ted cruz – Techdirt (original) (raw)

No ABC Did Not Engage In Election Interference In [Checks Notes] Fact Checking Donald Trump

from the fact-check:-this-is-all-stupid dept

In the bizarro world of MAGA politics, up is down, black is white, and apparently, fact-checking is now a form of election interference.

It is no secret that people across the political spectrum have a very warped view of what free speech or the First Amendment means. But I am particularly perplexed by the view of many lately (and this seems to run across the political spectrum, tragically) that fact checking is an attack on free speech and should be punished. It feels ridiculous to even bring this up, but fact checking is not just protected speech, it is the proverbial “more speech” that pretend defenders of the First Amendment always claim is the only possible answer to speech you disagree with.

Anyway, last week you might have heard there was a Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held on ABC. The CNN debate earlier this year between Trump and Biden included a vow from the moderators that they would do no fact-checking, which resulted in those moderators being roundly criticized.

On the other hand, ABC chose a few narrow points, when the lies were incredibly egregious, to provide simple fact-checks to blatantly false claims. I believe they responded just three times to make factual claims, even though the former President told an astounding number of blatant outright lies (not just exaggerations, but fully invented, made up bullshit).

This has set Republicans off on a ridiculous crusade, claiming that ABC was actively working with the Harris campaign to support it, which is not how any of this actually works. Then, Trump himself claimed that the debate was “rigged” (of course) and told Fox & Friends that (1) you “have to be licensed to” be a news organization and that (2) “they ought to take away their license for the way they did that” (i.e., fact-checked the debate).

Others in Trump’s circles claimed that the fact-checking was a form of “in-kind contribution” to the Harris campaign worth millions of dollars.

All of this is nonsense. First off, one of the complaints was that the moderators fact-checked Trump but didn’t fact-check Harris. There are a few responses to that, including that if you removed the three times they fact-checked Trump and compared things then, they still chose not to fact-check him on many, many more false claims and egregious lies. The second is that the fact-checking complaints around Harris are ones of leaving out context or having slight exaggerations. With Trump it was literal made-up nonsense, such as the false, bigoted claims about eating cats and dogs, or the idea that Democrats support killing babies after birth. Just out and out fearmongering bullshit.

But, again, fact-checking is free speech. The party that claims to be such a big believer in free speech should also support that.

However, even dumber is Trump’s false claim that ABC has to be licensed. That’s not how this works. It’s yet another false statement coming from the mind of a man who seems to only work in false statements. Individual affiliates can require licenses to obtain spectrum, but ABC itself is not something that needs licensing. You don’t need to be licensed to be a news organization.

Just ask Fox News.

Of course, we’ve been through this before with Trump, who has sued many news organizations he’s disliked (without much success) and has made this same bogus threat before. In 2017, he said that NBC should lose its (non-existent) license for reporting on former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calling Trump a “moron.” A year later, he threatened to pull NBC’s (still non-existent) license over its reporting on Harvey Weinstein.

Earlier this year, he said both NBC and CNN should have their “licenses or whatever” taken away for not giving him free airtime by showing his victory speech following the Iowa caucuses.

All of this is ridiculous. It’s an attempt at intimidation. It’s an attempt to threaten and cajole news organizations to not speak, to not use their First Amendment rights, and to not fact check when the former President spews absolute fucking nonsense.

But, because MAGA world is making a big deal of this, even the FCC Chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, had to put out a statement on the very basics of the First Amendment:

“The FCC does not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

It is true that there are some very, very, very limited and narrow circumstances under which the FCC can pull a local affiliate’s spectrum license (not the larger network). However, not liking how fact-checking happens is not even in the same zip code as those.

Indeed, if MAGA world is getting into the business of pulling affiliate licenses, they might not like where things end up. There has been an ongoing effort to pull the license from a Fox affiliate in Philadelphia, based specifically on Fox News admitting that it broadcast false information about the 2020 election.

I don’t support such efforts, which likely violate the First Amendment. Even if it’s a closer call when you’re dealing with a network that has effectively admitted to deliberately spreading false information the company knew was false. But here, the call from Trump to remove the license is simply because of a fact check. It was because they told the truth, not because they lied.

When that effort to remove the Fox affiliate’s license came about, MAGA world was furious. Senator Ted Cruz went on a rant about how “the job of policing so-called ‘misinformation’ belongs to the American people—not the federal government” and complained about how “the left” “want the FCC to be a truth commission & censor political discourse—a prospect that is unconstitutional.”

Hey Ted, care to comment on the claims from last week?

I see no similar statement from him about Trump and the MAGA world now demanding the same thing (for much more ridiculous reasons). I combed through his ExTwitter feed and surprisingly (well, not really) he seems to have no issue with his side calling to pull licenses. How typically hypocritical.

Tragically, this has become the modern Republican Party. They are total hypocrites on free speech. When they want to protect their own speech, they wrap themselves up in the cape of the First Amendment, but when someone who disagrees with them speaks up to contradict them with facts, they’re happy to push for censorship and punishment over speech.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, debate, donald trump, fact checking, fcc, free speech, kamala harris, ted cruz
Companies: abc

Ted Cruz Proudly Pledges To Kill Last Ditch Funding Effort For Popular Low-Income Broadband Program

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Thu, Aug 8th 2024 05:25am - Karl Bode

We just noted how several Trumplican lawmakers recently killed a popular program that helped deliver a $30 discount off of the broadband bills of low income Americans. The FCC’s Affordable Care Program (ACP) was implemented during peak COVID, and proved immensely helpful to 22 million Americans, many of whom are now being booted off the internet because they can no longer afford access.

The mass exodus from the program resulted in Comcast and Charter last week reporting their biggest quarterly broadband subscriber losses in company histories.

Separately, we’ve reported how Congress completely screwed up a plan to rip “dangerous” Chinese-made Huawei network gear out of U.S. telecom networks; something they proposed with great fanfare and then just (whoops) forgot to fully fund. As a result, many smaller telecoms can’t afford to “rip and replace” the Huawei gear, resulting, you guessed it, in a chunk of people potentially losing access to broadband.

A new bipartisan bill proposes to fix both problems at once: the PLAN for broadband Act would dole out 7billioninfundingtohelpfundACP,andanother7 billion in funding to help fund ACP, and another 7billioninfundingtohelpfundACP,andanother3 billion to help fund efforts to replace Huawei network components with safer alternatives. A large chunk of the costs would be offset by FCC spectrum auction proceeds. This level of money is, if you’re new to the U.S., routinely wasted on much dumber fare.

Enter Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who is now proudly declaring that he’ll work tirelessly to ensure the bipartisan bill doesn’t pass. Cruz claims he’s concerned about the cost of the program:

“This bill has no reform in it at all. It’s not paid for or offset in anyway.”

Consumer groups support the proposals. Telecom carriers support the proposals. Poor people certainly appreciate the help. The government certainly can afford it. There’s really no sense in Cruz’s opposition beyond performance, not least of which being that Cruz doesn’t actually care about fiscal responsibility.

Cruz is fully supportive of a Texas-based company like AT&T getting a $42 billion tax break for doing absolutely nothing. He’ll routinely have nothing to say if AT&T is accused of ripping off taxpayers and the nation’s school system. He’s the type of politician who’ll support no limit of wasteful subsidies to telecoms like Elon Musk’s Starlink, only drawing a line in the sand when it comes time to help poor people.

Ted’s facing an uncharacteristically tight race for Senate reelection in Texas thanks to a challenge by Rep. Colin Allred. Apparently Ted thinks the winning sauce involves giving a giant middle finger to poor families unable to afford broadband under the pretense he actually cares about fiscal responsibility.

