both the private sector and in the public interest community. Feld has an undergraduate degree from Princeton University, a law degree from Boston University, and clerked for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Donald Trump's offspring are as thin-skinned as the President himself. And, like him, they apparently have access to the worst legal counsel money can buy. First Daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, apparently can't handle being criticized for their involvement in the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.The Lincoln Project -- formed by Republicans who've distanced themselves from Trump and the current Republican party -- has been routinely and harshly critical of Trump and his presidency. Recently, the group purchased billboards in Time Square that feature Ivanka Trump gesturing towards COVID-19 death counts in the US and New York State, along with a quote from Jared Kushner -- the head of Trump's business-facing COVID-19 response task force -- stating that anything New Yorkers suffer is their own problem.Here's a photo of the billboard as posted by the Lincoln Project's Twitter account:The hand gesture appears to be an approximation of the one used by Ivanka Trump when she tweeted a plug for Goya Beans earlier this year.

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The RIAA is still going after downloaders, years after targeting downloaders proved to be a waste of time and a PR catastrophe. It's not actually thinking about suing the end users of certain programs, but it has targeted Github with a takedown notice for hosting youtube-dl, a command line video downloader that downloads videos from (obviously) YouTube and other video sites.Not that this is going to be any more effective than suing file sharers. The software has been downloaded countless times and forked into new projects hosted (and distributed) elsewhere.Github has posted the RIAA's takedown request, which looks a lot like a DMCA notice for copyright infringement. But it isn't actually targeting infringement. As Parker Higgins pointed out on Twitter, the RIAA -- after saying a bunch of stuff about copyright infringement -- is actually claiming this software violates Section 1201 of the DMCA, which deals with circumvention of copyright protection schemes.The request lists a bunch of Github URLs as "copyright violations." But these aren't actually copyright violations. A little further down the RIAA gets to the point.

While COVID-19 has been great for some sectors (like video games or webcams), it's beating traditional entertainment options (like brick and mortar movie theaters and cable TV subscriptions) to a pulp. To the point where Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett has declared that the traditional cable TV sector is unraveling thanks to a sharp spike in cord cutting. Recent data suggests that traditional pay TV subscriptions have dropped 22.8% from its peak back in 2014. And by the end of 2024, analysts expect that fewer than half of US homes will subscribe to a traditional pay TV service.A need to cut household costs, fewer live sports, obnoxious price gouging, and lousy customer service have all fused into a much worse problem, proclaims Moffett:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone doing the one of the only things you can still do when the feds continue to fail in their quest to find the dreaded antifa — be sarcastic about it:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, the FBI was seriously dragging its heels on a FOIA request we filed, while we were looking at a recent terrorist bust by the agency that didn't seem to be very hampered by people "going dark", and Apple was in court fighting against demands that it unlock a phone. We took a look at how cable television is the exception to a pattern of decreasing prices for tech hardware and services, while the cable industry was still trying to explain how cord-cutting wasn't a real problem. And Tim Berners-Lee was speaking out about Facebook's plan to bastardize the internet with a limited free offering.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, there were a lot of shots fired in the legal war over commenters, with Google being ordered to turn over the IP addresses of YouTube commenters in one case just as a Canadian cop was filing another case with a similar demand, and a Broadway actor was also suing Twitter to unmask an anonymous tweeter — though perhaps the most fiery anger towards anonymity was from Gene Simmons who... wanted the nebulous online group Anonymous thrown in jail. Blizzard was employing a dubious copyright theory to go after cheat creators, an English heritage organization was making a beyond-dubious claim that it holds effective copyright on any and all photos of Stonehenge, and Joe DiMaggio's estate was trying to block the use of a photo of DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe with a threat that seemed like it might turn into a battle over questionable publicity rights — something we generally expected to fuel a growing category of IP trolling. There were developments in a few major copyright lawsuits too, with Righthaven losing to fair use in the first ruling to come down on its operation, the Golan case being appealed to the Supreme Court, and Viacom busting out the big guns for its YouTube appeal by hiring former solicitor general Ted Olson.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, the booming world of blogs was facing its first big spam crisis, while traditional news publishers were beginning to come to terms with how deeply they needed to rethink their operations for the internet. India joined the list of countries getting scared about Google Earth, though a tragedy in Pakistan was demonstrating how satellite images can be a good thing. Viral video makers JibJab were being awfully hypocritical about fair use and apparently failing to properly understand what it's for, while Craigslist was disappointingly fighting against scrapers and aggregators. And two of the biggest and most controversial internet names of the era were teaming up as Michael Robertson hired DVD Jon to hack for him.

