Five Years Ago

This week in 2021, Australian news sites were reacting bizarrely to Facebook’s withdrawal from sharing news in the country, just before Facebook caved and decided to restore news links. The whole ordeal was surrounded by silly reactions so we pointed to the best summary of everything, and also looked at how it demonstrated the evil of Zero Rating. We also wrote about how attacks on internet free speech in Malaysia and Indonesia demonstrated the importance of Section 230, and some recent examples of how content moderation at scale is impossible. Also, a court tossed out Devin Nunes’ silly SLAPP suit against CNN.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2016, the fight over breaking into Syed Farook’s iPhone continued. We reminisced about when law enforcement told people to upgrade their phones for stronger security, explained how the FBI didn’t need the info but was just trying to set a precedent, noted that the scorched earth approach to Apple meant tech companies had even less reason to help the feds, and learned that the DOJ reached out to victims of the shooting for legal support before going to court. A stupid poll from Pew and a conflicting poll from Reuters demonstrated how the way you write questions impacts public opinion on issues like this one. Then we dug into Apple’s lengthy legal rebuke of the DOJ’s arguments.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2011, we wondered why the MPAA openly prioritized “fighting piracy” more than helping the film industry thrive, and continued whining about it even as we saw yet another record year at the box office. Music publishers were still annoyed by a free online archive of public domain scores, while Google finally got involved in a disappointingly limited way in a lawsuit over torrent search engines. Australian ISP iiNet scored another win in court, as did the admins of a torrent tracker in the UK, while we wrote about how the lawyers for Settlers of Catan were abusing IP to take down perfectly legal competitors, and about a particularly ridiculous trademark saga about a chicken restaurant.

One of the unfortunate knock on effects of being generally insufferable is that many people don’t want to be associated with you in any way. And when you’re both insufferable and happen to be the most divisive American political figure in modern history, all the more so. And that is certainly why, during both of the Donald Trump presidential campaigns, it became common practice for musical artists to complain about his “unauthorized” use of their music at his campaign events.

Now, as this site has posted out a zillion times in the past, many of the complaints from artists are unfounded. Often, the use of the music in question was authorized through blanket performance licenses held by the venues for the rallies. While it should be obvious that best practice would be for candidates like Trump to seek permission to use music just to avoid any public complaining and backlash for that use, there is no real copyright claim to be had in those instances. Lots of people get this wrong.

Where that gets thrown for a loop is when it comes to sound recordings from before 1972. Here’s how Mike described it all back in 2016.

Copyright law is so screwed up that there actually may be a case where the law does require permission. And it has to do with pre-1972 sound recordings. If you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know that we’ve discussed this issue many times in the past. Historically, while compositions were covered by copyright, under the 1909 Copyright Act sound recordings were not. This resulted in a patchwork of state laws (and state commonlaw) that created special forms of copyright at the state level. Eventually, sound recordings were put under federal copyright law, but it only applied to works recorded after February 14, 1972. Works recorded before that are not under federal copyright law, but remain basically the only things under those state copyright laws (the 1976 Copyright Act basically wiped out state copyright laws for everything but that one tiny thing).

The issue is not that simple, because nothing around this particular issue is simple. However, based on at least some of the rulings in pre-1972 sound recording copyright cases, federal copyright law doesn’t apply at all to those songs (other court opinions have come out otherwise). And thus, there’s an argument that the requirements involving blanket licenses for pre-1972 sound recordings may not apply, because the use of the sound recording may require a special public performance license from the copyright holder

And so now we have a decade or so of courts trying to figure this out. The outcomes of court cases are every bit as patchwork as the state laws that inform their outcomes. Add to all of this that even some of the blanket licenses from the likes of ASCAP include opt-outs for political campaigns and the like and it’s easy for all kinds of mistakes to be made.