Filed Under: Affordable Connectivity Program, broadband, fcc, fiber, high speed internet, huawei, rip and replace, ted cruz, telecom, texas

Free Speech Absolutist Elon Musk Removes Tweets Revealing Ted Cruz Fundraising Notes

from the ah,-there-he-goes-again dept

If ExTwitter is the bastion of free speech, you would think that it would allow for the publishing of newsworthy documents revealing a politician’s funding briefings, right? Apparently not when that politician is politically aligned with Elon Musk, whose commitment to open discourse appears to be about as floppy as the Cybertruck’s giant windshield wiper.

It’s been a little while since we’ve had one of these posts, but it remains important: Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist” and repeatedly insists that he bought Twitter and turned it into ExTwitter to “bring back” free speech. However, over and over again we see him delete speech, often on ideological grounds.

Remember, Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist.”

He also claims, bizarrely, that free speech means “that which matches the law” (which seems to contradict his claims above about disobeying orders from governments to block certain speech).

He also repeatedly claims that ExTwitter “will fight for your freedom to speak” and that “Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Without it, America ends.”

But, of course, the second someone semi-powerful whom Elon agrees with is aggrieved, well, down go the tweets. Witness the situation faced by reporter Pablo Manriquez, who ended up with the briefing notes that some poor schlub of a Ted Cruz staffer accidentally left somewhere to be picked up.

Manriquez went to ExTwitter, home of “free speech,” to report on what he got his hands on in a nice thread of posts with images of all the documents. Or maybe not:

Yeah, that image is the current entirety of Pablo’s nine post thread. Only the first and last tweets are shown, and all seven in the middle — the ones that at one point showed the documents in question — have been removed because, the screenshot shows, “This Post violated the X Rules.”

I went through “The X Rules” and couldn’t find anything this credibly violated. The closest would have to be the rule against publishing “private information.” But that rule describes private information as things like “home phone number and address.”

Going through the more detailed policy on private information, I still don’t see anything that could possibly qualify with this data dump. It also claims that the company takes into account what type of info is being shared, who is sharing it, and why. All of those would suggest this did not violate the policy, as it’s information in the public interest, being shared in a reporting fashion, in a manner that does not really violate anyone’s privacy, nor put anyone at risk (except of embarrassment).

Now, it is true that a few of the documents show the phone number of the Cruz staffer who will be tagging along for the meetings. So, arguably, you could say that would trigger a privacy violation as well. But not all of the removed tweets had that. And I just did a quick search on the staffer’s name and “phone number”, and the top Google result shows the exact same phone number. So it’s not exactly “private” information. Some of the docs also show some other phone numbers, or the names of family members, but nothing that seems particularly sensitive. Indeed, much of it appears to be copied from public bios that mention the family members.

But, fine, if Musk/Cruz defenders want to insist that this is obviously still a violation of the policy on private information then… wouldn’t the same be true of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

I can see no world in which the information from Hunter Biden’s laptop is not more private than some briefing notes regarding Ted Cruz being told to ask Ron Lauder to donate the maximum possible, a combined $119,200 to his various campaign and political PACs. It’s a nice way to “legally” donate way more than what the public believes are the official limits on individual campaign donations.

Anyway, Musk’s attempt to block these tweets from being shared didn’t work very well. The ThreadReader app captured them all, and I’ll include them below as well (though I’ll blur out some info to be nice, not because I think it needs to be blurred). Meanwhile, both Newsweek and Business Insider reported on the details of the documents, highlighting how newsworthy they are.

To be clear: there’s nothing nefarious in these docs. I can guarantee that every Senator has similar briefing notes revealing similar requests for money. It is, however, revealing to the public how the fundraising game is played, as the Business Insider piece notes. And that makes it extremely newsworthy.

Publishing these docs may be embarrassing, but they break no laws. So, Musk’s claims of his definition of free speech matching the laws is already shown to be bullshit.

And, of course, as we’ve always said, it’s Musk’s platform. He is absolutely free to have whatever rules in place he wants and to delete whatever content he thinks should be deleted. That’s part of his own free speech rights.

But the same was true of Twitter before Musk took it over. It wasn’t an “attack on free speech” when Twitter removed some content that violated its rules, nor is it one when Musk does it.

It would just be nice if Musk and/or his fans would recognize that he’s no more of a “free speech” warrior than the old Twitter was. Indeed, as we’ve highlighted, the old Twitter was actually willing to stand up to more government demands and push back on real attacks on free speech way more often than Musk’s ExTwitter has.

Filed Under: briefing docs, elon musk, free speech, free speech absolutist, fundraising docs, journalism, pablo manriquez, ted cruz

Bipartisan Group Of Senators Introduce New Terrible ‘Protect The Kids Online’ Bill

from the not-another-one dept

Apparently, the world needs even more terrible bills that let ignorant senators grandstand to the media about how they’re “protecting the kids online.” There’s nothing more serious to work on than that. The latest bill comes from Senators Brian Schatz and Ted Cruz (with assists from Senators Chris Murphy, Katie Britt, Peter Welch, Ted Budd, John Fetterman, Angus King, and Mark Warner). This one is called the “The Kids Off Social Media Act” (KOSMA) and it’s an unconstitutional mess built on a long list of debunked and faulty premises.

It’s especially disappointing to see this from Schatz. A few years back, I know his staffers would regularly reach out to smart people on tech policy issues in trying to understand the potential pitfalls of the regulations he was pushing. Either he’s no longer doing this, or he is deliberately ignoring their expert advice. I don’t know which one would be worse.

The crux of the bill is pretty straightforward: it would be an outright ban on social media accounts for anyone under the age of 13. As many people will recognize, we kinda already have a “soft” version of that because of COPPA, which puts much stricter rules on sites directed at those under 13. Because most sites don’t want to deal with those stricter rules, they officially limit account creation to those over the age of 13.

In practice, this has been a giant mess. Years and years ago, Danah Boyd pointed this out, talking about how the “age 13” bit is a disaster for kids, parents, and educators. Her research showed that all this generally did was to have parents teach kids that “it’s okay to lie,” as parents wanted kids to use social media tools to communicate with grandparents. Making that “soft” ban a hard ban is going to create a much bigger mess and prevent all sorts of useful and important communications (which, yeah, is a 1st Amendment issue).

Schatz’s reasons put forth for the bill are just… wrong.

No age demographic is more affected by the ongoing mental health crisis in the United States than kids, especially young girls. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 57 percent of high school girls and 29 percent of high school boys felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, with 22 percent of all high school students—and nearly a third of high school girls—reporting they had seriously considered attempting suicide in the preceding year.

Gosh. What was happening in 2021 with kids that might have made them feel hopeless? Did Schatz and crew simply forget about the fact that most kids were under lockdown and physically isolated from friends for much of 2021? And that there were plenty of other stresses, including millions of people, including family members, dying? Noooooo. Must be social media!

Studies have shown a strong relationship between social media use and poor mental health, especially among children.

Note the careful word choice here: “strong relationship.” They won’t say a causal relationship because studies have not shown that. Indeed, as the leading researcher in the space has noted, there continues to be no real evidence of any causal relationship. The relationship appears to work the other way: kids who are dealing with poor mental health and who are desperate for help turn to the internet and social media because they’re not getting help elsewhere.

Maybe offer a bill that helps kids get access to more resources that help them with their mental health, rather than taking away the one place they feel comfortable going? Maybe?

From 2019 to 2021, overall screen use among teens and tweens (ages 8 to 12) increased by 17 percent, with tweens using screens for five hours and 33 minutes per day and teens using screens for eight hours and 39 minutes.

I mean, come on Schatz. Are you trolling everyone? Again, look at those dates. WHY DO YOU THINK that screen time might have increased 17% for kids from 2019 to 2021? COULD IT POSSIBLY BE that most kids had to do school via computers and devices at home, because there was a deadly pandemic making the rounds?

Maybe?