Back in 2014 we had a post about Tom Lehrer and copyright. As you hopefully know, Lehrer, the unassuming retired math teacher, had a brief and massively successful music career, in part because all of his work is amazing. Years back, Buzzfeed had a fantastic article about Lehrer that is worth reading. That's what spurred my post about Lehrer and copyright, because in the Buzzfeed piece it became clear that Lehrer did not care one bit about retaining his copyrights.

Summary:Following the shooting of Black man Jacob Blake by Kenosha police officers, protests erupted in the Wisconsin town.As law enforcement attempted to rein in the damage, citizens aligning themselves with private "militias" discussed taking action during the civil unrest.Some of this organizing began on Facebook. A Facebook "event" created by the Kenosha Guard account (and promoted by conspiracy theorist/far right website Infowars) possibly caught the eye of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse traveled from his home in Antioch, Illinois with his weapons to the protest/riot occurring less than 30 minutes away in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Before the night was through, Rittenhouse had killed two residents and injured one other.Facebook finally removed the "event" posted by the Kenosha Guard account -- one the account referred to as a "call to arms." Posts by the group asked "patriots" to "take up arms" against "evil thugs." The event was deemed a violation of Facebook's policy regarding "Dangerous Individuals and Organizations." Facebook also claimed it could find no link between the account and this event and Kyle Rittenhouse.Some viewed this response by Facebook as too little too late. Someone had already apparently heeded the call to "take up arms" and had taken people's lives. According to a report by BuzzFeed, the event had been reported 455 times before Facebook removed it. Four moderators had responded to multiple flaggings with a determination that the event (and the account behind it) did not violate Facebook's rules. During an internal meeting with moderators, CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the company should have reacted sooner to reports about the event.Decisions to be made by Facebook:

While there is plenty of breaking news to go around, tech junkies will not have missed the Department of Justice’s long-awaited announcement of their antitrust lawsuit against Google. This is just the latest in a number of government moves aimed at applying more pressure to big tech. Congress is also reviewing potential reforms to antitrust law in order to make it easier to target online platforms. During recent hearings, the House Judiciary Committee examined how these companies compete and highlighted individual competitors­­ that struggle to compete or work with dominant firms.But in its rush to legislate market fairness into the tech world, Congress seems to be missing the point: we need to protect competition, not the competitors themselves.The Supreme Court warned about this nearly two decades ago. As the Court explained of the Sherman Act, “[t]he purpose of the Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.”In other words, competition law doesn’t care what happens to small competitors, it cares that these companies have a chance to compete.This is where Congress is treading on dangerous ground. Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee released an extensive report detailing their investigation into online markets. In this report, Congress finds themselves worried about what happens to individual competitors, not competition writ large.For example, at one point the report states that “Google’s preferential treatment of its own verticals, as well as its direct listing of information in the ‘OneBox’ that appears at the top of Google search results, has the net effect of diverting traffic from competing verticals and jeopardizing the health and viability of their business.” Because of this, the report recommends Congress overturn judicial precedent on attempted monopolization, which currently requires that plaintiffs show that the company has a dangerous probability of monopolization.But Google does not seem to be preventing vertical search engines from competing and as far as we can tell, it hasn’t monopolized this service. Their “OneBox” gives users a quick answer to a question or a product they are looking for. True, a competing vertical search engine may lose traffic, but the consumers get more search results overall. If Google could monopolize vertical search markets, then that would effectively prohibit competitors from offering better, rival services. But so long as a firm like Google can’t actually achieve that monopoly in the new market, the competitive constraints on behavior still exist.And even if a general search feature and anticompetitive conduct led to monopolization of vertical search, antitrust law would act as a check to protect competition. The Department of Justice’s long-predicted antitrust lawsuit against Google is evidence of this. If Google has illegally acquired, attempted to acquire or maintained a monopoly, then current antitrust law will ensure that any anticompetitive harms are corrected without hurting the consumers. But if they simply outcompeted rivals by offering a more efficient product, then competition policy should not, and currently does not, worry about the individual competitors who can’t keep up.Competition protects consumers and is critical in the online marketplace. In the fast-moving technology sector, some companies will not keep up. But Congress cannot lose focus by worrying about individual competitors. Instead, they must keep an eye out for anticompetitive behavior that prohibits competitions because the firm controls the entire market. In the end, if we artificially prop up less efficient or innovative competitors, then it will be the consumers who end up suffering.Jeffrey Westling is a technology and innovation resident fellow at the R Street Institute.

