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David Kris opens this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast by laying out some of the massive disruption that the Biden Administration has kicked off in China’s semiconductor industry – and its Western suppliers. The reverberations of the administration’s new measures will be felt for years, and the Chinese government’s response, not to mention…

We open today’s episode by teasing the Supreme Court’s decision to review whether section 230 protects big platforms from liability for materially assisting terror groups whose speech they distribute (or even recommend). I predict that this is the beginning of the end of the house of cards that aggressive lawyering and good press have…

This episode features a much deeper, and more diverse, examination of the Fifth Circuit decision upholding Texas’s social media law. We devote the last half of the episode to a structured dialogue about the opinion between Adam Candeub and Alan Rozenshtein. Both have written about it already, Alan critically and Adam supportively.…

The big news of the week was a Fifth Circuit decision upholding Texas social media regulation law. It was poorly received by the usual supporters of social media censorship but I found it both remarkably well written and surprisingly persuasive. That does not mean it will survive the almost inevitable Supreme Court review but…

  • Gus Hurwitz brings us up to speed on tech bills in Congress. They are all dead, but some of them don’t know it yet. The big privacy bill, American Data Privacy and Protection Act, was killed by the left, but I argue that it’s the right that should be celebrating, since the bill

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All of Washington is back from Christmas break, and suddenly the Biden Administration is showing a sharp departure from the Obama and Clinton years where regulation of Big Tech is concerned. Regulatory swagger is everywhere.

Treasury regulatory objections to Facebook’s cryptocurrency project have forced the Silicon Valley giant to abandon the effort, Maury Shenk…

Two major Senate committees have reached agreement on a cyber incident reporting mandate. And it looks like the big winner are the business lobbyists who got concessions from both committees. At least that’s my take. Dmitri Alperovitch says the bill may still be in trouble because of Justice Department opposition. And Tatyana Bolton…

Did you ever wonder where all that tech money came from all of a sudden? Turns out, a lot of it comes from online programmatic ads, an industry that gets little attention even from the companies, such as Google, that it made wealthy. That lack of attention is pretty ironic, because lack of attention…

This is the week when the movement to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act got serious. The Justice Department released a substantive report suggesting multiple reforms. I was positive about many of them (my views here). Meanwhile, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has proposed a somewhat similar set of changes in his…

This is a bonus episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast – a freestanding interview of Noah Phillips, a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. The topic of the interview is whether privacy and antitrust analysis should be merged, especially in the context of Silicon Valley and its social media platforms. Commissioner Phillips, who has devoted considerable attention to the privacy side of the FTC’s jurisdiction, recently delivered a speech on the topic and telegraphed his doubts in the title: “Should We Block This Merger? Some Thoughts on Converging Antitrust and Privacy.” Subject to the usual Cyberlaw Podcast injunction that he speaks only for himself and not his institution or relatives, Commissioner Phillips lays out the very real connections between personal data and industry dominance as well as the complexities that come from trying to use antitrust to solve privacy problems. Among the complexities: the key to more competition among social media giants could well be more sharing between companies of the personal data that fuels their network effects, and corporate sharing of personal data is what privacy advocates have spent a decade crusading against. It’s a wide-ranging interview, touching on, among other things, whether antitrust can be used to solve Silicon Valley’s censorship problem (he’s skeptical) and what he thinks of suggestions in Europe that perhaps the Schrems problem can be solved by declaring that post-CCPA California meets EU data privacy standards. Commissioner Phillips is bemused; I conclude that this is just Europe seeking revenge for President Trump’s Brexit support by promoting “Calexit.”…

Continue Reading Episode 303: Another merger the FTC should block