Mistakes don’t really explain the rash of instances of artists complaining about Trump’s usage, however. He’s been through this so many times, in fact, that it seems obvious that he and his people simply don’t care to try to secure permission. I doubt they even looked into whether they needed to. And the onus to understand what licensing is needed is certainly on their shoulders and nobody else’s. That’s how you get Pharrell clapping back on Trump’s use of his music at an insane rally shortly after a nationalist murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh (the venue didn’t have a license from the artist’s rights management of choice). Or his campaign losing a copyright suit to Eddy Grant for the use of his music in a campaign video.

And, now, it’s also how you get the Trump campaign to settle a suit brought by the estate of Isaac Hayes over the song he co-wrote, Hold on, I’m Comin’, performed by Sam & Dave.

Hayes’ son and estate manager, music producer Isaac Hayes III, says in a Monday (Feb. 23) Instagram statement that the lawsuit “has been mutually resolved, and we are satisfied with the outcome.” Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

“This resolution represents more than the conclusion of a legal matter,” writes Hayes III in his statement. “It reaffirms the importance of protecting intellectual property rights and copyrights, especially as they relate to legacy, ownership and the responsible use of creative works.”

It will surprise nobody that I would love to debate most of what appears in that quote from Hayes III, but that is a separate matter entirely. Instead, my focus is on two undeniable realities. First, the chaos that has been created with these older, pre-1972 song recordings is insane, complicated, and needlessly convoluted. Whoever thought this setup was a good idea should be placed in a facility under constant care.

Second, Trump almost certainly committed copyright infringement, the above complaint notwithstanding. And he’s been through enough of these that he could very easily tell his people to just go get the proper permissions for any music that is played at his little fascism pep rallies. While the settlement terms go undisclosed, which is always annoying, I’ve seen enough of these to be able to read between the lines. The Hayes estate got its pint of blood, at a bare minimum.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to get artists that like you to let you play their music at your events, Donald? There were at least a few artists at that emotional support half time show that nobody watched that you could choose from.

Full disclosure up front: I sit on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which, honestly, tells you something about how much of a legal non-event it was. But the underlying story here—about the NFL treating social media the way it treats television broadcast rights—is worth digging into, because it reveals something deeply broken about how major sports leagues think about the internet.

The 2025-2026 NFL season just wrapped up, and along with it came a federal court ruling in a case called Brown v. NFL that most people missed entirely. Two football fans—one in Illinois, one in California—sued the NFL under the Sherman Act, claiming the league violated antitrust law by barring its teams from posting on Bluesky. The fans wanted to follow their teams—the Bears and the now-champion Seahawks—on the platform they actually use, rather than on Elon Musk’s X. The court dismissed the case for lack of standing, and honestly, that was probably the right legal outcome.

The fans couldn’t demonstrate a concrete injury—the information they wanted was still available, for free, on X. As the court put it, their grievance reduced to being “denied the ability to obtain real-time NFL team information on a private platform with which they are ideologically comfortable.” And “I don’t like Elon Musk” is not an antitrust injury. The Sherman Act targets conspiracies that restrain trade and harm competition—not content distribution preferences. You can’t force a private organization to distribute its content on the platform you like best, just as we’ve called out attempts to force social media platforms to carry content they don’t want to carry.

But the fact that the NFL is legally allowed to be this myopic doesn’t make it a smart business decision. You can be entirely within your rights and still be making a spectacularly bad call.

Since 2013, the NFL has had a “content partnership” with X (dating back to when it was the useful site known as Twitter). The deal lets X publish real-time highlights, and in return the league gets… money, presumably. As the court noted in its ruling:

Since 2013, the NFL and X (formerly Twitter, Inc.) have had a “content partnership.” It allows X to publish real-time highlights from football games, such as touchdowns. During the offseason, reporters post on X with news about team practices and other NFL-related topics, and fans on X discuss teams’ acquisitions of free agents and other roster changes. For example, during the NFL draft (the high-profile annual event in which teams select eligible players to join their rosters), X published more than one million posts concerning the NFL; these appeared on users’ screens more than 800 million times. The NFL has repeatedly renewed its partnership with X. Fans do not pay money to receive NFL news on X.