It goes without saying that the current pandemic has altered our national broadband conversation. What it has not changed, as those of us who have been working in this space are painfully aware, is the reality which existed long before COVID-19. Nor has the virus undone any of the decisions made over the last few decades which have lead us here — a moment epitomized by a viral image of two girls attending classes from a Taco Bell parking lot.What is particularly difficult to accept are the limited options which can provide immediate relief. There are some quick fixes, like the hotspot the school district provided for those two girls, but these stopgap measures are imperfect and, often, ineffective. Mobile hotspots have limited coverage areas, often come with data caps, can be unsustainably expensive and provide access at sub-broadband speeds. Rather than closing a divide, they shift and mask it while creating two different classes of internet user — yet hundreds of millions of dollars are being expended on them. In a moment like this, we must employ every tool we have; we must also not lose sight of what else is possible.In Chattanooga, The Enterprise Center has been working to close this divide for some time. We have a program, Tech Goes Home, that provides devices, help in finding low-cost home access and digital skills training to those who need the assistance. We have supported more than 4,900 individuals and worked with over 100 partner organizations through the program, but we still have a lot of work to do. After years of research and hard work by local governments, anchor institutions, and nonprofits across the country, we have made progress, yet the digital divide persists.It feels callous to point out the opportunity we have, with more than 216,000 Americans now dead of this disease — but the pandemic has shone a light on systemic inequities, and we cannot look away. For particularly those of us who have worked around digital access and inclusion, there is a (perverse) sense of hope that our neighbors may be able to face whatever comes next on more equal footing.So what else can we do about it? Partners in Chattanooga and Hamilton County recently launched HCS EdConnect, an initiative to ensure every student will have the home access they need to succeed during the pandemic, and beyond; in addition, we’ve worked to expand access to public WiFi across the county. Below, we will tell you how this response became possible while offering both some local best-practices and policy recommendations which can have an impact on other such initiatives.A New Chattanooga StoryHCS EdConnect, powered by EPB will provide home broadband access to every economically disadvantaged family in our school district — roughly 17,700 families or 28,500 students — for at least the next decade and at no cost to them. This access is fiber-backed, offering a minimum 100Mbps symmetrical connection; any family receiving financial assistance through programs like SNAP or the Federal School Lunch Program are eligible, as is any family with a child attending a CEP (Community Eligibility Provision) school.HCS EdConnect represents a $15.3M commitment to the fundamental reality that the Internet is integral to a 21st century education, and that any equitable public education requires equitable access to the Internet. In utilizing municipal broadband to ensure not just access, but high-speed connectivity sufficient for students and their entire families, EdConnect is truly a first-of-its kind initiative — and our future depends on it being the first of many.It has been a true community effort. Funding partners for HCS EdConnect include Hamilton County; the City of Chattanooga; BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee Foundation, private donors, the Smart City Venture Fund, representing numerous local philanthropies, and CARES, funded under a grant project with the State of Tennessee. Numerous community organizations, public and private, have played vital roles in implementation.Chattanooga has an advantage stemming from EPB’s investment in municipal fiber more than a decade ago, and it is worth noting that timeline because we want to be clear in saying that this project could not have taken place overnight. Getting started, however, happened almost that quickly. From our perspective, municipal fiber isn’t the only reason we were able to make this commitment, but investment in infrastructure, public, private or some partnership thereof must be part of any long-term solution.What Made Our Response Possible?Community Leadership: EdConnect could not have happened without the leadership of the partners at the core of this work: Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Bryan Johnson, EPB CEO David Wade, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke and Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger. From rapid deployment of public WiFi to this decade-long commitment to home access, our community leaders banded together to see this project through; this has not been the work of one organization, buoyed by others, but an all-in approach. Our community, cemented by a mid-size city, often tells the story of “working together works” — this is an instance of living that story.Multi-stakeholder Partnership: Our multi-stakeholder collaborative has numerous advantages: There has been, from a high level, a commitment to not stopping when confronted by barriers, but going over, around or through them. Because each partner brings differing resources and capacities to the table, navigating challenges (and developing creative solutions) is that much easier. Trust in the community, we have learned again and again, is essential. For families who feel they have been let down by program after program, promise after promise, a relationship, like that with the teacher their child sees every day or a pastor from their church, offers an opportunity to build trust in something new.Creativity in Funding: This multistakeholder approach extends to funding, as well: Funds for EdConnect and our expansion of public WiFi have come from the public sector (The City of Chattanooga, Hamilton County, Hamilton County Schools and EPB), the private