Did Schatz forget that? I recognize that lots of folks would like to forget the pandemic lockdowns, but this seems like a weird way to manifest that.

I mean, what a weird choice of dates to choose. I’m honestly kind of shocked that the increase was only 17%.

Also, note that the data presented here isn’t about an increase in social media use. It could very well be that the 17% increase was Zoom classes.

Based on the clear and growing evidence, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory last year, calling for new policies to set and enforce age minimums and highlighting the importance of limiting the use of features, like algorithms, that attempt to maximize time, attention, and engagement.

Wait. You mean the same Surgeon General’s report that denied any causal link between social media and mental health (which you falsely claim has been proved) and noted just how useful and important social media is to many young people?

From that report, which Schatz misrepresents:

Social media can provide benefits for some youth by providing positive community and connection with others who share identities, abilities, and interests. It can provide access to important information and create a space for self-expression. The ability to form and maintain friendships online and develop social connections are among the positive effects of social media use for youth. , These relationships can afford opportunities to have positive interactions with more diverse peer groups than are available to them offline and can provide important social support to youth. The buffering effects against stress that online social support from peers may provide can be especially important for youth who are often marginalized, including racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minorities. , For example, studies have shown that social media may support the mental health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, transgender, queer, intersex and other youths by enabling peer connection, identity development and management, and social support. Seven out of ten adolescent girls of color report encountering positive or identity-affirming content related to race across social media platforms. A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%). In addition, research suggests that social media-based and other digitally-based mental health interventions may also be helpful for some children and adolescents by promoting help-seeking behaviors and serving as a gateway to initiating mental health care.

Did Schatz’s staffers just, you know, skip over that part of the report or nah?

The bill also says that companies need to not allow algorithmic targeting of content to anyone under 17. This is also based on a widely believed myth that algorithmic content is somehow problematic. No studies have legitimately shown that of current algorithms. Indeed, a recent study showed that removing algorithmic targeting leads to people being exposed to more disinformation.

Is this bill designed to force more disinformation on kids? Why would that be a good idea?

Yes, some algorithms can be problematic! About a decade ago, algorithms that tried to optimize solely for “engagement” definitely created some bad outcomes. But it’s been a decade since most such algorithms have been designed that way. On most social media platforms, the algorithms are designed in other ways, taking into account a variety of different factors, because they know that optimizing just on engagement leads to bad outcomes.

Then the bill tacks on Cruz’s bill to require schools to block social media. There’s an amusing bit when reading the text of that part of the law. It says that you have to block social media on “federally funded networks and devices” but also notes that it does not prohibit “a teacher from using a social media platform in the classroom for educational purposes.”

But… how are they going to access those if the school is required by law to block access to such sites? Most schools are going to do a blanket ban, and teachers are going to be left to do what? Show kids useful YouTube science videos on their phones? Or maybe some schools will implement a special teacher code that lets them bypass the block. And by the end of the first week of school half the kids in the school will likely know that password.

What are we even doing here?

Schatz has a separate page hyping up the bill, and it’s even dumber than the first one above. It repeats some of the points above, though this time linking to Jonathan Haidt, whose work has been trashed left, right, and center by actual experts in this field. And then it gets even dumber:

Big Tech knows it’s complicit – but refuses to do anything about it…. Moreover, the platforms know about their central role in turbocharging the youth mental health crisis. According to Meta’s own internal study, “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” It concluded, “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.”

This is not just misleading, it’s practically fraudulent misrepresentation. The study Schatz is citing is one that was revealed by Frances Haugen. As we’ve discussed, it was done because Meta was trying to understand how to do better. Indeed, the whole point of that study was to see how teens felt about using social media in 12 different categories. Meta found that most boys felt neutral or better about themselves in all 12 categories. For girls, it was 11 out of 12. It was only in one category, body image, where the split was more pronounced. 32% of girls said that it made them feel worse. Basically the same percentage said it had no impact, or that it made them feel better.

Also, look at that slide’s title. The whole point of this study was to figure out if they were making kids feel worse in order to look into how to stop doing that. And now, because grandstanders like Schatz are falsely claiming that this proves they were “complicit” and “refuse to do anything about it,” no social media company will ever do this kind of research again.

Because, rather than proactively looking to see if they’re creating any problems that they need to try to fix, Schatz and crew are saying “simply researching this is proof that you’re complicit and refuse to act.”

Statements like this basically ensure that social media companies stick their heads in the sand, rather than try to figure out where harm might be caused and take steps to stop that harm.

Why would Schatz want to do that?

That page then also falsely claims that the bill does not require age verification. This is a silly two-step that lying politicians claim every time they do this. Does it directly mandate age verification? No. But, by making the penalties super serious and costly for failing to stop kids from accessing social media that will obviously drive companies to introduce stronger age verification measures that are inherently dangerous and an attack on privacy.

Perhaps Schatz doesn’t understand this, but it’s been widely discussed by many of the experts his staff used to talk to. So, really, he has no excuse.

The FAQ also claims that the bill will pass constitutional muster, while at the same time admitting that they know there will be lawsuits challenging it:

Yes. As, for example, First Amendment expert Neil Richards explains, “[i]nstead of censoring the protected expression present on these platforms, the act takes aim at the procedures and permissions that determine the time, place and manner of speech for underage consumers.” The Supreme Court has long held that the government has the right to regulate products to protect children, including by, for instance, restricting the sale of obscene content to minors. As Richards explains: “[i]n the same way a crowded bar or nightclub is no place for a child on their own”—or in the way every state in the country requires parental consent if it allows a minor to get a tattoo—“this rule would set a reasonable minimum age and maturity limitation for social media customers.”

While we expect legal challenges to any bill aimed at regulating social media companies, we are confident that this content-neutral bill will pass constitutional muster given the government interests at play.

There are many reasons why this is garbage under the law, but rather than breaking them all down (we’ll wait for judges to explain it in detail), I’ll just point out the major tell is in the law itself. In the definition of what a “social media platform” is in the law, there is a long list of exceptions of what the law does not cover. It includes a few “moral panics of yesteryear” that gullible politicians tried to ban and were found to have violated the First Amendment in the process.

It explicitly carves out video games and content that is professionally produced, rather than user-generated:

Remember the moral panics about video games and TV destroying kids’ minds? Yeah. So this child protection bill is hasty to say “but we’re not banning that kind of content!” Because whoever drafted the bill recognized that the Supreme Court has already made it clear that politicians can’t do that for video games or TV.

So, instead, they have to pretend that social media content is somehow on a whole different level.

But it’s not. It’s still the government restricting access to content. They’re going to pretend that there’s something unique and different about social media, and that they’re not banning the “content” but rather the “place” and “manner” of accessing that content. Except that’s laughable on its face.

You can see that in the quote above where Schatz does the fun dance where he first says “it’s okay to ban obscene content to minors” and then pretends that’s the same as restrictions on access to a bar (it’s not). One is about the content, and one is about a physical place. Social media is all about the content, and it’s not obscene content (which is already an exception to the First Amendment).

And, the “parental consent” for tattoos… I mean, what the fuck? Literally 4 questions above in the FAQ where that appears Schatz insists that his bill has nothing about parental consent. And then he tries to defend it by claiming it’s no different than parental consent laws?

The FAQ also claims this:

This bill does not prevent LGBTQ+ youth from accessing relevant resources online and we have worked closely with LGBTQ+ groups while crafting this legislation to ensure that this bill will not negatively impact that community.

I mean, it’s good you talked to some experts, but I note that most of the LGBTQ+ groups I’m aware of are not listed on your list of “groups supporting the bill” on the very same page. That absence stands out.

And, again, the Surgeon General’s report that you misleadingly cited elsewhere highlights how helpful social media can be to many LGBTQ+ youth. You can’t just say “nah, it won’t harm them” without explaining why all those benefits that have been shown in multiple studies, including the Surgeon General’s report, somehow don’t get impacted.

