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As you hopefully know by now, we are once again hosting our annual game jam celebrating the works that enter the public domain in 2026, a.k.a. today! This year, that means we enter a new decade, as works originally published in 1930 finally exit copyright protection and become free to remix, repurpose, and build on. Gaming Like It’s 1930! begins today and runs until the end of the month, and we’re calling on designers of all stripes to help us show why a robust and growing public domain is so valuable and important.

You can sign up on the game jam page on Itch, read the full rules, and get some ideas about works you might use (but we encourage you to go looking for other hidden gems too!) As usual, we’ll be giving away prizes in six different categories. For extra inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.

We’re always astounded by the creativity on display in these jams, and I’m sure this year will be no different. 2026 has now begun, so it’s time to get designing!

Look, I get it. The world is a mess. Important institutions are crumbling. It feels like both the tech and political worlds are collaborating to squeeze all remaining humanity out of all of us. Cynicism is ascendant. Nihilism is the new black.

And yet: I remain optimistic.

Not the naive, everything-will-work-out-fine kind of optimism. The kind grounded in seeing what’s actually happening beneath the surface-level chaos. Because while legacy institutions are capitulating and folding, others are standing up and speaking out. And more importantly, people are building alternatives that route around the failures entirely.

This is the pattern: centralized systems fail, people figure out how to build around them. We’ve seen it before. We’ll see it again. The difference this time is that we’re building with the knowledge of how those systems failed baked in from the start.

Every year, my final post on Techdirt is about optimism. For the past decade, I’ve felt like I needed to apologize for it. Not this year. At the lowest points, you need optimism. Things are a mess. But let’s roll up our sleeves and fix stuff. And it’s easier to maintain that optimism when you can see the concrete alternatives already taking shape, even if only in their earliest forms.

If you want to see the past final posts of the year, they’re here:

• 2008: On Staying Happy
• 2009: Creativity, Innovation And Happiness
• 2010: From Pessimism To Optimism… And The Power Of Innovation
• 2011: From Optimism And Innovation… To The Power To Make A Difference
• 2012: Innovation, Optimism And Opportunity: All Coming Together To Make Real Change
• 2013: Optimism On The Cusp Of Big Changes
• 2014: Change, Innovation And Optimism, Despite Challenges
• 2015: Keep Moving Forward
• 2016: No One Said It Would Be Easy…
• 2017: Keep On Believing
• 2018: Do Something Different
• 2019: Opportunities Come From Unexpected Places
• 2020: Make The World A Better Place
• 2021: The Arc Of The Moral Universe Is A Twisty Path
• 2022: The Opportunity To Build A Better Internet Is Here. Right Now.
• 2023: Moving Fast And Breaking Things Is The Opposite Of Tech Optimism
• 2024: The Biggest Challenges Create The Biggest Opportunities

Earlier this month, with some friends, we launched the Resonant Computing Manifesto—a framework for building tech that empowers rather than extracts, that resonates with what people actually want rather than what some corporation or politician decides they should have.

The response was overwhelming. Over and over we heard from people who’d been thinking similar thoughts but didn’t realize how many others shared them. That’s how movements start: not with grand pronouncements, but with the realization that you’re not alone in seeing what needs to change.

A movement comes about as more and more people realize things that need to change and need to be fixed and then step up and say “hey, we can be a part of the process of fixing things.” It’s not easy. It doesn’t happen overnight. There’s no silver bullet.

But you can move things in the direction of change towards a better system. And as more people join in, real change is possible.

Take politics. People are rightfully upset about the direction things are heading, in the US and globally. But the backlash is producing politicians who believe in actually helping people over accumulating power. That matters.

And, similarly, for all the reasonable fears about giant tech companies working hand in hand with authoritarians, we’re seeing that kick off the processes that will enable more people to take more control over their own lives, and away from those collaborators.

Or take AI. Yes, the slop is real and the hype is exhausting. But the same tools the giants are using to flood the internet with garbage can be turned against them. I’ve spent this year building personalized tools that work for me without handing my data to corporations for their benefit over mine. You can take back control from the billionaires. The tools exist.

This matters more now that we’ve watched centralized systems and power-hungry billionaires get co-opted by authoritarian regimes. But we can use the tools of innovation to empower ourselves over them.

It’s also why I remain incredibly bullish on the work being done on open social networks like Bluesky (where I’m on the board). This year may have felt slower than the year before, but there are so many exciting developments happening where people are building amazing tools and systems without having to rely on billionaires or ask for permission.

This feels like the early internet, when you could just build something and see what happened. But we’re smarter now. We’ve seen how centralized systems become capture points for authoritarians. We know the failure modes. So we’re building with that knowledge baked in—creating systems that are, by design, resistant to the kind of control we’ve watched corrupt the previous generation of platforms.

The mess that we’re in today on both the tech and political vectors should be seen as a guide to where we need to go and what needs to be done. The seeds have already been planted and many folks are already building. The optimistic viewpoint is that this movement will continue to grow and more people will continue to see how they, too, don’t need to be held back by the whims of billionaires and authoritarians, but can use the tools of innovation for their own interests.

As always, my final thoughts on these posts are thanking all of you, the community around Techdirt, for making all of this worthwhile—and this year in particular for coming out to support our fundraiser and our continued existence. The community remains an amazing thing to me. I’ve said in the past that I write as if I’m going to share my thoughts into an empty void, not expecting anyone to ever pay attention, and I’m always amazed when anyone does, whether it’s to disagree with me, add some additional insights, challenge my thinking, or reach out to talk about how to actually move some ideas forward.

I know this community is full of creators, thinkers and advocates who care deeply about using technology to make the world better. Let’s use this opportunity to prove that innovation, thoughtfully applied, can route around institutional failure and corruption. Once again, thank you to those who are reading this for making Techdirt such a wonderful and special place, and let’s focus on being truly optimistic about the opportunities in front of us.

I certainly don’t expect the wider Techdirt readership to care all that much about NFL football or, more specifically a single local team like the Chicago Bears. So, to that end, here’s a hopefully educational preamble to this post that will provide you with the context you need. If you were to make a list of the single biggest rivalries in the NFL, that list should begin with the rivalry between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears. The rivalry has existed since 1921 between two charter franchise teams. Packers fans refer to themselves as “Cheese Heads” and even go so far to wear foam caps to games to celebrate the moniker.