Fine. Lots of organizations have deals with social media platforms. But this just seems like self-sabotage: the NFL apparently used this partnership as justification to tell its own teams they couldn’t even exist on a competing platform. Multiple NFL teams—including the New England Patriots—had set up accounts on Bluesky, started posting, and were building audiences. And then the league office stepped in and told them to shut it all down.

From the ruling:

Initially, multiple NFL teams, including the New England Patriots, had accounts on Bluesky to communicate with fans….

As alleged, however, the NFL later instructed its member teams to delete their Bluesky accounts. But for this instruction, at least some NFL teams would use Bluesky. The Patriots’ vice president of content, Fred Kirsch, for example, has stated: “Whenever the league gives us the green light[,] we’ll get back on Bluesky.”

Yes, the (Super Bowl-losing) Patriots’ VP of content is publicly saying his team wants to be on Bluesky and is just waiting for the league to let them. This wasn’t a case of teams being uninterested. Teams saw the audience there, set up shop, and were actively communicating with fans—and the NFL made them stop.

As Front Office Sports reported at the time, the league specifically told the Patriots to take down their Bluesky account. The league apparently hasn’t even approved Threads—Meta’s X competitor—for team real-time updates either.

So the NFL has essentially decided that when it comes to the kind of real-time updates that fans actually care about, X is the only approved outlet. Everything else is locked out.

This is “broadcast-brain” thinking applied to the internet, and it’s spectacularly dumb.

The NFL is treating social media platforms the way it treats regional sports networks or its Sunday Ticket package: as exclusive territories to be carved up and sold to the highest bidder. In the television world, that model makes a certain kind of sense—there’s a limited amount of spectrum, a limited number of cable channels, and that scarcity creates value. But social media doesn’t work that way. There’s no scarcity. Posting an injury report on Bluesky doesn’t remove it from X. Cross-posting is literally free. The entire point of social media for a brand is to be everywhere your audience is.

And the audience, increasingly, is on Bluesky. As Mashable noted last year heading into the season, the NFL community on Bluesky had already hit a kind of critical mass:

You need the presence and regular posting of big names to legitimize a platform. It certainly helped that folks like Kimes and a large portion of the NFL writers at popular sports sites like The Ringer made Bluesky home. And last season it felt like Bluesky hit terminal velocity, where enough people joined that you could fully exit to the site for football content. And with the migration of the professionals, the shitposters naturally came along, too. Because that’s where the discussion was happening. There is genuine, easy-to-find, fun NFL talk on Bluesky with minimal interruptions from, say, weird ads or angry reply guys you might find on X.

That’s a real community. A vibrant, engaged community of exactly the kind of hardcore football fans that the NFL should be desperate to cultivate. These are, as Mashable noted, the “ball knowers.” They’ve moved to Bluesky because, well, X kind of sucks now for following sports. As Mashable also noted:

Bluesky does have a leg-up in some areas — Elon Musk’s site recently has proven unreliable for NFL fans. The site crashed the morning free agency launched, which is one of the most important days for NFL social media. And the sports tab — which used to be an easy, fun way to follow games in the Twitter days — degraded into near uselessness years ago. And, in general, X has morphed with Musk’s image, which is focused more on AI and politics — not things like following football. Of course you can still follow the NFL on X, but it does involve wading through more junk than it used to. Bluesky offers an interesting alternative in that regard.

So the most engaged, most knowledgeable football community has moved to Bluesky. The teams themselves want to be on Bluesky. And the NFL’s response to all of this is… to ban its teams from showing up.

It’s the digital equivalent of a local blackout (something we’ve been calling out for well over a decade)—punishing your most dedicated fans because of some deal you cut with a middleman in an effort to create an artificial and unnecessary scarcity.