sector (BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee), philanthropy (The Benwood Foundation, Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga, The Footprint Foundation, The Robert L. and Katherina Maclellan Foundation and the Lyndhurst Foundation) and individual donors, as well as through State CARES funding. There was no single source of support available for this initiative, but we treated that as an opportunity for community ownership rather than a reason to scale back.A Commitment to All Meaning: All An ‘if you build it’ strategy rarely reaches everyone, and it’s impossible simply to make connectivity happen to a community: You’ve got to build with them. For an initiative truly focused on equity, we knew that it could only be as successful as connecting those hardest to reach. This ethos was at the heart of building the tracking system for eligible families, to ensure decisions could be informed by data (Were certain geographies or schools lagging in connection rate? Was a specific demographic not opting in or scheduling service?), as well as in adapting outreach and communication strategies.A Multi-Pronged Approach: And, finally, knowing that no single solution could work for everyone, we invested in multiple strategies. This includes long-term investment in public WiFi, which offers emergency connectivity now and potential unanticipated benefits later, from neighborhood walkability to test-bed infrastructure, for environmental censors and the like. And, as we explore more sustainable solutions with local co-ops and other ISPs, it also includes mobile hotspots for those few hundred families who live outside of the footprint EPB is, per state policy, legally allowed to serve.What Else Can Make a Difference?Local Control: As noted above, EPB cannot provide service to all of Hamilton County; this has not stopped us from finding creative solutions, but not every community can draw on our breadth of providers. (Tennessee, for example, has expanded the authority of co-ops to offer internet service.) There are numerous, successful models for how public interests and private sector opportunities align around broadband, but restrictive preemption laws are a barrier to ensuring universal access.Access to Funding: Infrastructure is expensive, but we are witnessing the devastating cost of failing to invest play out in real-time. Chattanooga was creative in response to the pandemic, but we had to be. As a city of fewer than 500,000 residents, despite an MSA of that size, Chattanooga did not have access to dedicated CARES funds, while larger municipalities like Nashville and San Antonio were able to draw on single funding streams to invest in connectivity solutions. Tennessee does fortunately have a state broadband office, and, working with state officials, our local delegation was able to secure more than $3 million in CARES funding to help bridge the digital divide for students locally — but not every state or community has these resources. Additional dedicated funding, for more than an emergency response and with a timeline beyond December 30th, is essential.Modernizing E-Rate: Schools should be able to utilize E-Rate funding to provide or subsidize home access. The very existence of homework supposes that essential learning happens outside of the classroom. Schools, underfunded as they are, make incredibly difficult budget decisions every day; continuing to hamstring their ability to operate and equitably serve students with funding already available will have needless and devastating consequences.Accurate Mapping: Finally, we need better mapping — not just of where service is available, but at what speeds and at what cost. Our current digital divide is not just a question of access, but of affordability. That we largely use FCC maps which only illustrate a partial story (and which overestimate coverage) to determine funding for deployment leads to families going unserved. In preparing both our public WiFi deployment and EdConnect outreach, we often relied on proxy data to inform decision making, like food insecurity mapping, from our United Way and 211; information from the school district on families who had not been in touch following the March closures; and modelling from Esri and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s GIS department.Where We Go From HereWe firmly believe Chattanooga’s model is a replicable one, but we also know that the digital divide impacts more than K-12 students and their families. College students, the rising number of unemployed Americans, seniors and other medically vulnerable populations are just a few groups for whom affordable access to broadband is a dire necessity. COVID-19 has highlighted decades of systemic redlining, underinvestment and restrictive policy decisions, but it has also led to a newly shared understanding and experience of this digital divide. Closing it, though, is possible; we’re proving it.Deb Socia is President and CEO of The Enterprise Center, a nonprofit that nurtures innovation in Chattanooga with the goal of connecting people to resources and building an inclusive community. Geoff Millener serves as senior program and operations officer for The Enterprise Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Way back in 2013, we discussed an interesting study conducted by Google looking at the effect of let's play and video game reviews has on the gaming industry. That study's conclusion was that viewers watched let's plays at a far higher clip than, say, video game trailers. Two-thirds of those views appeared to be watchers focusing on the video itself, whereas the other third were watching on secondary devices/screens in order to find tips and tricks for completing the game in question. Both were conducive to promoting the gaming industry, being a method for finding out if a game is worth buying and because gamers know they have a resource to help complete a game.Fast forward to 2020 and Google has its own game-streaming platform that it's trying to get off of the ground. One of the folks that works at Google on the platform is Alex Hutchinson. And when it comes to let's play videos and streams, hoo boy does he have some thoughts.

