Think of the Children
Plus more state bills, a mention of our FTC letter, antitrust guidelines, and more
First Amendment: On the latest Tech Policy Podcast, Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Techdirt, joined Corbin to discuss state governments’ attempts to “protect” kids by restricting their access to social media. Maybe what we really need is to protect kids—and the Internet—from the government.
State Legislation: In a letter to the California State Assembly, joined by several scholars, Ari and Berin explained how the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) would violate the First Amendment and undermine content moderation in the same ways as the ill-fated JCPA.
We joined several free-speech and civil-liberties organizations against Montana’s bill banning TikTok. Ari was quoted in the ACLU press release: “Legislatures must do the hard work of actually defining the harm and carefully tailoring any proposed resolutions, rather than aiming the flamethrower of moral panic at the First Amendment.”
MediaPost (paywall) quoted Ari about some of the odd exceptions in Arkansas’s new youth social media ban, a law that’s even more problematic for what it does than for what it leaves out.
The Dispatch (paywall) also quoted Ari about Utah’s youth social media ban: “These bills are all written with very little idea of how they’re going to work in practice. I will eat my shorts if there aren’t challenges filed to it.”
Antitrust: Bilal was published in this month’s CPI Antitrust Chronicle (paywall). His paper proposes guidelines the FTC and DOJ could issue on how to apply existing antitrust laws to platform competition—as an alternative to rewriting those laws or reviving less credible theories of competitive harm. Check back next week for the full paper.
FTC: In an essay at City Journal, Corbin explained how the FTC has become a “fourth branch” of government. Instead of respecting Congress, the federal courts, and the president, it's defying, sidestepping, and subverting all three.
Law.com (paywall) mentioned our letter urging the FTC to allow reply comments in its proceeding on non-compete clauses. This will be the most significant rule issued in the FTC’s 109-year history—and, for the first time since 1914, there’s a good chance there won’t be a single minority Commissioner to write a dissent. That means reply comments will be the only way to hear an “open exchange of ideas” on the issue, and whether the FTC has the authority it claims to write competition rules.
Section 230: Corbin was quoted in the Maryland Daily Record about Section 230’s relevance to Gonzalez v. Google: “The plaintiffs’ suit is really about the user-generated content and is a loser under Section 230.”
Next week, Shane will moderate two panels at AEI’s Section 230 Spring Summit—including a discussion with Chris Cox, the author of Section 230. Ari’s panel will explore the current state of Section 230, and Berin’s panel will focus on ideas for Section 230 reform.
What? Somebody has to say it.