While the Packers didn’t event the foam cap, they did buy the rights to it decades ago and those hats are now official Packers products sold on the team’s storefront. Plenty of other companies out there make variants of them as well and the Packers have been known to fire off legal notices and C&D letters as a result.

One of those companies was Foam Party Hats out of Houston, Texas. They briefly produced their own version of the “cheesehead” foam hat, but shut down production of them after the team contacted them and demanded they stop. Here is owner Manuel Rojas:

Foam Party Hats has hundreds of different products and, at one time, used to make a cheese head.

“We end up getting a cease and desist letter from the Green Bay Packers,” Rojas explained.

But that setback turned into a better opportunity.

“So as a payback, we came up with this sign of, you know, making our own cheese grater hats. And, well, this is like the best revenge that we could ever have,” Rojas said.

Yes, Rojas and the company turned the C&D notice they received into another foam hat product, this time a cheese grater. And those cheese grater hats have been selling fast, having gone viral during the last two Packer losses, one to the Bears, and one to the Baltimore Ravens. In both instances, players from the winning team wore one of the grater hats on television as they celebrated their respective wins.

And as a result, sales of the grater hats have exploded. What was once a small time novelty item is now selling in the thousands over these past couple of weeks. And, what’s more, Rojas is getting inquiries from all kinds of storefronts and is hoping to work with some NFL teams directly.

Rojas said now he’s thinking of more ways to tap into the NFL and continue to reach fans in new and creative ways.

“Now that things are starting off with the Chicago Bears fans, we want to take advantage of this and actually build a brand more towards NFL fans because I know people love this stuff and at Foam Party Hats, we shine with creativity,” he said.

He said the company is even planning to reach out to the Bears directly.

“The next move for us is definitely to sell them to the Bears and see where we can collaborate,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of inquires from stores near the Chicago area to see where we can sell these.”

And there you have it. Because the Packers wanted to exert control over a foam hat created to celebrate Packers fans, it instead has fueled the team’s chief rivalry all the more, while birthing a competing product designed to make fun of the team instead. I’m not sure that’s exactly what they were going for, but it’s nice to see a company make nimble work of all of this and turn it into fun win for everyone.

Everyone except the Packers, that is. Go bears.

Before she was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison to turn CBS into a right wing propaganda and safe space, Bari Weiss tried her best to create a fake propaganda-fueled college in Austin.

If you recall, Weiss (alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) helped create the University of Austin in 2021 under the pretense they were creating an “anti-woke” (read: right wing) corrective to “campus leftism running amok” (read: a handful of young people annoyed by systemic racism, broad U.S. corruption, or Benjamin Netanyahu’s industrialized mass murder of toddlers).

The “university” pretended to champion free speech and the truth, but, much like the “renovation” of CBS, the pseudo-university is really part of a larger right wing initiative to reshape journalism and education in order to coddle right wing ideology, eradicate uncomfortable truths right wingers don’t like, and distort reality into a strange, delusional safe space (the exact thing the experiment professes to be combating).

There’ve been a lot of desperate efforts to pretend this is some storied institution, despite the fact the billionaire-backed prop comprises just a few floors of an Austin office building. It’s just a few blocks from the Joe Rogan “anti-woke” Comedy Mothership man-baby safe space in Austin, which is effectively trying to similarly disembowel U.S. comedy.

There’ve been hints for a while that the adorable fake university hasn’t really fared all that well. Like earlier this year, when one staffer was unceremoniously cancelled from the “free speech” focused university for politely suggesting on LinkedIn that the war on inclusion in diversity had maybe gone a little too far.

But a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates there’s been a larger recent mass exodus of staff:

“According to LinkedIn, roughly 20 university employees have left this year. That’s a lot for a new institution that had 34 staff members listed on its website this week (the number is separate from faculty). The departures include the president, the provost, the lead fund raiser, the executive director of admissions, as well as people who worked in events, operations, and other positions.”

In addition to a mass exodus of an already small staff, there’s also been a notable departure among key advisors (like Jeffrey Epstein pal Larry Summers) who claim they are only just now figuring out that the entire project might not be entirely on the up and up:

“Over the summer, the provost and the lead fund raiser also left the university, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Summers, the former Harvard president, stepped down from the advisory board in July, saying that he was “not comfortable with the course that UATX has set nor the messages it promulgates and so am withdrawing.” (His colleagues on the board, Zimmer and Pinker, stepped down shortly after the university’s launch, with Zimmer saying that UATX’s critical statements about higher education “diverged very significantly from my own views.”

The inability (or refusal) of highly educated people to see this project for what it was (a billionaire-backed ideological assault on reality and common sense), doesn’t speak particularly well to our broader cultural awareness or ability to defend ourselves from deep-pocketed bad actors. And while this university, like Weiss’ “new CBS,” may fail due to ham-fisted incompetence, they (and their unlimited budgets) still leave a very ugly mark on informed consensus and a semi-coherent electorate.

Over the summer, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upended decades of traditional First Amendment standards to say that Texas could put in place an age verification law if that law was intended to keep kids away from porn. As we argued at the time, the ruling had all sorts of problems, but even leaving those aside, it was still pretty clearly limited solely to situations involving age gating adult content. Not news sites. Not fitness apps. Not therapy platforms. Porn.

Texas, predictably, heard “you can age gate porn” and decided that meant “you can age gate everything.” Because why respect constitutional distinctions when you can just pretend they don’t exist?

And Texas isn’t alone in this—states across the country have been rushing to pass sweeping age verification laws for social media and other content, because ignoring the First Amendment rights of children remains a proud bipartisan tradition.

In Texas’s case, the legislature passed Senate Bill 2420, entitled the “App Store Accountability Act,” which would require age verification, parental controls, and warning labels on various app stores and apps.