Meanwhile, the platform the NFL is propping up with this exclusivity arrangement is one where fans who tuned in for the Super Bowl halftime show got to watch a significant chunk of the X user base have a full-blown racist meltdown over Bad Bunny performing. The NFL specifically chose Bad Bunny to appeal to a broader, more global audience—and the audience that actually appreciated the choice? They were on Bluesky where there was an overwhelming wave of support for the performance. The league is betting its real-time presence on the platform where its expansion strategy gets shouted down, while blocking teams from the one where those new fans are actually showing up.

This kind of control-freakery from the NFL shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed the league’s behavior over the years. This is the same organization that has spent decades aggressively lying to bars, restaurants, and small businesses about the scope of its “Super Bowl” trademarks, sending threatening letters suggesting you can’t even say the words “Super Bowl” in an ad without a license—something that has never actually been true.

The NFL’s institutional DNA is “control equals value,” and they apply that logic to everything, from what a church can call its viewing party to which social media apps their teams are permitted to use.

The problem is that control-based thinking only works when you actually can control the ecosystem. You can (sort of) control which networks broadcast your games. You can control which streaming service gets Sunday Ticket. You cannot control where fans choose to talk about football on the internet. The conversation is going to happen whether the NFL’s official accounts are there or not. The only question is whether the league’s teams get to participate in it.

Any organization whose core business depends on fan engagement should be finding fans where they are, not herding them onto a single platform because you cut an exclusivity deal. Especially when that platform is increasingly known for being a hellscape of AI slop, political rage, and engagement-bait, while the platform you’re blocking your teams from is the one where people are actually talking about your product with genuine enthusiasm.

The NFL generates billions in revenue. And yet, when it comes to social media strategy, it’s stuck in a 2005 mindset. That’s not how any of this works anymore.

Someone at NFL HQ needs to understand that when your most passionate fans have moved to a new platform and your own teams are begging for permission to follow them there, the smart play is to let them go.

ICE can’t keep up with the baseline set by resident ghoul/White House advisor Stephen Miller. Miller has demanded 3,000 arrests per day, which he presented as the minimum he would be satisfied with.

To reach this goal, tons of talent from other federal law enforcement agencies have been added to the mix. The results have been less than impressive, to be entirely too kind to these kidnappers and murderers.

CBP and Border Patrol officers used to handling border crossing business are now roaming the streets of Midwestern cities looking for anyone who seems a bit too dark to be a native. In addition, nearly half of FBI agents have been placed on the “find the brown person” beat, along with volunteers/voluntolds from DEA, ATF, US Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and anyone else with a badge they’re unwilling to display prominently when raiding local day care centers.

The GOP threw a whole lot of money at ICE with the “Big Beautiful Bill.” ICE is throwing a lot of money at potential hires, much to the chagrin of law enforcement agencies everywhere, as well as already-understaffed prisons and jails.

The expectations were lowered, along with the bar for entry. The promise of a $50,000 signing bonus has managed to attract the expected blend of MAGA faithful, retired cops, bigots (but I repeat myself…), and anyone who thinks they have what it takes to frog-walk five-year-olds to the nearest rented SUV.

Hiring a bunch of people is only half the battle. The next step is preparing them to do their jobs. Ridding the nation of migrants is Job #1 here in America at the moment. But it’s a job too important to be done well by fully trained ICE officers. Quantity over quality is the name of the game, as former ICE trainer Ryan Schwank — who only resigned last week — told Congress. Here’s the Washington Post with the details:

[S]chwank… told congressional Democrats at a hearing that the agency eliminated 240 hours of “vital classes” from a mandatory 580-hour training program, including instruction about the legal boundaries for the use of force, how to safely handle firearms, and the proper way to detain and arrest immigrants.

Seems like a pretty sweet deal for new hires. Not only do they get a hefty signing bonus, but they don’t have to go through 40% of the training. Giving people guns and the power to deprive others of their lives and liberties should mean giving them the best possible training you can in hopes of heading off… well… pretty much everything we’ve been seeing lately during Trump’s anti-blue state/city surges.