There’s a lot more, but this is just a terrible bill that would create a mess. And, I’m already hearing from folks in DC that Schatz is trying to get this bill added to the latest Christmas tree of a bill to reauthorize the FAA.

It would be nice if we had politicians looking to deal with the actual challenges facing kids these days, including the lack of mental health support for those who really need it. Instead, we get unconstitutional grandstanding nonsense bills like this.

Everyone associated with this bill should feel ashamed.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, age verification, brian schatz, chris murphy, coppa, john fetterman, jonathan haidt, katie britt, kids, kids off social media act, kosma, mark warner, peter welch, social media, ted cruz, teens

GOP Wants To Prevent The FCC From Protecting Broadband Consumer Privacy

from the who-needs-privacy-anyway dept

Tue, Dec 19th 2023 05:31am - Karl Bode

Back in 2017 the FCC tried to pass some very basic privacy protections for broadband access. The rules simply demanded transparency as to what kind of data your ISP collects and sells. They also mandated that the trafficking of sensitive financial data by telecoms require the opt in consent of consumers.

Telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast didn’t much like that. So, in perfect synchronicity with the GOP, they first successfully painted the proposal as extremist, and then killed the rules with a simple majority vote via the Congressional Review Act. Not only did that vote kill the rules, the CRA prohibits the regulatory agency in question from revisiting the same rules ever again.

It was an obvious act of corruption and regulatory capture by a Republican party consistently in perfect lockstep with predatory and unpopular telecom monopolies. A relationship the party never has to genuinely take ownership of thanks to press outlets often incapable of calling out obvious corruption.

Fast forward to 2023 and the FCC is considering new privacy protections that would require ISPs be more transparent about privacy breaches. And, once again, Republicans like Ted Cruz are very upset about it.

While the CRA prohibits a regulator from exploring the same rule, it’s less legally clear if the FCC can embrace specific aspects of the bigger rule. So that’s what the FCC is going to try, according to agency boss Jessica Rosenworcel:

“By its terms, the CRA does not prohibit the adoption of a rule that is merely substantially similar to a limited portion of the disapproved rule or one that is the same as individual pieces of the disapproved rule.”

I’m not sure that’s going to work out, but I think it’s important for the FCC to try and thread the needle anyway just to see if there’s traction here. An FTC report from 2021 highlights how telecom giants spy on consumers, collect oceans of data, then — despite constant industry denials of this fact — turn around and sell some form of access to those datasets to a broad assortment of middlemen and nitwits.

Lost in the debate over whether this will succeed in courts will be the fact that this whole mess was caused by corruption we’re seemingly incapable of doing anything about. The telecom industry has the majority of Congress — and the entirety of the GOP — in its back pocket. We’ve normalized the fact an entire party that works in lockstep with telecom monopolists to routinely make your service shittier and more expensive.

The GOP has been endlessly busy trying to create a future where regulators have zero meaningful authority to hold giant companies accountable for anything. In telecom, this is all driven by the delusion that once you remove oversight of companies like Comcast and AT&T, amazing “free market” synergies fill the vacuum, unleashing amazing new benefits and synergies everywhere you look.

Of course, that’s manufactured delusion. Without competition or regulatory oversight, companies like Comcast and AT&T simply double down on all of their worst impulses. And the GOP fully supports that future, whether it’s the demolition of net neutrality, high broadband prices due to monopolization, a lack of consumer privacy, or your family getting ripped off by bullshit fees and surcharges.

But despite the widespread, bipartisan unpopularity of U.S. telecom giants, the GOP never has to truly own its policy decisions on this front. In part because they’ve now got their own propaganda-focused press sure to frame any attempt to hold corporations accountable as government overreach. But because the “both sides,” view from nowhere mainstream press is incapable of calling out obvious corruption.

To make matters worse, there are several upcoming Supreme Court rulings that will be specifically designed to undermine already shaky U.S. regulatory authority further. And here, too, the press hasn’t really explained the stakes to the American public adequately. What could possibly go wrong?

Filed Under: broadband, congressional review act, fcc, high speed internet, privacy, ted cruz, telecom

The Day Ted Cruz Stopped A Bad Internet Bill

from the right-for-a-day dept

Well, this was a bit of a surprise. Over the past couple of weeks I wrote about how Senator Josh Hawley was planning to try to hotline his terrible No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act. As we have explained multiple times, the bill is so poorly drafted that it would make a mess of the entire internet. After rumors of two attempted hotlines (effectively trying to sneak the bill through if no Senator objects) planned for last week, and then a rumor of a Tuesday night attempt, Hawley finally took to the floor Wednesday morning to make the push. If C-SPAN’s clunky embed feature works, you can watch it here:

The key point: a Senator did step up to oppose, and it was not one you would expect. Senator Ted Cruz ended up blocking Hawley’s bill, which is a bit of a surprise, since much of the false mythology about Section 230, including the very wrong claim that under Section 230 a website has to “choose” between being a “platform” or a “publisher” seems to have originated with Cruz.

So if there were any Senator who you’d think would be thrilled to support Hawley’s destructive attack on 230 through the backdoor of AI, you’d think it would be Cruz. But he chose to go the other way. And while he reasoning was mostly misleading bullshit, he actually did make a few good points in his objection.

But, first, let’s deal with Hawley’s nonsense.

We’re here today to ask one very simple question. Are the biggest most powerful technology companies in the world going to be the only companies in this country? The only companies on the face of the Earth who are absolutely immune for anything and everything they do.

I mean, so not surprisingly, Hawley starts off on a lie. Section 230 does not just apply to big tech companies. It applies to anyone (including users for doing things like retweeting). And it does not, in any way, shape or form, make companies “absolutely immune for anything and everything they do.”

All of that is wrong. Section 230 applies to anyone — company or individual — who passes along or hosts _someone else’_s speech. And all it says is that the entity hosting or passing along someone else’s speech is not liable for that speech. The user who created that speech is still liable. And the intermediary is still liable for anything they, themselves, do to imbue speech with any sort of illegality.

So Hawley’s entire complaint about 230 is just based on a lie. Multiple lies.

From there, Hawley continues to lie:

Are they going to be the only ones who can give our children advice on how to kill themselves? Who can give our children advice on how to procure the romantic interests of 30 and 40 and 50 year olds? Are they going to be the only ones who can push the most unbelievable content at our kids use our kids images to create deep fakes that ruin their lives. Are they going to be able to do all of this and not be held accountable?

Because right now in America, they’re the only companies who cannot be taken to court for a simple suit when they violate their own terms of service when they violate their own commitments to their customers.

Again, everything here is nonsense. Any company or individual is protected in the exact same manner for third party speech. And the reason a website cannot be taken to court for violating their own terms of service is the exact same reason you can’t sue your local bar owner for tossing your ass on the sidewalk when you start a fight. It’s their property, their rules.

From there, Hawley goes a little nuts on misunderstanding AI:

And I would just submit to you that when it comes to AI and the generative technology that AI represents. I know that these big tech companies who own almost all of the AI development tools processes and equipment in this country. I know they promise US that AI is going to be wonderful. It’s gonna be fantastic for all of us. Maybe that’s true Mr. President, but it’s also true that AI is doing all kinds of incredible things. Here’s just one example. Here’s the AI chatbot from Bing. It’s Microsoft, I believe, having an interesting conversation with a journalist, in which the chatbot recommends… he says… or it says… “you’re married, but you’re not happy.” The journalist is a he. “You’re married, but you’re not satisfied. You’re married, but you’re not in love.”

The chatbot goes on to recommend that this individual — by the way, the chatbot has no idea how old this person is or who this person is — the chatbot goes on to recommend that this person leave his spouse, divorce his spouse, break up his family. Oh just another day at the office for AI.