A couple of lawsuits were filed to challenge the law—one from CCIA, the trade group representing a bunch of internet companies, and another from a bunch of students who pointed out that the law violated their rights. Last week, judge Robert Pitman ruled in both cases, putting the law on hold and noting that the law pretty clearly violated the First Amendment, because the law is extremely overbroad and not at all narrowly targeted:

Because strict scrutiny applies, Paxton must prove that SB 2420 is “the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest.” Free Speech Coalition, 606 U.S. at 484. Paxton has not proven this. First, it is far from clear that Texas has a compelling interest in preventing minors’ access to every single category of speech restricted by SB 2420. State interests in protecting minors exist; for example, a state has a compelling interest in preventing minors from accessing information that facilitates child pornography or sexual abuse. See Sable Commc’ns of Cal., Inc. v. FCC, 492 U.S. 115, 126 (1989) (“[T]here is a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors.”). On the other hand, nothing suggests Texas’s interest in preventing minors from accessing a wide variety of apps that foster protected speech (such as the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, Substack, or Sports Illustrated) is compelling. See Brown, 564 U.S. at 794 (“No doubt a State possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”) (internal citation omitted). While SB 2420 may have some compelling applications, the categories of speech it restricts are so exceedingly overbroad that Paxton likely cannot show a compelling state interest.

Texas tried arguing that age gating apps is no different than age restrictions on tobacco and alcohol. The court wasn’t having it—not least because Texas showed up with zero evidence that downloading apps poses health hazards comparable to cigarettes or booze. You can’t just assert “apps are like tobacco” and expect a federal judge to nod along.

Analogizing to tobacco or alcohol use, Paxton argues that Texas has an interest in regulating products and services “which pose health hazards, or which may be addictive” to minors. (Resp., Dkt. 17, at 13.) However, the State does not cite evidence to substantiate the assertion that downloading an app of any kind without parental permission poses a health hazard to minors. That argument gestures toward Texas’s interest in preventing social media addiction, but SB 2420’s coverage sweeps far wider—all apps are restricted, beyond social media, as described above. So too, SB 2420 does not limit its scope to apps that use addictive algorithms designed to encourage prolonged use, or apps that are responsible in particular for causing excessive screen time. As one example, SB 2420 restricts access to apps that seek to promote physical or mental health, such as mindfulness apps like Calm, fitness apps like Strava, or therapy providers like BetterHelp.

Read that again: In seeking to age gate everything, Texas would be age gating therapy apps. And mindfulness apps. And fitness trackers. Because apparently tracking your morning run is a clear and present danger to minors.

Of course, with strict scrutiny, you need to show that the law is narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest. Even if we assume (without evidence) the compelling government interest here, it was not “narrowly tailored.”

Even accepting that Texas has a compelling interest in requiring age-verification and parental permission to mitigate an overall mental- or physical-health effect of mobile phone app use—an interest which Texas has not offered evidence of at this stage—SB 2420 is not narrowly tailored to that interest. Rather, Texas “could have easily employed less restrictive means to accomplish its protective goals, such as by (1) incentivizing companies to offer voluntary content filters or application blockers, [and] (2) educating children and parents on the importance of using such tools.” NetChoice, LLC v. Bonta, No. 23-2969, 113 F.4th 1101, 1121 (9th Cir. Aug. 16, 2024); see also, e.g., SEAT, 765 F. Supp. 3d at 696, 698−99; CCIA, 747 F. Supp. 3d at 1036−37. In this case, one less restrictive means than SB 2420 (as the State acknowledged at the hearing) would have been to narrowly target regulations toward apps that the State demonstrates have specific addictive qualities. To the state interest of preventing minors from accessing harmful material, Texas has existing laws requiring age-verification for digital services providers containing one-third or more sexual material harmful to minors. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 129B.002(a). Paxton has not shown that methods employed by SB 2420—broadly restricting app downloads and content within apps, with few content-based exceptions—are necessary to prevent minors from accessing the subset of apps which contain harmful material. Because it restricts almost all apps and content within apps, SB 2420 does not employ “the least restrictive means” to stop minors from accessing harmful material

To emphasize how not narrowly targeted the law is, the court points out how it would ban kids from all sorts of perfectly legitimate information they should have access to:

Also problematically, the law is under- and over-inclusive. That a law “is wildly underinclusive when judged against its asserted justification . . . is alone enough to defeat it.” Brown, 564 U.S. at 802. The law is under-inclusive: SB 2420 specifically cuts teenagers off from wide swaths of the critical “democratic forum[] of the Internet” even though the same content offered via apps remains available to minors via pre-downloaded apps like Safari (or in stores). Reno v. Am. C.L. Union, 521 U.S. 844, 868 (1997). The law is also over-inclusive: its attempt to block children from accessing harmful content on select apps, Texas also prohibits minors from participating in the democratic exchange of views online by curtailing their access to all apps.

Pitman reserves particular disdain for Texas’s evidence-free assertions:

So too, Texas offers no evidence that even some or most of the apps covered cause mental-or physical-health detriments for youth. Paxton gestures generally to the impacts of social media on youth, (Resp., Dkt. 28, at 15), and calls the apps at issue a “health hazard,” (id. at 13). At the hearing, Paxton suggested, too, that the interest underlying the law was mitigating the impact of excessive phone use and overall screen time, algorithmic targeting, and artificial intelligence on youth users of social media. But nothing in the record suggests, for instance, that teens suffer from mental health disorders from using a dictionary or weather app, even though those apps are age-restricted and subject to parental override under the Act in the same way as social media. Because it bans minors from downloading apps and content from all apps, not a narrowly tailored subset of apps deemed, for example, harmful or addictive based on evidence, the law is more over- and under- inclusive than HB 18, which this Court previously enjoined.

That’s a federal judge pointing out that Texas wants to age gate dictionary apps and weather apps using the same justification as social media. No evidence. No tailoring. Just vibes.

That’s not how anything works.

Of course, this is just in the district court, and Judge Pitman has been down this road before. He was the judge who initially blocked Texas’ content moderation law, which was overturned by the 5th Circuit (who was later overturned by the Supreme Court). He also blocked an earlier attempt at age verification.

Here, Texas has already announced its intent to appeal, and knowing the Fifth Circuit’s twisted views of the First Amendment (they’re not fans, unless it’s to limit private companies from moderating MAGA speech), who knows how long this particular ruling will last.

For now, we have a ruling that does what courts are supposed to do: demand that the government actually prove its case before trampling constitutional rights. Pitman’s built a detailed factual record here—one that documents Texas’s complete failure to provide evidence, identify less restrictive means, or narrowly tailor its restrictions. That matters, even if the Fifth Circuit tries to ignore it.

And the core message remains: you can’t just run into federal court screaming “but think of the children” and expect judges to hand you a blank check to age gate the entire internet.

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America continues to be made great again. Or so says the collective of fascist buffoons currently holding federal positions of power.