Certainly, the administration is already doing everything it can to undercut the credibility of its now-former employee. But it’s not going to work unless you’re an idiot who prefers nigh-incoherent MAGA invective to actual facts. You see, Schwank didn’t just bring himself to this hearing. He also brought receipts.

Ahead of the hearing, Schwank provided a joint panel of House and Senate Democrats copies of internal ICE documents that he said show the extent of the cuts. The documents indicated that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Glynco, Georgia, shortened its training program from 72 days to 42 days.

Except that’s not what Todd Lyons said to Congress when he was asked to testify following two murders committed by federal officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Lyons claimed nothing important had been cut. He also said this, which is directly contradicted by the documents Schwank gave to lawmakers:

In a statement Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said ICE recruits receive 56 days of training before beginning their assignments…

Lyons went on to say that an “average” of 28 days of additional “on the job training” occurs after that. But even if you might believe Lyons is stacking his apples against the apples in ICE’s internal documents to come up with 84 days of training, you’re miscounting apples the same way Lyons is. OJT is post-assignment. Even if you choose to believe Lyons more than the documents his own agency generated, officers are still being put on the street two weeks earlier than they used to be.

The lies persist, of course. The statement provided to the Post says something else entirely, which is also contradicted by the documents and statements made by Schwank.

“No training hours have been cut. Our officers receive extensive firearm training, are taught de-escalation tactics, and receive Fourth and Fifth Amendment comprehensive instruction,” said Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the department.

But training hours have been cut. And the rest of it is pure horseshit, especially the part about training new hires about the Fourth and Fifth Amendment. Schwank’s testimony noted that he was asked to review an internal memo signed by Lyons that claimed — untruthfully — that ICE officers can enter people’s homes using only a self-issued administrative warrant.

Other rights were similarly glossed over. In fact, some of them are ignored completely.

[Schwank] also said that a two-hour class on the rights of protesters was shortened into 10 minutes of discussion during a lecture on “the concept of seizure.”

Nice. That’s the way to do it. Goodbye, First Amendment. Instead, here’s 10 minutes of ICE’s interpretative dance: “The Fourth Amendment, And What It Doesn’t Mean To Us.”

Everyone knew that once the cattle call began, ICE would be swarmed with opportunists who saw a great way to combine their bigotry and violence tendencies with a career — however short-lived — in public service. A steady paycheck, and all the government asked was that you show up at least 40% of the time during training.

This horde (actual number unknown) is being pushed through the doors towards their on-the-job-training, armed with little more than their masks, their guns, and some very comprehensive incorrecting of their constitutional notions.

Of course, none of this will matter to the people running ICE. I’m pretty sure they love this press. They have no interest in heading up a finely-tuned precise instrument of immigration law enforcement. They’d rather have the untargeted terrorizing of entire neighborhoods and the unearned swagger of a paramilitary death squad that somehow can still be hooted, horn-honked, and whistled into submission by suburbanites. And maybe this isn’t even an intentional design decision. There’s a good chance no one up top is intelligent enough to recognize the self-destructiveness of their actions. For now, at least, we know what they know. And we know this is wrong.

Earlier this year we noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules making it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after years of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so you could easily switch to competitors.

Verizon, as we’ve long established, hates competition, and early last year immediately got to work lobbying the Trump administration to destroy the rules (falsely) claiming, without evidence, that the modest phone unlocking requirements were a boon to criminals and scammers.

The pay-to-play Trump administration quickly agreed, killed the rules, and shortly thereafter Verizon started telling wireless customers on its many prepaid phone brands (including Tracfone) they had to wait a year before switching phones after purchasing one from Verizon:

“While a locked phone is tied to the network of one carrier, an unlocked phone can be switched to another carrier if the device is compatible with the other carrier’s network. But the new TracFone unlocking policy is stringent, requiring customers to pay for a full year of service before they can get a phone unlocked.”