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Trump has made no secret of the fact he adores law enforcement. One of the first edicts he issued from his office told America in no uncertain terms that cops were to be respected, if not worshipped, for deigning to stand between millions of US peons and the forces of evil.

It was the technology that was supposed to change the world. According to carriers, not only was fifth-generation wireless (5G) supposed to bring about the "fourth industrial revolution," it was supposed to revolutionize everything from smart cities to cancer treatment. According to conspiracy theorists and internet imbeciles, 5G is responsible for everything from COVID-19 to your migraines.Unfortunately for both sets of folks, data continues to indicate that 5G is nowhere near that interesting.A number of recent studies have already shown that U.S. 5G is notably slower than most overseas deployments (thanks in part to government's failure to make more mid-band spectrum available for public use). Several other studies have shown that initial deployments in many cases are actually slower than existing 4G networks. That's before you get to the fact that U.S. consumers already pay more for wireless than a long list of developed nations, something likely to get worse in the wake of mindless industry consolidation.While 5G is important, and will improve over time, it's pretty clear that the technology is more of a modest evolution than a revolution, and 5G hype overkill (largely driven by a desperate desire to rekindle lagging smartphone sales) is a far cry from reality.That's not stopping us from already hyping 6G, though. As carriers begin the fairly mundane process of building the standards framework for the next next-generation standard, the familiar promises of near-magical capabilities are already starting to emerge. Just ask Mazin Gilbert, AT&T's VP of network analytics and automation, who appears to have learned absolutely nothing the last few years, and is already equating 6G to The Matrix:

The EU is now starting to work in earnest on what is likely to be its most important new law for the online world, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Techdirt wrote about this last year, when the European Commission started sketching out (bad) ideas for the new law. The basic impetus for the DSA is to replace the EU's e-Commerce Directive, which was passed 20 years ago, and is clearly in need of an update. As the European Commission's page on the DSA explains, there are two core elements:

While the music industry's war on stream-ripping sites -- sites that have perfectly legitimate and legal uses -- continues, it's true that this is a war in which one side has almost universally surrendered. Facing legal opposition with well-funded industry groups, most stream-ripping sites simply close up shop when staring down litigation. But Russia-based FLVTO.biz has been an exception. We first wrote about the site's decision to defend itself back in early 2019. At that point, the owner of the site, Tofig Kurbanov, had successfully argued in a Florida court that the United States legal system had no jurisdiction over his site, given that it operates in Russia and makes no effort to entice American patronage.It was a sensible ruling. After all, why should anyone want websites in one nation to be subject to the laws of every other nation's laws just because the internet is designed to be international? And, yet, the RIAA labels appealed the ruling and got it reversed. The case was sent back to the lower courts where it was supposed to once again proceed, except that Kurbanov's team has asked the Supreme Court to consider its jurisdiction arguments once more.

