Ice cold: Frozen yogurt and the Texas social media bill
Plus, an analysis of tech companies' obligations to the FCC, and a podcast on websites' right to editorial control
Whatever happened to frozen yogurt? In the early 2010s, you’d be lucky to drive by any suburban strip mall and not pass at least one seemingly obligatory fro-yo shop. This culinary trend was, dare I say, one of the best in recent memory. Parents got to take their kids out for ice cream more often without fearing childhood obesity in their household (that is, until their kid started piling on the toppings at 16 Handles). But all good things come to an end. Big Fro-Yo died. It’s been gradually declining for years, and COVID-19 couldn’t have been good for the self-serve business model at many of the most popular chains.
Theories abound as to why the fro-yo bubble started to pop in the first place. Some attribute it to new trends in healthy eating — dieters started eating light, wholesome meals almost all the time, with the occasional full-blown indulgence like the subsequent “Freakshake” trend mixed in. Frozen yogurt occupied too much of a gray area in between the two extremes. The concept of “ice cream topped with Oreos and Reese’s Cups, but make it healthy” no longer made much sense. Growing antipathy toward dairy and a waning fear of high-fat foods among the health-food community may just have been the nail in the coffin.
Maybe I’m an outlier, but I miss the frozen yogurt craze. Luckily, plenty of dessert trends continue to pop up. Bubble tea has exploded (no pun intended) over the last year. Apparently, so have “churro waffles.” And at Surreal Creamery in New York City, you can now get an unapologetically unhealthy mason jar full of bright blue, “monster cookie”-flavored soft serve. Even in the frozen dessert segment… the free market provides.
Social Media. In its special session, the Texas legislature revived and passed its own unconstitutional social media law this week. Governor Greg Abbott is expected to sign it — setting the stage for yet another courtroom showdown. In case you missed it, Ari explained the glaring legal problems with the bill back in May. He was quoted in USA Today, The Verge, Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, KnowTechie, and Screen Shot criticizing Texas’ failure to learn from the thrashing that Florida’s law got in court just a month ago, and predicting that the Texas law will similarly be held unconstitutional.
FCC. The Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project published Jim’s piece addressing whether the FCC can require Big Tech to pay into the Universal Service Fund, or pay regulatory fees to the FCC because they “benefit” from the FCC’s regulations. Jim argues that in order for the FCC to impose fees, it must have some jurisdiction over the entities, or else, as courts have noted, such “rules are ancillary to nothing.” Stay tuned, as the FCC is seeking comment on this very issue in the next few weeks.
Content Moderation. On last week’s Tech Policy Podcast, Corbin speaks with Mailyn Fidler, a fellow at the University of Nebraska Governance and Technology Center and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, about her recent law review article, The New Editors: Refining First Amendment Protections for Internet Platforms. Because most lawsuits attacking social media websites’ free speech rights are dismissed under Section 230 (which is good!), there are comparatively few cases fleshing out those websites’ right to editorial control under the First Amendment. So although it’s clear that the right to editorial control is strong, its exact contours remain imperfectly defined. Mailyn and Corbin discuss and debate edge cases—e.g., fraud, hate speech, algorithmically driven advertising—at the outer boundary of protected “editing.”