Recently, Verizon implemented a whole bunch of additional restrictions made possible by the Trump administration. More specifically, they imposed a new 35-day waiting period when a customer pays off their device installment plan online or in the Verizon app and wants to take their device to another carrier:

“Payments made over the phone also trigger a 35-day waiting period, as do payments made at Verizon Authorized Retailers. Getting an immediate unlock apparently requires paying off the device plan at a Verizon corporate store.”

So first, they implemented the most draconian restrictions on its prepaid customers, who tend to be lower income and the most impacted from high prices. Now they’re starting to push restrictions onto their more lucrative postpaid (month to month) customers.

Verizon insists (falsely) that these restrictions are necessary to “prevent fraud,” but the real goal is to increase friction when it comes to switching to a competitor. They don’t want the press to outright acknowledge this is anti-competitive in coverage, so they’re engaging in the slow-boiling frog approach that just steadily makes porting your phone out steadily more difficult and annoying.

These unlocking conditions were broadly popular, served the public interest, and took decades of activism and reform advocacy to pass. They ensured that it was easier for consumers to switch between our ever-consolidating, anti-competitive wireless phone giants (consolidation directly made possible by the Trump administration’s past rubber stamping of shitty telecom mergers).

Verizon lobbied the FCC by repeatedly lying, without evidence, that these conditions resulted in a wave of black market phone thefts. FCC boss Brendan Carr, ever the industry lackey, parroted the lies in his subsequent industry-friendly rulings. You know, to make America great again via “populism” or whatever.

Verizon (and Carr) know that there’s a lot going on and the mundanity of a subject like phone unlocking won’t get much attention in the press. Given that the Trump administration has largely lobotomized regulatory independence (at Verizon’s request), there’s very little chance Verizon will see any future accountability, but it’s positively adorable that they’re proceeding cautiously just in case.

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If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it.

And yet, here we are.

Palantir Technologies, the infamous surveillance and data analytics giant chaired by Peter Thiel, has filed a lawsuit against Republik, a small Swiss online magazine, over a pair of investigative articles published in December. The articles, produced in collaboration with the investigative collective WAV, detailed a years-long, multi-ministry charm offensive by Palantir to sell its software to Swiss federal authorities. The campaign was, by all accounts, a comprehensive failure. Swiss agencies rejected Palantir at least nine times, with concerns ranging from data sovereignty to reputational risk to the simple fact that nobody needed the product.

The reporting was based on documents obtained through 59 freedom of information requests filed with Swiss federal agencies. The key finding was an internal Swiss Armed Forces report that concluded Palantir’s software posed unacceptable risks because sensitive military data could potentially be accessed by U.S. government intelligence agencies. As the Republik article details:

The authors of the report state that using Palantir’s software would increase dependence on a U.S. provider. It also poses the risk of losing data sovereignty and thereby national sovereignty.

Above all, however, the army’s staff experts say it remains unclear who has access to data shared with Palantir. The following sentence from the Swiss Army report is particularly relevant: “Palantir is a U.S.-based company, which means there is a possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services.”

As if it’s any sort of surprise that European governments are wary of betting on US tech companies with close ties to the US government. It’s not like reports of US spies co-opting US tech companies for surveillance efforts haven’t been front page news over the past twenty years. And now, this administration—with its willingness to antagonize everyone in Europe, and its close ties to Palantir and Thiel? It’s no freaking wonder that the Swiss government was like “yo, maybe pass.”

So how does a sophisticated data intelligence company respond to well-sourced investigative journalism based on official government documents?

By suing the journalists, of course.

But here’s the thing that makes this even more absurd: Palantir isn’t even claiming the articles are false. The company isn’t suing for defamation. It isn’t seeking damages. Instead, it’s invoking a Swiss “right of reply” statute, alleging that Republik didn’t give the company a sufficient opportunity to respond. Palantir wants the court to force the magazine to publish lengthy counter-statements to each article.