The city of Portland, Oregon is still in the midst of anti-police brutality protests stemming from the killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin. Federal officers arrived in Portland in July, making their presence known by engaging some extremely questionable tactics.Their arrival was met with their addition to an ongoing lawsuit against law enforcement seeking an injunction banning cops of all types from assaulting or dispersing journalists and legal observers. The plaintiffs secured an injunction. They also secured an agreement from local police to stop treating those reporting and observing protests as protesters, exempting them from dispersal orders and forbidding them from being targeted with crowd control measures, such as tear gas and rubber bullets.The federal interlopers gave zero fucks. They were added to the injunction but immediately violated it. The feds' excuse? Sometimes protesters and rioters disguised themselves as press to avoid being dispersed and/or assaulted. The district court pointed out the local police had made no such accusations and appeared capable of controlling crowds without violating their agreement.The federal agencies appealed. In August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the injunction. A short opinion stated the federal government had shown evidence it would suffer "irreparable harm" if officers weren't allowed to assault members of the press and other non-protesters. The emergency stay of the district court's injunction was granted.The Appeals Court has now fully addressed the government's arguments and reversed its stance. The federal defendants are no longer exempt from the injunction forbidding them from assaulting journalists.The government made three arguments in favor of assaulting journalists and observers. First, it argued journalists would not be deprived of Constitutional rights if assaulted or otherwise removed from areas where protests are taking place. It also argued that observing or recording protests (as observers or journalists) was not protected by the First Amendment -- not when dispersal orders have been given. Finally, it argued federal officers were not targeting journalists and observers for being journalists and observers, so any OC spray/bullets headed in their direction were just part of solid, proven crowd control efforts. This last argument was made despite recordings being submitted to the court that showed federal officers appearing to deliberately target journalists with pepper spray and other forms of force.The Appeals Court [PDF] says a lot of what the government is asserting simply isn't true. There's ample evidence showing federal officers deliberately targeted journalists and observers.

You might think that Congress has more important issues on its hands, with a pandemic still going on, issues around disinformation and the election, massive fires still burning in parts of the US, a record number of hurricanes pounding the south... but it appears that Congress thinks the most pressing issue is gutting Section 230. As you'll recall, right after FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly made some generally straightforward statements about how the 1st Amendment wouldn't let the government interfere with social media platforms, Trump informed O'Rielly that his nomination to stay at the FCC had been rescinded.It seems pretty clear that in the world of Trump, all that he wants out of his FCC is to act as his own private speech police. To that effect, he not only put in place the obviously unconstitutional executive order pushing NTIA to petition the FCC to "reinterpret" Section 230 of the Communications Act -- the law that enables social media to exist in its current form -- but has since put pressure on the FCC to move forward with that effort. While some had hoped that maybe Ajit Pai would find a backbone and his long-stated principles in his giant Reese's mug, he has proven he has neither, and moved forward with the process to make the FCC the internet speech police.Of course, there remains a problem. O'Rielly is still there, and both the Democrats on the FCC have made it clear they disagree with this plan. When the announcement was made that O'Rielly's nomination had been pulled, I heard from multiple FCC experts who told me there was "no way" that a new Commissioner could be nominated, vetted, paraded before the Senate, and voted on before January 20th. However, it appears that a Senate that has decided it can rush through a candidate for an open Supreme Court seat rather than deal with the actual problems of the country can also do the exact same thing for an FCC Commissioner.Last month, Trump nominated the guy who wrote the unconstitutional executive order, Nathan Simington, to the seat, and again I was told that his nomination was unlikely to be reviewed by the Senate before the new session began next year. Not so, apparently. As Politico reported last week, the Senate Commerce Committee has agreed to rush through his nomination in "near record time" with a hearing set for November 10th.It's going to be fascinating to watch all those Senators who spent years claiming they were absolutely, 100% against the FCC regulating anything to do with the internet do total 180s and make sure that Simington is ready to become the speech police for the internet.