The Trump administration has made a lot of noise about bringing the “rule of law” back to America — something that supposedly went missing during Biden’s term. The alleged lawlessness covers everything from rational immigration policies to whatever the fuck the word “woke” means to whatever White House mook is currently using that term in a disparaging way.

Trump’s return to office set in motion a whole lot of recklessness and lawlessness, starting with the wholesale dismissal of migrants’ constitutional rights and running all the way through several DOGE-gutted agencies until this regime reached its current nadir: straight up murdering people just because they happen to be in boats off the coast of Venezuela.

Anyone who actually respects the rule of law has either quit or been fired. They’ve been replaced by people Trump prefers, like former personal lawyers, Fox News commentators, and far-right podcasters.

We’ve already witnessed a lot of failure from the Trump DOJ, which can’t manage to secure indictments during revenge prosecutions ranging from anti-ICE protesters to high-profile names from Trump’s official enemies list, like NY Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey. Everyone that failed upward due to their MAGA loyalty has made a mockery of half of the DOJ’s name: justice.

Fortunately, courts — for the most part — aren’t just rolling over for half-baked “unitary executive power” legal theories. As Reuters reports, the DOJ is in the midst of a historic losing streak that’s the direct result of Trump’s preference for loyalists.

As President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown got underway in Washington, D.C., in August, federal agents and police spotted a man named Torez Riley tugging at his backpack inside a Trader Joe’s store, searched it and recovered two firearms.

But federal prosecutors were forced to dismiss the charges after video surveillance revealed the search lacked probable cause and was unlawful.

In a subsequent legal opinion, a federal magistrate judge said the errors were part of a broader pattern of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps, resulting in a 21% dismissal rate of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office’s criminal complaints over eight weeks, compared to a mere 0.5% dismissal rate over the prior 10 years.

It used to mean that getting prosecuted meant getting fucked. Judges tended to side with prosecutors and rogue cops, rejecting only a small amount of cases that contained violations too egregious to be granted a “good faith” mulligan.

At this point, the DOJ is struggling to secure grand jury indictments, which is a little like struggling to lift a feather over your head. Most indictments are considered slam dunks because they’re entirely one-sided presentations made by prosecutors to people who are just there to pencil-whip their way through the day’s prosecutorial offerings.

But with Trump running the DOJ (and handpicking people like his former insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan to handle politically motivated prosecutions), the government’s fridge is now overstocked with unindicted ham sandwiches.

This is on top of literally hundreds of court rulings declaring the administration’s deportation efforts are illegal — specifically, the jailing and indefinite detainment of alleged immigration law violators who don’t pose a threat to public safety or a flight risk.

The blustering continues, however, with no sign of respite in sight. The administration apparently feels that if it goes hard enough for long enough, everything will eventually work out in its favor. Meanwhile, its band of bigots and incompetents continues to undercut its ability to perform well in court, much less convince judges that the government is acting in good faith.

The errors have sometimes undermined the department on civil and criminal matters it cares about, from the prosecutions of Trump’s political foes, to cases about immigration, violent crime, gender-affirming care and voting rights. At times, they came about after senior officials made public statements about pending cases on social media or television that strayed from the allegations made in sworn court filings, violating department rules designed to ensure a fair trial.

These mistakes are causing department attorneys to lose credibility with federal courts, with some judges quashing subpoenas, threatening criminal contempt and issuing opinions that raise questions about their conduct.

Reuters calls these “errors,” but they’re actually “failures.” The administration is very deliberate when it comes to its efforts to allow (and encourage!) Trump to rule like a king, bypassing the legislative process entirely with daily executive orders and Truth Social posts that are meant to be treated as executive orders.

Meanwhile, the DOJ is bragging that none of this — from the failure to secure indictments to the hundreds of adverse rulings it has generated since the beginning of the year — matters. Its statement to Reuters gives away the game: the administration believes (and not unreasonably!) that it has the Supreme Court in its pocket:

“This Department of Justice is winning in court on behalf of the Trump Administration and the American People with 24 successful rulings at the Supreme Court emergency docket so far and multiple prominent indictments of transnational terrorists, violent criminals, and even politicians who have allegedly engaged in corruption.”

That the Supreme Court has decided to handle most of its stuff completely off the record with its reliance on its shadow docket, it is aiding and abetting the administration’s autocracy speed run. But the DOJ can’t pretend it’s “winning.” To get “24 successful rulings” (which overstates things a bit), it first had to lose far more cases at lower levels just to get the MAGA majority of the Supreme Court to reject (or ignore) rulings against the DOJ and the administration’s routinely unlawful behavior.

We can hope that sooner or later the administration’s complete disregard for the rule of law and the US Constitution will catch up to it. But hope is only going to get us so far if the nation’s top court keeps ignoring cases that might generate precedent that works against the bigoted efforts of the administration. Maybe it will finally reach a tipping point and return the nation back to the stuff that actually made it great. Until it does, we can at least take solace in the fact that the rest of the federal court system isn’t just rolling over for Trump. It’s generating precedent almost daily.

More importantly, most federal judges no longer consider Trump’s DOJ to be a credible party in criminal cases or civil litigation. That means the government’s omnipresent threat (“your word against ours”) to people it’s trying to punish becomes less useful with each passing day. The lower courts know this government can’t be trusted. And as all of this continues, the Trump administration gives the courts more reasons to treat it as the most unreliable of narrators.

For years we had to listen to a bipartisan roster of lawmakers insist that TikTok was one of the greatest national security threats to ever face the nation. In reality, they were mostly just interested in protecting Facebook from a short-form video company it couldn’t out innovate. And ultimately, it was about transferring TikTok ownership and its revenues to Trump’s billionaire buddies so they can do all the stuff they’d spent years accusing China of (surveillance, propaganda).

The same nonsense is playing out again with the Trump FCC’s ban of Chinese drones, which quietly went into effect during the Christmas holiday, intentionally ensuring that a lot of people missed it.

In short, the Trump administration added Chinese drones to its Covered List, which it says are communications equipment and services “deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons.” Soon Americans will no longer be able to buy new drones from some of the most successful and popular companies in the space, like DJI.

The Trump fact sheet explains it this way:

“UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] and UAS critical components, including data transmission devices, communications systems, flight controllers, ground control stations, controllers, navigation systems, batteries, smart batteries, and motors produced in a foreign country could enable persistent surveillance, data exfiltration, and destructive operations over US territory, including over World Cup and Olympic venues and other mass gathering events.”