According to the FT:

Palantir’s lawsuit, filed in January, is not seeking damages or making libel claims against Republik, but instead alleges that the company was not given sufficient right to reply under Swiss media law. The company objects to Republik’s presentation of the public documents and believes its right to reply has been wrongfully denied.

….

Republik’s managing director Katharina Hemmer said Palantir had wanted the magazine to publish a very lengthy counterstatement to each article. Republik believed the proposed statements did not fairly address or rebut the reporting, she said, adding that the magazine stands by its reporting.

To which I say: good. Because Palantir’s demand here is absurd. Oh boo-fucking-hoo, the big defense contractor didn’t like the coverage? Pull on your big boy pants and get over it. Switzerland’s right of reply law exists so people can correct factual errors, not so corporations can force publications to run PR copy because they didn’t like the tone of accurate, document-based reporting.

And it’s worth noting: Palantir has already used other avenues to respond. The company published a blog post complaining that the Republik article “paints a false and misleading picture” and “hinders important discussions about the modernization of European software.” They’ve got the platform. If Palantir wants to push back on the story, they have many methods of doing so. Hell, they can do so on X any time they want—on what Musk and company like to call the global town square for free speech.

But that’s apparently not enough. Instead, a multibillion-dollar American defense and intelligence contractor is hauling a small independent Swiss magazine into court, not because anything the magazine published was wrong, but because Palantir wants to force the publication to run its talking points under legal compulsion.

Compelled speech isn’t free speech, guys. And this is nothing more than a blatant intimidation campaign to frighten away reporters from reporting the truth about Palantir.

The European Federation of Journalists has called this exactly what it is: a SLAPP suit—a strategic lawsuit against public participation, designed to use the weight and cost of litigation to intimidate and punish journalists for doing their jobs.

“The investigation conducted by WAV and Republik into Palantir is largely based on official documents that journalists were able to access thanks to Swiss freedom of information law,” notes EFJ President Maja Sever. “The legal action brought by this powerful multinational firm against a small Swiss media start-up is, in our view, an attempt at intimidation aimed at discouraging any critical analysis of Palantir’s activities.”

And in case you didn’t catch the irony: the Swiss military rejected Palantir in part because of fears about a heavy-handed American entity with uncomfortably close ties to U.S. intelligence. Palantir’s response to the reporting of that rejection? Behave like a heavy-handed American entity trying to bully a small foreign publication into submission. If anyone at Palantir had run this decision through their own pattern-recognition software, you’d hope a few red flags would have popped up.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit has done exactly what anyone with a passing familiarity with the Streisand Effect could have predicted. The original Republik articles were about the Swiss government politely but firmly declining Palantir’s advances—an embarrassing but relatively contained story.

Now, thanks to the lawsuit, the story has gone international. The Financial Times is covering it. The European Federation of Journalists is covering it. A UK member of parliament has already cited the Republik investigation during a debate on British defense contracts with Palantir, using the story to suggest that the British government “pivot away” from Palantir.

The Republik investigation itself is genuinely worth reading, and not just because Palantir desperately doesn’t want you to.

It paints a picture of a company that spent seven years working every angle to get Swiss federal agencies to buy its products—approaching the Federal Chancellery during COVID, pitching the Federal Office of Public Health on contact tracing, presenting anti-money laundering software to financial regulators, making repeated runs at the military—and getting turned away at every door. Sometimes embarrassingly, such as the Federal Statistical Office director apparently just ignoring Palantir’s outreach entirely.

For a company that brags about its ability to “optimize the kill chain” and whose CEO once told investors that “Palantir is here to disrupt… and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and occasionally kill them,” getting politely rejected by the Swiss statistical office has to sting a little.

But suing the journalists who reported on it? When the entire basis of your lawsuit is “we want you to publish our talking points” rather than “anything you published was wrong,” it makes pretty clear you don’t actually have a substantive response to the reporting. If Palantir thinks the picture is false, the remedy is to demonstrate that the documents are wrong—not to drag a small magazine through expensive litigation until it capitulates or goes broke.

