Nachos, Antitrust Reform, Florida Man, Privacy, Dig Once & More
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Longtime friends of TechFreedom probably already know all about Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, the entrepreneurial genius behind our beloved nachos and ballpark nachos. He created an amazing dish with few ingredients he had at hand AND named it after himself. Legendary. But as the weather turns a little nicer day by day, keep this important fact in mind: pork tacos are better for your health than granola bars.
So fill up your Camelbak with margaritas, pack pork tacos and get out there, tech adventurers! On with the update!
And welcome to our s̶u̶b̶n̶a̶c̶h̶o̶ — er, substack. Please share it with your friends and colleagues!
Privacy. Washingtonian Magazine included Gerry Stegmaier, a TechFreedom Adjunct Fellow, among 23 tech and telecom experts in its list of Washington’s Most Influential People. We first discovered Gerry through his 2013 law review article “Psychics, Russian Roulette, and Data Security: The FTC’s Hidden Data Security Requirements,” which argued that the FTC’s “common law” of settlements and consent decrees failed to provide companies with the “fair notice” required by the Constitution.
Last year, Gerry, a partner at Reed Smith LLP, worked with us on an amicus brief we filed in Facebook v. Patel. We asked the Supreme Court to review a Ninth Circuit decision that class action plaintiffs had “standing” to sue Facebook in federal court for purely technical violations of a state privacy law — even though they never alleged any concrete injury. The Court declined to grant cert, but the Ninth Circuit decision still threatens to enable a cottage industry of privacy and data litigation security litigation — especially as more states enact their own bespoke privacy laws. Follow Gerry on Twitter and LinkedIn for his running commentary about privacy and the FTC.
Corbin published a Legal Backgrounder for Washington Legal Foundation on the state of the push for federal data-privacy legislation. His paper is called “The Fraught Path to a Federal Privacy Law Businesses Can Live With” — which pretty much sums up the situation. Companies want a law that preempts state privacy laws, and that contains no private right to sue. But as Corbin explains, they are unlikely to get both, and will have to make tough choices about where to compromise.
Antitrust. The Hill published Asheesh’s op-ed regarding our “positive antitrust agenda,” which we shared broadly with congressional staffers and others. Like our coalition letter, the op-ed identifies five areas where both sides of the aisle might find agreement.
Asheesh live-tweeted during this week’s Senate hearing on antitrust. Among other points, we argued that most antitrust experts oppose substantive changes to the antitrust laws and that, in any event, any changes would be premature in light of the pending lawsuits and new vertical merger guidelines. He also noted that one witness, Prof. Rose, had written previously that there’s no correlation between industry concentration and market competitiveness.
Social Media. Florida Republicans are trying to impose Fairness Doctrine requirements on social media through a mix of consumer protection law and campaign finance law. The First Amendment bars both, as Corbin and Berin explain in an essay published in Lawfare. Ironically, as we explain, until very recently, it used to be Republicans who argued that the First Amendment protected all media equally, and that campaign finance law couldn’t be used to override the editorial rights of private companies. Check out the accompanying Twitter thread.
On the latest Tech Policy Podcast, Corbin speaks with Dr. Anna Zaitsev, a postdoctoral scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about YouTube’s progress in driving viewers of radical messages toward more mainstream videos. As Dr. Zaitsev explains, YouTube needs flexibility, both in setting its policies and in tweaking its algorithms, in order to act quickly in spotting, blocking, and demoting ever-evolving forms of misinformation.
As Florida and other states consider unconstitutional bills that would force social-media websites to maintain more rigid content-moderation standards, this episode offers a timely message: placing content-moderation standards under government control would cause extremist content to spread more easily, more rapidly, and more widely.
Broadband. Berin appeared on the Community Broadband Bits Podcast. He encouraged local, state and federal policymakers to focus on leveraging the privacy sector to maximize the impact of taxpayer investments in broadband — an idea TechFreedom laid out in detail years ago. The federal government has a key role to play in putting conduit along federally funded highways and roads — “Dig Once.” And of course, we also talked about Section 230 and all the confusion surrounding the law.
We’re hiring! Lastly, we are still looking to grow our team by hiring an antitrust expert and an external affairs & comms person. If you know anyone who would be a good fit, please send them our way.
Our friend Ignacio Anaya. Be like Nacho and…