To be clear, you can continue to use DJI drones you already own. And you can buy DJI drones currently approved by the FCC already for sale. But you soon won’t be able to buy new versions of these drones as they’re released. Which is a shame because DJI generally leads the drone field with a 70 percent market share and their drones are very good, very popular, and less expensive than U.S. alternatives.

The ban was imposed with zero transparency after “an Executive Branch interagency body with appropriate national security expertise that was convened by the White House.” Which is gibberish when you consider the Trump administration is stacked to the rafters with odd zealots and unqualified weirdos who are basically just propping up a wide assortment of shady grifts.

DJI urged lawmakers to conduct audits of its devices for years, and was ignored. The normal comment period for public input was ignored. Folks in the aerospace industry say they were neither consulted, nor given any advance notice of the quick ban. Drone and RC hobbyist organizations are annoyed and dismayed, and state the ban was shadow dropped during Christmas to lessen scrutiny.

You’re supposed to believe this is about protecting Americans from nefarious Chinese drone surveillance. In reality, this is about protecting U.S. drone manufacturers from having to compete with better, more popular technology. But because it’s so easy to get xenophobic lawmakers and our lazy press so ginned up about China, that truth gets buried in news reports and the policy weeds.

I’ll just randomly note here that Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., coincidentally owns stock in and advises several aspiring drone startups that have received billions in loans and subsidies from the Pentagon. That’s before you get to the countless other MAGA orbit folks and tech companies with personal investment in military drone and surveillance hardware.

I think in their heads guys like Junior probably think they’re cleverly building functional, domestic alternatives to Chinese tech, but their corruption and incompetence generally blinds them from reality and our broader failures on privacy and national security.

Truly shoring up national security and U.S. privacy requires standing up to domestic corporations first and foremost (with say, data broker regulation and a privacy law that holds execs personally accountable for lax security), which none of them want to actually do. Because in their heads, government should only exist to make them personally richer at other peoples’ expense.

As with the “TikTok ban,” the drone ban is being applied in a country that’s too corrupt to functionally regulate privacy and security. Congress is too corrupt to pass even a baseline internet-privacy law or regulate data brokers, which routinely hoover up endless troves of sensitive American data and then sell access to that surveillance data to any random nitwit, including foreign intelligence.

While the Trump administration professes to be super worried about Chinese threats to national security, with its other hand it has gutted government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating the biggest Chinese hack of U.S. telecom networks in history), dismantled the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents), and fired oodles of folks doing essential work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

FCC boss Brendan Carr is also engaged in a massive effort to destroy whatever is left of the FCC’s consumer protection and corporate oversight authority, despite the fact that the recent historic Chinese Salt Typhoon hack (caused in large part because major telecoms were too incompetent to change default administrative passwords) was a direct byproduct of this exact type of mindless deregulation.

In addition to rolling back oversight of U.S. telecoms and they’re lax security, Carr has been stalling programs designed to bring better security and privacy standards to the internet of things space, which is dominated by Chinese companies with few if any security and privacy standards.

Superficially the Trump administration loves putting on a veneer that it’s protecting U.S. interests and national security, but as we’ve seen elsewhere this is hollow cack. Trumpism is just pay-to-play kakistocracy and a bottomless well of assorted lazy hustles and grifts. These are not serious people.

Some U.S. drone makers asked daddy to protect them from global market competition and he did. Now U.S. consumers have to pay twice as much money for much shittier technology, and instead of translating the proceeds into new jobs, better tech, or lower prices, the executives at the companies responsible will simply pocket the proceeds. All while the New York Times and large corporate media blows smoke up your ass about this being good for national security and American labor.

This administration is in the midst of failing the American people in so many ways, of course, but if you need one stark example of that failure then you can find it in measles. When I wrote this post way back in March of this year, it was our first Techdirt post done on the disease in over 11 years. In other words, this is how it started:

And from there we were off and running. It took roughly a month for us and many others to begin warning what would be inevitable if RFK Jr. wasn’t axed from his role as Secretary of Health and Human Services. A virulent anti-vaxxer leading the charge on a measles outbreak was always going to result in a lackluster response at best, but the real embarrassment would come in the form of America losing its measles elimination status. That status was hard won in 2000 via a concentrated and government led vaccination campaign beginning in the late 70s and early 80s. 12 months of continuous spread from connected outbreaks loses us elimination status and we began predicting this would happen eight months ago.

So that’s how it started. How are we looking at present? We now sit at 2,012 confirmed cases of measles in America for 2025. And those numbers are both incomplete for the year and almost certainly significantly underreported. Add to that the fact that we are enduring current outbreaks in multiple states and we are set up for a banger of a 2026.

Measles cases nationwide have reached 2,012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported last week, as outbreaks in Arizona and South Carolina continue to grow and three other states alert the public about airport exposures.

The US total reflects 54 new cases, as the country teeters on the brink of losing its measles elimination status—which it earned in 2000—next month. This year’s total is the nation’s highest since 1992, when officials reported 2,200 cases. Coordinated vaccination efforts led to a precipitous drop in cases in the ensuing decades, but vaccine skepticism in recent years has spawned the disease’s resurgence.

In those numbers are 3 deaths, including two children, and 227 hospitalizations. More frightening is that, while 93% of infections have occurred among the unvaccinated, 7% have not, including 4% that had two MMR vaccine doses. That sure sounds like we’re experiencing an increase of breakthrough infections, which itself is an indication that we are losing herd immunity protections.

So it’s not really a question of if we’re going to lose the measles elimination status. The game is already over, we’re just waiting for the clock to run out. The real question is whether that embarrassment is going to spur anyone in positions of power to do anything about it. And the only real thing to do here is get RFK Jr. the hell out of his cabinet secretary role.

Nothing this administration does is subtle. Nothing about its anti-migrant purge has been anything less than brutish. As if to drive the point home that the bigots were running the shop, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the stripping of due process from people whose only crime was usually just a civil infraction: being undocumented. Anyone who knows the history of that Act knows it was last used for the same purpose: to round up a bunch of non-white people and imprison/deport them.

As fast as it could, the administration rounded up anyone that looked Latino, tossed them on airplanes, and sent them to whatever country would take them. For more than 100 deportees, the final destination was El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison, known mainly for its inhumane abuse of anyone unfortunate enough to end up there.