Seriously, how fucking fragile are the egos in the Palantir executive suite that they can’t handle a bit of mildly embarrassing reporting? Grow up.

A Zurich court is expected to rule on the case in March. Whatever the outcome, Palantir has already lost the only contest that matters: the one for public perception. For a company that sells the ability to see around corners, they apparently never thought to search “The Streisand Effect.”

Netflix has retreated from its protracted bidding war with Larry Ellison for control of Warner Brothers, giving the Trump ally likely control of Warner, CNN, and HBO. In a statement, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that Paramount’s latest offer made the acquisition financially irresponsible:

“The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.”

As we’ve repeatedly noted, Ellison is clearly attempting to to buy his way to a total domination of U.S. media (with the help of Saudi cash). The acquisition of Warner Brothers and its assets come after Ellison gained control of CBS and a significant portion of TikTok thanks to some help from Trump and bumbling Democrats.

As we’ve seen with the Ellison family mismanagement of CBS, a big part of the acquisition involves converting acquired assets into Trump-friendly agitprop. It’s the exact trajectory we’ve seen play out in autocratic countries like Hungary, where authoritarian-allied oligarchs buy up media outlets and pummel the public with propaganda while the government strangles publicly owned and independent journalism just out of frame.

The merger was made possible, in part, by the Trump administration’s efforts to help Ellison and Paramount elbow out Netflix. That included a disinformation campaign across right wing media falsely portraying Netflix as a “woke” leftist company, as well as a fake DOJ antitrust investigation into Netflix (that will now mysteriously disappear now that Larry Ellison has likely gotten his prize).

This trajectory was always very clear; recall that Trump and Ellison met last year to discuss which CNN reporters Ellison would fire to please Trump. The history of authoritarian movements suggests that not too long after this deal is finalized you can expect a significant ramping up of hostilities against independent journalism that speaks truth to power (whatever’s left of it in the U.S.).

I’d like you to take a peek at the news coverage of this whole mess and notice how few outlets even acknowledge that Trump administration corruption played a role, much less acknowledge that the goal here is autocratic-friendly propaganda.

If there’s a potential positive here, it’s that nobody at Ellisons’ companies appear particularly competent. Bari Weiss was hired to convert CBS into a ratings-friendly, autocrat coddling trolling and propaganda farm, and the result as been broadly disastrous.

The massive debt load from massively overpaying for Warner Brothers is also likely to cause major operational headaches that could result in this being a short-lived adventure much like the several-decades worth of pointless Warner media mergers (including AT&T) that preceded it.

In addition to promising a whopping $111 billion (or $31 per share), Paramount promised a ticking fee payable to shareholders equal to $0.25 per quarter beginning after Sept. 30, 2026, a $7 billion regulatory termination fee if the deal doesn’t cross the finish line, and $2.8 billion to cover Netflix’s proposed payout to Warner Bros for their own deal failing to materialize.

That’s a lot of money for the Ellisons (and the Saudis) to dump into a company that has, again, seen nothing but a two-decade history of disastrous overvalued mergers resulting in a progressively shittier and less creative company, broadly despised by creatives after a parade of brutal layoffs (much more of which are certainly coming to pay off debt).

Things could could be further complicated by a sudden subscriber exodus across the brands, or the Ellisons’ fortunes being further strained by a potential AI hype bubble collapse. All the lazy AI-generated Batman IP slop in the world will not be able to save this mess if the winds don’t blow favorably in the Ellisons’ direction over the next two years.

Still, an overt authoritarian oligarch is now very close to controlling an unprecedented segment of U.S. traditional and new media. If it follows the established autocratic playbook, this push will continue until it runs into something other than pudding-soft public, political, and policy opposition. There’s a window here for policymakers and consumers to ensure the gambit fails, but the hour is getting late.