So, look, this famous anecdote, which involved NY Times reporter Kevin Roose, was one that got a lot of attention. What Hawley leaves out (conveniently) is that if you read the entire transcript, Roose repeatedly prodded and pushed Bing’s AI chat to get this kind of result, and it only came very far into the conversation, which is a known issue with AI systems and why many now limit the length of a chat they’ll allow.

It was not just some random AI telling Roose to leave his wife.

And, even if it was… what exactly does Hawley think is a cause of action here that Roose might be able to bring against Microsoft? Is there something illegal about a bot telling you it loves you?

Hawley’s next example is tragic, but again, without any real cause of action:

Here’s another AI chatbot that recommended to a user — there’s no age restrictions here, there’s no way to verify who is having conversations with this technology — this chat bot recommended that the interlocutor kill himself saying if you wanted to die, why didn’t you do it sooner?

The horrifying thing Mr. President is that this individual who is having this conversation did kill himself?

He took the advice of this technology.

Now, as we’ve discussed in the past, there are huge problems with ever putting liability on a third party for someone’s decision to end their life by suicide. For one, it gives those thinking about ending their life even more reason to do it, knowing they can “punish” someone they see as an enemy. Just blame the person whose life you want to ruin, and not only do they have to deal with the eventual guilt, they may also now face legal liability, even if they did nothing to encourage someone’s death.

And, in this case, we have no way of knowing if the AI chat is what pushed this individual over the line. We can argue that AI chat bots should be better about recommending help, and I’d agree with that, but to hold it responsible for someone’s death is a huge leap.

From there, Hawley throws out a bunch of stats that don’t really say what he wants them to say:

Now I’ll just point out that when it comes to our teenagers — and I’m the father of three when it comes to our teenagers — 58% of kids this last year said that they used generative AI. You may think well for research — well, not only for that. No, almost 30% said that they used it to deal with anxiety or mental health issues. 22% said they used it to resolve issues with friends. 16% said they used it to deal with family conflicts.

Now, a normal, in-touch-with-reality Senator might look at those numbers and think “gee, perhaps we should fix our mental healthcare situation in the US, such that teenagers don’t have to rely on bots, but actually have access to good mental health care and social services that can help them!”

But, no, instead, Hawley wants to put liability on AI companies such that kids will have even fewer places to turn to when they run into mental health issues. Great job, Senator!

From there, Hawley goes down the old trope of comparing speech to poison. But, again, that’s not how any of this works:

I just submit to you this. I remember the great phrase of President Reagan. He used to say “trust but verify.” Maybe it’s time to allow the parents of this country to trust but verify, maybe it’s time to put into the hands of the parents, vis-à-vis these companies, the same power they have against pharmaceutical companies who try to put asbestos in the baby powder. The same power that they have against any other company that would try to hurt their kids, harm their kids, lie to their kids, the power go to court.

Again, literally poisoning kids is entirely different from “your kid might come across speech that they don’t like via AI.”

Not understanding that is just one of Hawley’s many confused positions.

And to have their day in court. They don’t have that power now why well because this government gives the big tech companies a sweetheart deal a deal. Nobody else in America gets a subsidy worth billions of dollars a year known as section 230. Big Tech can’t be held accountable. Big Tech can’t be put on the line. Big Tech can’t be made responsible.

Again, literally all of this is wrong. Section 230 does not apply just to big tech. And it’s not a “subsidy.” It’s just making sure that liability gets placed on the party who actually did the speech.

And also, it remains quite incredible that Republicans, who for years have fought for “tort reform” to try to stop “ambulance chasing” lawyers from filing frivolous lawsuits, are now eager to push that when it comes to tech:

What this bill does Mr. President, it’s a simple bill. It doesn’t contain regulation. It doesn’t contain new standards for this and that. None of that. It just says that these huge companies can be liable like any other company. No special protections from government. It just removes government protection. It just breaks up the Big Government Big Tech cartel. It’s all it does and it says parents can go into court on the same terms as anybody else and make their case. Surely that’s not too much to ask, you know, the companies even they don’t want to be on the record saying it’s too much to ask.

Again, all of that is a lie. Section 230 already applies to everyone, not just big tech. And this bill doesn’t put them on an even playing field, instead it says that if you use AI, you suddenly get less protection than everyone else, and will have to go through long and expensive litigation without the protections of 230 for someone else’s speech.

Anyway, there was not much clarity over the past few days if anyone would object to the hotline. I’d heard last week that maybe Senator Cruz would, or possibly Senator Rand Paul, but that no Democrats were interested in opposing it, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. Opposing bad bills from Senator Hawley is the kind of thing that any Democrat should jump at.

Eventually, though, it was Cruz who stood up to point out that Hawley’s bill was a problem, both in how it worked and where it stood procedurally. He starts out with the procedural aspects, highlighting that there’s all sorts of process, process that should have gone through the committee where Cruz is the top GOP Senator, and which Hawley was trying to skip over:

I appreciate my friend from Missouri. I appreciate his passion. And I share his passion for reigning in the abuses of big Tech. Big Tech has a lot that they’re responsible for.

The Senator for Missouri is right that big Tech is doing a lot of harm to our kids. The Senator for Missouri is also right that big Tech has been complicit in the most far-reaching censorship of free speech our nation has ever seen. These are issues. I’ve worked for a long time to rein in Big Tech, to rein in censorship, to protect free speech.

However, the approach this bill takes: I don’t think substantively accomplishes the goals that the senator from Missouri and I both want to accomplish. My concerns are both procedural and substantive procedurally. This bill has not yet been debated. This bill hasn’t been considered by the Commerce Committee. This bill hasn’t been marked up. This bill hasn’t been the subject of testimony to understand the impact of what it would be.

The Commerce Committee on which I’m the ranking member has a strong tradition of passing legislation in its jurisdiction. To date 22 bills have been reported out of the Commerce Committee. I’m more than happy to work with the Senator from Missouri — and he and I have worked on many issues together — on this bill.

But we need to make sure when legislating in this area that we’re doing so in a way that would be effective. And that wouldn’t do unintended consequences

From there, Cruz also rightly points out that a rushed attempt to use this sledgehammer of a tool as a way to regulate AI — especially without anyone bothering to explore what this bill would actually do:

You know when it comes to AI, AI is a transformative technology. It has massive potential. It’s already having massive impacts on productivity and the potential over the coming years is even greater. And there are voices in this chamber, many on the Democrat side of the aisle, that want government to play a very heavy hand and regulating AI. I think that’s dangerous.

I want America to continue to lead innovation.

Just this year in the United States, over 38 billion dollars have been invested in American AI startups. That’s this year. That is more than twice the investments in the rest of the world combined.

Look, there’s a global race for AI. And it’s a race that we are engaged with China. China is pursuing it through government directed funds. It would be bad for America if China became dominant AI. Right now the 38 billion dollars that was invested this past year in American AI companies. It is more than 14 times the investment of Chinese AI companies

We need to keep that differential we need to make sure that America is leading the AI Revolution.

I mean, okay, if that’s a reason not to break the internet, that’s good, I guess?

Then we get to Cruz’s… somewhat odd comments on 230.

And I agree that section 230 is too broad. In fact, the last time this body considered legislation successful legislation to rain in section 230 was in 2017. We had a robust debate over reforms to section 230 to close a loophole for websites that were profiting from sex trafficking on their platforms.

That bill introduced by Senator Portman — the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act — ultimately gained 70 Senate co-sponsors, received extensive debate, and committee and passed out of the Senate with only two no votes.

I personally was proud to be an original co-sponsor of that important legislation, which is now law.