Judge James Boasberg has seen plenty from this administration already. He’s the judge who was received one of the first fuck you’s from the Trump anti-migrant machinery. The administration blew off his order to stop sending migrants to El Salvador, pretending it couldn’t do anything about the flights it had hurriedly sent airborne the moment it seemed Boasberg might issue an injunction.

Boasberg continues to thwart the administration’s unlawful actions. And because he’s chosen to do his job (rather than slip himself into Trump’s pocket like too many members of the Supreme Court), he’s been targeted personally by the administration. Earlier this year, Trump’s team filed a completely bogus misconduct complaint against him because he expressed very legitimate concerns about the current administration during a US court system judicial conference: that there was far more than a non-zero chance Trump’s administration would simply refuse to comply with court orders.

It wasn’t just a legitimate concern. This has actually happened more than once. Judge Boasberg has personal experience with the administration’s refusal to comply with the letter and/or spirit of his court orders.

Here’s another ruling the administration will probably choose to ignore if it can’t get SCOTUS to slide it a mash note under the table during the next shadow docket drop.

A federal judge on Monday said the U.S. government denied due process to the Venezuelan men it deported to a prison in El Salvador in March after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act.

[…]

Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in his order agreed that they deserved the right to a hearing — whether by bringing them back to the U.S. or allowing them to pursue legal remedies from abroad.

“On the merits, the Court concludes that this class was denied their due-process rights and will thus require the Government to facilitate their ability to obtain such hearing. Our law requires no less,” Boasberg wrote in his opinion.

Lest we forget (as the Trump administration definitely wants you to), this is how this all began. I quote directly from the ruling [PDF] because this document ensures the government can’t claim ignorance of its own bullshit as this case continues to move forward:

These men were given “no advance notice of the basis for their removal,” nor were they informed that they could challenge their designation. The only reason that this Court was made aware of these impending removals was because a few of the men moved to El Valle had been able to contact their lawyers the day before, who rightly surmised that such a Proclamation either had secretly issued or was about to issue and thus filed this action at 1:12 a.m. on March 15. The Court granted the five named Plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order that same morning, which enjoined their removal, and it scheduled an emergency hearing for 5:00 p.m. that day to consider the Motion to Certify a Class.

Just an hour before the hearing, the Proclamation was made public. Less than two hours after the Proclamation was published, and while the emergency hearing was ongoing, the Government flew 252 Venezuelan men, including 137 putative class members, out of the United States.

The Trump administration thought if it violated due process rights fast enough, no one would be able to do anything but offer up a resigned shrug. Boasberg has refused to do this. He saw this happening and moved on it. The administration efforts to stay ahead of easily foreseeable adverse rulings may now result in a lot of deportations being undone.

As for the government’s last-ditch argument that the Court has no jurisdiction because the hastily deported people are no longer in the custody of US federal officers, the court has this to say:

In a statement to the U.N. Office, El Salvador expressly disclaimed responsibility for the detainees, contending instead that “the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons l[ay] exclusively with the competent foreign authorities.”

So, it’s no use pretending the people denied their due process rights are still not under the control of the United States government. On top of that, there’s plenty of documentation on the public record that shows the Trump administration not only asked El Salvador’s government to accept whatever people it chose to dump into CECOT, but paid it nearly $50 million to offset whatever expenses El Salvador might rack up while violating the human rights of Trump’s deportees.

And the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act doesn’t change anything. Only under very narrow circumstances can due process rights be nullified. None of that is happening here. To pretend the government’s vague assertions about foreign powers and threats to national security are all that’s needed to negate the constitutional rights extended to anyone who happens to reside in this country, no matter how temporarily.

The remedy must thus adapt to meet the injury that has occurred. The Court finds that the only remedy that would give effect to its granting of Plaintiffs’ Motion would be to order the Government to undo the effects of their unlawful removal by facilitating a meaningful opportunity to contest their designation and the Proclamation’s validity. Otherwise, a finding of unlawful removal would be meaningless for Plaintiffs, who have already been sent back to Venezuela against their wishes and without due process. Expedited removal cannot be allowed to render this relief toothless. If secretly spiriting individuals to another country were enough to neuter the Great Writ, then “the Government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country, and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action.”

Those are the words of someone who not only knows the law, but respects it. These are words of the Trump administration:

“Once again Judge Boasberg issued an order that has no basis in law and undermines national security,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to NPR.

Amazing. This death cult of an administration is also a murder cult and kidnapping cult. National security interests can still be served while respecting due process rights. It’s not either/or, no matter how many people we murder in international waters. But this initial statement makes it clear the administration will do everything it can to continue violating these rights, no matter what the courts say about the issue.

Donald Trump has an enemies list. Not a secret one, either. It’s actually been published at the official White House website. But he has plenty of enemies beyond that. And ever since his return to office, he’s been engaged in acts of vengeance. Federal agencies have been purged of anyone who isn’t a MAGA loyalist. Journalistic entities have been threatened, sued, and — most recently — been placed under the “leadership” of people who serve Donald Trump, rather than their actual employers or the journalistic standards they’re supposed to uphold.

He’s also gone after a number of law firms who’ve represented people suing Trump and the administration. He’s also targeted lawyers who represent people he personally doesn’t care for, like the FBI agents who investigated the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt by his supporters.

Mark Zaid has represented a number of clients, including national security whistleblowers during the Obama years. In contrast to Trump’s opportunistic thuggery, Zaid doesn’t have a political ax to grind when he chooses to represent someone in court. All Trump has is political axes in need of grinding. Since he can’t fire Zaid directly, he’s doing what he can to make it more difficult for him (and others on the president’s neverending shitlist) to represent current and former government employees.

Eisen and Zaid, the lawyers representing the FBI agents, themselves became the target of a presidential memorandum in March that revoked their access to classified material. Both have aggravated Trump for years. Zaid represented a whistleblower who helped bring about Trump’s first impeachment.

Zaid sued to restore his security clearance in May, in a case that is ongoing. His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, is a high-profile defense attorney who left Winston this spring in order to form his own firm. Lowell said his goal is to represent those “unlawfully and inappropriately targeted.” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a fraud judgment against Trump and is now a target of his DOJ, was one of his first clients.