I mean, it’s still kinda bizarre to watch Senators still trying to take credit for FOSTA/SESTA when report after report after report has come out highlighting how it’s been a near total failure and has literally resulted in deaths, and many are calling for it to be repealed. But I guess it’s Senator Cruz, so what can you expect.

Senator Cruz continues to be very confused about Section 230, but, in his confusion he did say one very accurate thing:

When it comes to censorship repealing 230 would not eliminate censorship. In fact repealing 230. I fear would lead to an increase in censorship.

For once, Cruz is actually correct about Section 230. Repealing Section 230 would mean that companies hosting speech would face expensive litigation for 3rd party speech, which would make them way more hesitant to host that speech, and therefore they’d be likely to pull down speech much more quickly (if they allow it at all) in response to government action. Thus, it’s a clear plan for censorship: when the government makes a move to suppress speech.

Of course, Cruz making sense can only last for a little while.

What I’ve long advocate — and I’m happy to work with the senator from Missouri on — is using Section 230 reform to create an incentive not to censor in other words, repealing section 230 protection when Big Tech engages in censorship, when Big Tech stifles free speech, they lose their immunity from Congress in those circumstances. So that 230 becomes a safe harbor an incentive to have a free and open marketplace for ideas.

I think that is tremendously important. It has been a passion of mine for years and I know the senator from Missouri cares deeply about it as well. So I extend an offer to my friend from Missouri. Let’s work together on this.

But this bill right now I think is not the right solution at this time and so object.

Cruz’s formulation for the bill he wants is obviously unconstitutional, as it would be a form of compelled speech, requiring that websites leave up content that they don’t wish to leave up, which violates their own terms of service, and which leads to harassment and abuse. But, you know, we’ll deal with that when it comes.

For now, Senator Cruz actually did the right thing and blocked Hawley’s bill.

Hawley got up after Cruz and the two had a bit of a back and forth that was mostly nonsense, though Hawley seemed immensely pleased by the idea that they could talk to each other rather than at each other (you’d think they’d have figured that out before, but okay…).

Hawley goes back to the point of letting the tort lawyers and the courts hash things out (something Cruz has supported in the past) and asks what’s wrong with that here. Cruz more or less responds that he’s fine unleashing tort lawyers on social media companies, but not fine with unleashing them on AI companies who he wants to lead the world:

Hawley: I remember my friend from Texas saying wisely in a Judiciary Committee hearing not that long ago, and the Senator will correct me if I misremember, but my my memory is that the Senator from Texas said when it comes to these big tech companies, we can try to find a thousand ways to regulate them, but maybe the best thing we can do is just let people get into court have their day in court, you know, just just let them get in there. Let let them make their arguments.

Don’t try to figure out how to micromanage them. Just open up the courtroom doors according to the usual rules.

Does my friend from Texas think that in the AI context that that is any different? I mean, why would it be different there? Why wouldn’t that same approach be effective here?

Cruz: Well, listen, it is a good question and it is true. I am quite open to using exposure to liability as a way to rein in the excesses of Big Tech. But I think we should do so in a focused and targeted way. AI is an incredibly important area of innovation and simply unleashing trial lawyers to sue the living daylights out of every technology company for AI? I don’t think that’s prudent policy. We want America to lead an AI and so I’m a much more of a believer of using the potential of liability in a focused targeted way to stop the behavior that we think is so harmful, whether it is behavior that is harming our kids — and I am deeply deeply concerned about the garbage that big Tech directs at our children — or whether it is the censorship practices.

I support the approach but in my view it needs to be more targeted and produce the outcomes we want, rather than simply harming American technology across the board. That shouldn’t be our objective. Our objective should be changing their behavior so that they’re not engaging in conduct that that is harmful to American consumers and to American children and parents.

Anyway, yesterday, it appears that Senator Ted Cruz helped block a bad internet bill, even if he did so for mostly confused reasons. Still, he did it, and deserves at least some amount of kudos for doing so.

But I sure do hope that someone hangs onto that clip of Cruz revealing that an outright repeal of Section 230 will lead to more censorship. Because I kinda feel that might be handy before too long.

Filed Under: ai, generative ai, josh hawley, liability, section 230, ted cruz

Senator Ted Cruz Pretends To Care About Wasteful Broadband Subsidies

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

Tue, Sep 19th 2023 05:28am - Karl Bode

We’ve noted a few times now how the 2021 infrastructure bill includes more than $42.5 billion to shore up broadband access. And while a huge chunk of that money will absolutely be going to giant telecom monopolies with a long history of subsidy fraud, a lot of the funding is genuinely going to help fund a parade of broadband expansion projects that simply wouldn’t have been possibly previously.

We’ve also noted how Republicans voted against the infrastructure bill, then have turned immediately around to take credit for the broadband deployments it enables among local constituents. Texas Senator Ted Cruz has been no exception; he’s repeatedly tried to take credit for highway projects only made possible by the infrastructure bill, while simultaneously criticizing the bill’s very existence.

It’s a very “have your cake and eat it too” situation where Republicans get to obstruct progress while simultaneously taking credit for improvements they opposed. After all, who’s going to correct their constituents’ perception in an ocean of partisan propaganda?

Last week, Ted Cruz came out swinging against the underlying broadband subsidy program (the Broadband Equity And Deployment (BEAD) program run by the NTIA) made possible by the infrastructure bill. One of his primary claims is that money is being “wasted” by “overbuilding” broadband into areas already served by giant incumbent monopolies like AT&T and Comcast:

“The report basically lays out the Republican view of broadband subsidies in recommending “fixes” for BEAD. Those include that the money should not be used to overbuild where there is already service and should not be biased in favor of fiber.”

But in telecom corruption land, “overbuilding” has generally been code for bringing competition to bear against industry giants. And even then, the BEAD program goes well out of its way to ensure that lion’s share of money will first be going to parts of the country that lack broadband access. This aversion to “overbuilding” is just an aversion to competition, dressed up to sound like adult policymaking.

The NTIA has also tried to prioritize the subsidization of fiber deployments because fiber is inherently more reliable and future proof than technologies like wireless. AT&T and a handful of fixed wireless companies didn’t like that.

The result is a “report” by Cruz that makes up various claims and data points I’d bet a toe was ghost written by industry. Its function is to basically shame government for spending any money on “duplicative or wasteful” competition to monopoly power. Its synopsis does a great job pretending that Republicans like Cruz actually care about telecom subsidy fraud:

“Forty-two billion dollars is more than enough money to deliver broadband to every American. Will it succeed in doing so? In light of these findings, count me skeptical. This report should serve as a call to action for the Biden administration and the states to ensure BEAD dollars are not funneled to duplicative and wasteful purposes, and instead are used to solve the nation’s connectivity challenges once and for all.”

(For what it’s worth, $42 billion isn’t close to enough to shore up U.S. broadband gaps, even under a scenario where the subsidy program was flawless).

If there’s a real problem with BEAD and other federal subsidy programs, it’s that giants like AT&T and Comcast — with long histories of taking taxpayer money for projects they half-complete — will almost certainly nab a disproportionate amount of funding using unreliable maps whose improvement they’ve long opposed. But Cruz doesn’t mention — or care about — that.

Cruz is silent when a Texas-based company like AT&T gets a $42 billion tax break for doing absolutely nothing. He’ll routinely have nothing to say if AT&T is accused of ripping off taxpayers and the nation’s school system. If you’re a modern Republican, taxpayer money set aside for broadband deployment subsidies is only deemed “wasted” if it goes to anybody other than the dominant local telecom monopoly that funds their re-election campaign.

Throwing taxpayer money at the regional telecom monopolies directly responsible for high prices, spotty access, and slow speeds doesn’t fix the real problem of monopoly power and muted competition. Throwing some of that money at things like city-owned utilities, cooperatives, and municipalities building open access, next-generation fiber does challenge those monopolies, which is why guys like Cruz oppose it.