Fortunately for Zaid, he’s one step closer to getting his security clearance restored. DC federal court judge Amir Ali says [PDF] what’s immediately obvious: the president can’t just revoke security clearances simply because he doesn’t like a lawyer’s clientele. That’s a violation of First Amendment rights and that still doesn’t fly here in the US, despite Trump’s continuous efforts to make every right dependent on loyalty to the president.

It’s so obviously a violation of rights that even the government doesn’t try to rebut Zaid’s main argument. Instead, it tries to argue that the president is pretty much a king and can do whatever he wants when it comes to determining who gets to do what in this nation:

This case involves the government’s retribution against a lawyer because he represented whistleblowers and other clients who complained about the government, carried out by summarily canceling the attorney’s security clearance without any of the process that is afforded to others. In defending its actions, the government does not meaningfully rebut that the decision to deny this attorney the usual process was based on his prior legal work for clients adverse to the government.

The government instead asserts, emphasizes, and repeats that the executive branch has exclusive power to determine who meets the requirements for security clearance. […] That is well established, but does not answer the question in this case. It is equally well established that the executive branch’s exclusive power to determine who satisfies the eligibility criteria for security clearance does not mean it can conduct that determination however it wants and free from the Constitution’s limits.

If you need more evidence that this is nothing more than blatantly unconstitutional vindictiveness, you’ll find it in Judge Ali’s 39-page opinion. Zaid, who has held a security clearance for the last two decades, first angered Trump in 2019, bringing forward a whistleblower complaint that led to the House filing articles of impeachment. Here’s how Trump reacted to that:

When Zaid’s representation of the whistleblower became public, the President publicly rebuked him, including by showing Zaid’s photo at a 2019 rally and calling him a “sleazeball.” The President later said: “And [the whistleblower’s] lawyer, who said the worst things possibly two years ago, he should be sued and maybe for treason. Maybe for treason, but he should be sued. His lawyer is a disgrace.”

Here’s how things were going earlier this year, when Zaid again crossed Trump’s angry radar:

More recently, in February 2025, Zaid filed a lawsuit against the government on behalf of several Federal Bureau of Investigation employees to protect them from being targeted for work they did investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Four days later, a news source reported the President was planning to target Zaid, among others, by revoking his security clearance. The next month, the Director of National Intelligence announced on social media that she had revoked Zaid’s and others’ security clearances and access to classified information. And on March 22, 2025, the President issued a presidential memorandum to executive agency heads that included Zaid among a list of people for whom access to classified information was “no longer in the national interest.”

The government insisted the administration has the unilateral right to revoke clearances. The court agrees… to a point. But when clearances are revoked (or even denied), there’s a process involved that allows the person on the receiving end of this clearance stripping to appeal or challenge that decision. At the very least, they’re allowed to ask why. This summary stripping of security clearance from multiple lawyers at one time is obviously a rights violation (due process) that compounds the other alleged rights violation (free speech).

Based on the preliminary injunction record, the court finds the government has not conducted any individualized assessment of Zaid’s eligibility for security clearance. It instead denied Zaid the process and individualized assessment afforded to others because of his prior representation of whistleblowers and other clients in matters that were adverse to the government.

[…]

Because Zaid’s claims all challenge the legality of revoking his security clearance without meaningful process, they go only to the “methods used” to revoke his clearance.

The government pretends this is simply about denying access, which it can do. But it isn’t. It’s about selectively removing access, which isn’t really about the security clearance process, but whether or not the government can use the process to engage in retaliatory action against people it doesn’t care for.

So it tried this:

As mentioned, the government’s principal approach here has been to offer an expansive reading of the cases it likes (Egan and Lee) and to leave out the cases it doesn’t (Greenberg and Rattigan).

And ends up with this after Judge Ali parses the cited cases the government really wishes he wouldn’t have read so closely:

[E]ven the cases the government selectively quotes from recognize the line between “ends and means.

Furthermore, the court practically invites every other lawyer named in the White House memo to get busy suing over their stripped clearances:

The government, second, asks the court to just construe the presidential memorandum as an individualized national security assessment. But the court finds the memorandum was not based on any such assessment. It is undisputed that no government agency conducted an assessment of Zaid’s eligibility for clearance, and the memorandum itself does not purport to make any national security assessment—in fact, it does not mention national security at all. The memorandum instead directs agencies to summarily revoke Zaid’s clearance based on the “national interest,” which courts have consistently recognized as distinct from and more nebulous than a particular determination about national security.

Zaid wins, for now. The government has until December 30 to challenge the injunction. If it can’t raise a better argument than it has here (and there’s no reason to believe it can), Zaid’s clearance will be un-revoked on January 13, 2026. And the others who were targeted by the White House memo need to lawyer up and get their clearances back too. Certainly, the administration will try to get the Supreme Court to undo this, but for now, the clock is ticking.

Last week, I pointed out that part of the reason for running our current fundraiser (donate $100 or more and you’ll get our first commemorative challenge coin) is to show that it is possible to have a successful media business model that doesn’t involve annoying its community into paying.

Apparently that struck a nerve. A (actually very good) journalist for a billionaire-owned news org complained, suggesting that it was unfair of me to call out other media organizations for choosing to annoy people for money. Which billionaire? Does it matter? The list is long enough that you could throw a dart.

The crux of the argument seemed to be that there just aren’t that many ways for news orgs (billionaire-owned or not) to make money these days, and thus I shouldn’t call out those who have chosen an “annoy people until they pay” method.

I disagree.

One of the very earliest areas of coverage on Techdirt was about the changing music industry, and how the record labels’ Napster-era strategy of disrespecting music’s biggest fans by accusing them of all being thieves was not in their long-term best interests. Rather, working on finding a better business model that enabled fans to enjoy more music would be the better, more sustainable strategy. Today I would argue that I was correct.

I think the same is true in the news business. Insisting that the only way that a news org can make money is to be actively hostile to your readers/watchers/listeners strikes me as unsustainable and going down the wrong road.

Tragically, one thing that we’re seeing is that the news orgs with the least community-hostile approach tend to be right wing MAGA shitpost factories. They’re running on dark money or extracting cash from the perpetually credulous, but either way they’ve figured out that not actively pissing off your audience creates loyalty. It’s a depressing lesson in how the worst actors sometimes understand community dynamics better than legacy institutions.

But it would be nice if we could show the world a better way. That you can have a publication that does, in fact, respect its community. That doesn’t want to annoy you into paying. That doesn’t want to only make its content shareable if you have a subscription or if you first give up all sorts of private data about yourself.