Cruz and the modern GOP support banning your town or city from building better, faster, more affordable fiber networks, even in instances where there are no other options available. The GOP even proposed a nationwide ban on community broadband during the middle of a pandemic that brutally showcased the need for reliable and affordable home internet.

Again, both Texas Senators Cruz and John Cornyn like to take credit for projects only made possible by an infrastructure bill they voted against. Coryn took plenty of heat back in June when he tried to take credit for the $3.3 billion in federal funds being funneled into the Lone Star State (the most of any state) to expand broadband access. Despite voting against it.

Cruz, himself a sort of mindless and terrible work of performance art at this point, wants to simultaneously get credit for the infrastructure bill he voted against, while also putting on a little stage play about being concerned about government waste. But he only really considers taxpayer money wasted if it goes to competitors to Texas companies like AT&T. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Republicans are historically terrible on telecom policy, because their primary “policy” always involves mindlessly kissing the ass of companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Occasionally they’ll try to pretend their policies go deeper than that, and it’s routinely adorable.

Filed Under: BEAD, broadband, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, john cornyn, ted cruz, telecom

One More Time With Feeling: The GOP Never Seriously Supported ‘Antitrust Reform’ Or Monopoly Busting

from the past-is-prologue dept

Wed, Apr 26th 2023 05:23am - Karl Bode

For the last few years, press and policy circles were absolutely dominated by talk about how there was an amazing “new, bipartisan coalition” of folks interested in “reining in ‘Big Tech’,” meaningfully checking corporate power, and finally embracing competent “antitrust reform.”

The problem: it was largely all bullshit.

The GOP in particular, which has, for forty years, embraced and encouraged monopolization and consolidation at nearly every turn (see: telecom, banking, insurance, media, healthcare, air travel, energy, etc.), was repeatedly portrayed by some pundits and journalists as “very serious about antitrust reform this time.”

At least as it applied to “Big Tech.” There are countless U.S. business sectors where monopolies and anticompetitive behaviors are rampant that Congress simply couldn’t give any less of a shit about because crowing wildly about them generally doesn’t get you a prime-time spot on corporation-controlled cable news. Legitimate anger at “Big Tech” did provide an opening for dialogue.

For years, many of these same experts quite correctly pointed out that U.S. antitrust reform had grown toothless and frail, our competition laws desperately needed updating in the Amazon era, and “are consumers happy?” (the traditional consumer welfare standard) no longer meaningfully measured all aspects of potential harm in complex internet-connected markets.

The problem: the GOP’s interest in antitrust reform was never really genuine. Politicians like Senators Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz glommed onto a legitimate reform movement primarily to gain leverage over Silicon Valley tech giants, hoping (pretty successfully, as it turns out) to scare them away from moderating the kind of race-baiting hate speech and political propaganda increasingly employed by America’s growing conspiracy theory addled authoritarians.

Some folks, like popular monopoly buster Matt Stoller — the subject of a somewhat glowing profile piece in Politico last week — meaningfully bought into Hawley’s claim he actually cared about the public interest on this subject. The most generous interpretation is that Stoller saw it as an opportunity to develop a meaningful new bipartisan coalition on antitrust reform.

It didn’t go particularly well, something that anybody with even a fleeting grasp of fifty years of GOP policy history probably could have predicted:

For some of Stoller’s critics, the episode put in sharp relief the folly of his attempt to celebrate Hawley’s antitrust work. About ten days after the Capitol riot, a software engineer with his own interest in antitrust built a website — “Why Did Matt Stoller Shut Up About Josh Hawley Dot Com” — complete with a countdown clock noting that Stoller had tweeted about Hawley just before midnight on the 5th but not since.

Politico’s interpretation is that legitimizing and validating the GOP’s hollow performance on antitrust reform was somehow a helpful means to an end, and that, as a result, Stoller has been “winning over Conservatives” despite some strange looks cast his direction by other trustbusters:

The Hawley gambit is part of a broader effort to build a bipartisan consensus around the idea that government should use its might to challenge the power of big business. And amid what some on the right are calling the “Realignment,” which has some conservatives and Republicans reevaluating their orientation toward corporate power, he has a fresh opportunity to do just that.

The problem, again, is that the GOP was never actually interested in “reevaluating their orientation toward corporate power,” and claiming otherwise gave the party unearned policy credibility in the media and policy circles it never had to actually earn.

There’s fleeting evidence the GOP was every actually interested in any of the policy reforms Stoller and friends claimed they were shifting toward.

GOP party leaders are still out there, week after week, defending monopolization across countless sectors, dismantling the regulatory state, undermining the nominations of hugely popular reformers, stacking the courts to the benefit of large corporations, and coddling the most radical whims of unchecked corporate power across nearly every industry.

So unsurprisingly, not much ever actually came from the GOP’s sudden and completely uncharacteristic support of antitrust reform, despite two straight years of sound and fury by Stoller, Glenn Greenwald, and some major news outlets like Politico.

The results were some, sloppy bills, several specifically tailored to only apply to the biggest tech companies, which failed to gain necessary traction in Congress despite endless press rhetoric about a bold new “bipartisan” coalition that was destined to change everything. All while the GOP saw relatively little coverage of efforts like its propaganda-laden assault on FCC nominee Gigi Sohn.

To be clear, despite the press narrative to the contrary, I don’t think either party is particularly serious about antitrust reform. Congress is simply too grotesquely corrupt, and the combined cross-industry lobbying opposition to meaningful reform (see: consumer privacy) is too gargantuan to be overcome without a massive policy and cultural sea change, serious and unified lobbying and campaign finance reform, and an historic, voter-driven upheaval of the affluent, captured, congressional gerontocracy.

By absolutely every indication, we’ll all be waiting a while.

Some key Democrats, like Katie Porter and Lina Khan, do at least actually care about the issue. Some key Republicans, like Ken Buck, kind of care, but are so mired in bigoted partisan fever dreams (see his threat to use antitrust to punish “woke Apple” or his tendency to shoot his own legislation in the ass via strange missteps) he’s effectively useless as any kind of serious reformer.

The peril of taking the GOP seriously on this subject came with a nasty side effect: it normalized and legitimized insurrectionist pseudo-populists like Hawley, who were able to hide their real agendas — namely their assault on content moderation of increasingly unhinged authoritarian propaganda — under the banner of legitimate interest in anti-monopolization and antitrust reform.

That’s not to say there’s no value in bipartisan coalition building, or that even the most corrupt policy makers can never change their stripes. But that’s a far cry from what happened here: the legitimization and normalization of increasingly unhinged authoritarian bullshit artists with a generation-long history of supporting unchecked corporate power on nearly every level.

You needed only look at the last 50 years of GOP policy history to see how this gambit was going to turn out, something ignored by folks like Stoller (whose not so “progressive” China hawkery is ignored by Politico), keen on creating an illusory bipartisan coalition that never actually was.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, big tech, josh hawley, matt stoller, monopolies, monopoly busting, ted cruz, telecom

Ted Cruz Goes After ‘Woke’ Microsoft Over Xbox Power Saving Settings Update

from the woke-on-LAN dept

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you will be familiar with the concept of the anti-“woke” culture war the Republican Party grows and farms for its own purposes. This isn’t to say there aren’t real cultural conflicts we need to work out as a country, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that much of what you hear about in the press is specifically cultivated by one party or another to generate headlines and outrage for the purposes of votes and campaign contributions.

And if you’re looking for an avatar for this sort of un-principled outrage manufacturing, Ted Cruz would be one of the first names I would bring up. Cruz claims to be a strict constitutionalist, while also threatening companies for exercising their free speech rights. In most of the cases, Cruz is railing against “the woke” in favor of shit-peddling lie-factories like OAN, claiming that a company choosing what to do within its own private purview is somehow “censorship” in favor of “wokeism.”

And it gets really dumb at times. You may have heard recently that the GOP was out there claiming that the White House was going to be coming to collect not your guns (this time), but your gas-powered ovens/stoves. It wasn’t really true. What actually happened was a consumer safety group within the government pointed out that there were a lot of health risks with these ovens and that the group might seek to lower future production of them in favor of safer electric ovens. No jackbooted thugs were going to go house to house and haul away your grandmother’s gas stove.

But then came Cruz also going after Microsoft. Why Microsoft? Well, because Microsoft had embraced wokeism, according to Cruz, by updating its standard Xbox power settings to be more power efficient. Yes. Yes, really.

Here’s what Microsoft’s Xbox update actually does: It will cut down on power usage by up to a factor of 20 by changing the default setting of Xbox consoles from “sleep” to “shut down.” Microsoft promises this update won’t affect performance or gameplay, nor the ability to update the Xbox overnight. The main side effect is it will take a bit longer for the console to boot. The new firmware will also be “carbon aware” and try to time its downloads and updates for periods when it will have the least impact on the electrical grid. And if for some reason you don’t like these changes, everything can be switched back to how it was previously.

Innocuous. Good, even. But after Cruz’s tweet picked up The Blaze’s narrative it set off a wave of stories from Fox News and the like. According to them, not only was Xbox “going woke” by making these environmentally friendly changes, but Fox and Friends hosts Ainsley Earhardt and Jimmy Failla suggested Microsoft was “trying to recruit your kids into climate politics.”

The open question appears to be: if this is wokeism, which it’s not, then that doesn’t explain what in the world is wrong with any of this. What, specifically, is Cruz objecting to here? The end customer is barely going to notice any difference other than a slightly longer boot time. The only other differences he or she might notice is a lower electricity bill, a longer-lasting Xbox console, and maybe the air outside is just a little bit less polluted. Where is there a problem to rail against here?

But the idea behind a manufactured culture war is to make good use of the echo chamber, which is exactly what happened next.

“But again, what’s the point of video games? It’s for kids to be kids,” Faila suggested in a Tuesday Fox and Friends segment about Microsoft’s Xbox plans. “Now you sit down and pick up a controller and they’re like ‘by the way, the world is on fire, AHH.’ You know what I mean? You just want to play the game!”

And you can. That hasn’t changed. The console doesn’t tell you “the world is on fire.” The console doesn’t open to a splash screen requiring you to donate to Black Lives Matter before you start your game. It just… you know… starts up and plays your game.

So please, whatever your political leanings, don’t fall for this stuff. Cruz knows better, but he’s trying to take advantage of you. Don’t let him.

Filed Under: energy, energy saving, power saving, ted cruz, woke, xbox
Companies: microsoft

Klobuchar’s Link Tax Is Back… And Somehow Even Worse? Helps Trumpist Grifters Get Free Money & No Moderation From Google

from the who-are-you-trying-to-help-here dept

So, we’ve talked quite a bit about the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), Senator Amy Klobuchar’s attempt to do Rupert Murdoch’s bidding and force successful internet companies to send cash to media companies for… linking to them. Yes, not only do the news orgs want the traffic from Google, but they also want to get paid for it. This whole scheme was dreamed up by Rupert Murdoch, who after decades of pretending to be about free markets, started demanding the government force internet companies to subsidize him for his own failures to innovate.

The nature of the JCPA is that it allows news organizations to band together into a cartel to “negotiate” with big internet companies to force them to “pay” for “access” where access really means “linking to us and sending us the traffic we crave, and already use search engine optimization tactics to try to increase.” If the big internet companies don’t agree to pay for this thing that does not require payment (on the internet, linking is and must remain fundamentally free), then the cartel can submit an amount they think they should get paid to an arbitrator. The internet company can submit their own alternative, but the arbitrator has to chose, baseball-style, between one of the two submissions, and can’t pick anything else.

Two weeks ago there was a “markup” in which Klobuchar seemed to think she had a deal to push the bill out of committee and onto the floor (despite no real hearings addressing the many, many issues with the bill). However, Ted Cruz blew up the bill by attaching an amendment about content moderation.

Apparently, Klobuchar and Cruz spent the last two weeks negotiating, and now the bill is back up for markup after they came to an agreement… that appears to give Cruz and Trumpist grifter disinfo peddlers exactly what they want. As pointed out by Adam Kovacevich, the new language in the manager’s amendment says that in the “negotiation” internet companies basically can’t even raise content moderation issues.

The mgrs amendment adds this ⬇️ language in several places, which seems to be Cruz's way of preventing platforms from engaging in content moderation against right-wing news:

In other words, Klobuchar folded on Cruz's anti-content moderation amdmt. 2/ pic.twitter.com/HZ4KGRDREW

— Adam Kovacevich (@adamkovac) September 21, 2022

Again, this gives much more power to Trumpist grifter sites who can band together, demand free cash from Google, and Google is prohibited from saying anything about content moderation issues. It’s… a weird thing for Klobuchar to be on board with, but she’s made it clear in this and other bills that she has no problem helping out Trumpist websites if it means attacking Google and/or the open internet. Seems like strange priorities to me, but what do I know?

Indeed, the Daily Caller, one of many Trumpist grifter sites is already celebrating how the deal “protects conservative media.” When Tucker Carlson’s publication is cheering on a Democrat’s bill for how it will “protect conservative media,” a sensible Democrat might reconsider what they’ve done.

But not Amy Klobuchar! If it’s bad for Google, who cares if it helps out Breitbart and the Daily Caller to spread more nonsense. Great work, Senator.

The co-sponsor of the bill, Senator Kennedy, is now saying out loud that the bill bars content moderation of conservatives:

“We have reached an agreement that clarifies what the bill was designed to do: give local news outlets a real seat at the negotiating table and bar the tech firms from throttling, filtering, suppressing or curating content,” Kennedy’s office told the DCNF. “The only reason I can see for parties to oppose this bill is that they have a problem either with healthy market competition or free speech.”

Kennedy’s final sentence is particularly ridiculous. Free speech includes (outside of the 5th Circuit) editorial discretion. And this bill is a huge attack on editorial discretion in multiple ways. It limits the ability of websites to remove content they find problematic. It forces companies to pay for content that is literally free to link to, it effectively rewrites copyright law. It also does not create “healthy market competition,” when businesses are not even allowed to freely associate or not. There are so, so many reasons to oppose this bill.

As Kovacevich notes, the other big change is that the bill is even more explicit that they are negotiating over “pricing terms” rather than just terms. That’s just doubling down on the fact that this is a tax, even as Klobuchar and fans of this bill (the news industry who will get free money out of it) pretend it’s not a tax.

In my original post about the bill, I had noted that there was no definition of “access” (the bill requires big tech companies to pay for “access”) which made no sense since that was the whole crux of the bill: that you were paying for “access” by linking to sites. In a proposed manager’s amendment that got passed around last week, there was a definition of access included, saying “the term ‘access’ means acquiring, crawling, or indexing content.”

That… would have been really bad, because it’s saying that crawling and indexing might require a fee. That can’t be how anything works.

Oddly, this new manager’s amendment no longer appears to have a definition included for access.

So, again, this bill seems like the worst of all worlds. It forces companies to pay grifters for “access” to sites they might not even want to link to. And, because of the bizarre baseball style arbitration here, we’re fundamentally setting up a system where big companies need to pay to do something that is fundamentally free on the open internet.

This is a horrifically dangerous bill. It takes a sledge hammer to a fundamental principle of the open internet… all to aid Trumpist media grifters. Why is this bill coming from a Democratic Senator?

Filed Under: amy klobuchar, crawling tax, indexing tax, jcpa, journalism, link tax, linking, news, ted cruz