And that’s where you come in. While Techdirt will accept donations year-round, if you want to get one of these cool new commemorative challenge coins, you have until Monday, January 5th, to make your donation. On Tuesday we’ll be submitting our order of how many coins get minted, so we’re down to our final week if you want in.

Help show the world that a good, thoughtful news site can be reader supported, but without having to use tactics that disrespect its community to do so.

This administration runs on vengeance. If it’s not Donald Trump aiming the DOJ at his personal enemies, it’s the DOJ itself taking a shotgun approach to justice (read: filling it full of holes) by filing as many criminal charges against anti-ICE protesters as possible. The charges have been transparently bogus — an obvious attempt by the administration to intimidate protesters into silence. And juries — even extremely submissive grand juries — have refused to buy what the government can’t even be bothered to sell properly.

Every loss by this administration is a win for what’s left of America and its constitutional ideals. Here’s one to cherish, just because the DOJ decided to brag about this supposed slam dunk a couple of months before a California jury went Wembanyana and swatted this shot halfway across the court.

The story starts here, back in September:

A tow truck driver from South Los Angeles has been arrested on a federal criminal complaint alleging he illegally towed a government vehicle used by law enforcement during an immigration-related arrest. 

The U.S. Department of Justice issued a media release on Tuesday morning indicating that Bobby Nunez was charged with one count of theft of government property. 

An affidavit filed with the complaint states that on Aug. 15, Nunez interfered with federal law enforcement officers conducting immigration enforcement in downtown L.A. This particular case involved a 23-year-old Colombian woman named Tatiana Mafla-Martinez, whose vehicle was boxed in by two government vehicles, preventing her from getting away. 

Here are some more details about the case, albeit supplied solely by the government:

While the second man was being addressed by the officers, Nunez allegedly got into his tow truck and towed one of the government cars blocking Mafla-Martinez’s car. Per the DOJ, the car he towed had its keys inside and also had a firearm, although it was locked in a safe. 

“Addressed” of course means “arrested.” And while the officers were otherwise occupied, Nunez towed their vehicle away because it was blocking access to the apartments. Nunez apparently resided at these apartments. The government says it found the tow truck “parked in its assigned parking space” two days after this incident (August 17). Somehow, it didn’t get around to arresting him for another two weeks.

After the arrest, DOJ prosecutor Bill Essayli decided to get on the X and brag about the nailing of this alleged criminal:

“Apparently he thought it would be funny to interfere with our immigration enforcement operations,” he wrote on X in September. “Now he can laugh behind bars while he faces justice. Nunez is looking at up to 10 years in federal prison if convicted.”

Whether or not the tow truck driver, Bobby Nunez, thought this was funny remains (like the rest of the case) an unproven allegation. But it is objectively funny, as this recording clearly demonstrates:

Essayli should know better than to run his mouth in public. His career with the Trump administration has basically been a long run of failures in courts while pursuing federal charges against protesters, journalists, and anyone else the administration thinks needs to be vindictively prosecuted.

The last laugh belongs to Bobby Nunez:

The South Los Angeles tow truck driver who was arrested in September on a federal criminal complaint charging him with “stealing government property” after he towed a government vehicle whose occupants were making an immigration arrest in DTLA was acquitted last week, prosecutors say.

We see what Essayli said about this. Nunez’s lawyers — both public defenders — pointed out the actual facts of the situation:

Deputy Federal Public Defenders Rebecca Harris and David Menninger, argued that the law enforcement vehicle was blocking the driveway to the apartment complex and that their client moved it only one block away to stop the impediment of traffic in the high-density apartment complex. It was returned less than 15 minutes later, they argued.

The jury apparently agreed: no (lasting) harm, no foul. The government suffered some temporary embarrassment but it still managed to carry out its arrests even if one of its cars was now located a few hundred feet away from where officers had (deliberately and carelessly) parked it.

Bill Essayli managed to handle the loss with whatever grace he has left in his body, simply stating that Nunez had been found not guilty and that he had no further comment. Local abhorrent/Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, of course, had to get up on his bitchiness horse and ride off into the sunset of his own humanity:

“Another example of blatant jury nullification in a blue city,” Miller wrote on X on Sunday. “The justice system depends on a jury of peers with a shared system of interests and values. Mass migration tribalizes the entire legal system.”

Good luck trying to parse whatever the fuck that is. I’ve tried multiple times and the best I’ve come up with is “Froth froth froth froth blue city froth.” Complaining about jury nullification is something someone does when they don’t like the outcome. And what makes this nullification more “blatant” than any other goes unexplained, although we all know it just means that it happened in Los Angeles.

If the DOJ is going to insist on being Trump’s vengeful marionette, things are never going to improve. Juries can be swayed easily, but they also tend to know when the government expects them to be the kangaroos in the court. The more extreme the government’s actions, the less likely they are to be complicit in obvious bullshit. No one in the administration is learning anything from this, which means they’re doomed to repeat their own recent history ad infinitum.

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I’ve written repeatedly about how Republicans effectively rewrote the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants (intended to be spent on affordable, next-generation fiber) was stolen from local communities, and instead given to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for expensive, congested satellite service.

I’ve also explained in detail why that’s a problem: These networks may be initially cheaper to deploy, but the networks lack the capacity to actually scale to meet demand. Data indicates they harm astronomy research and the ozone layer. They’re ultimately more expensive for consumers than fiber deployments, especially if those fiber deployments are by cooperatives or community owned.

In short, taxpayer money directed toward Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is also money directed away from higher-capacity, faster, locally-owned (and usually cheaper) fiber and wireless alternatives. And it’s money given to billionaires for technology they already had deployed or would have deployed anyway. It’s a coordinated hijacking of taxpayer money that will actually undermine affordable internet access.

Enter the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which aggressively lies about all of this all of this in a new, comically terrible editorial. The headline starts with an outright lie about how Trump somehow “unbroke the Internet”:

How did Trump “unbreak the internet?” Well again, he basically hijacked a huge chunk of the billions we planned to spend on next-generation fiber upgrades to schools, rural communities, and under-served areas, and gave it to Elon Musk for expensive satellite service he (again) already planned to deploy. This, according to the Wall Street Journal, is positively ingenious!

There’s no need to spend money on affordable gigabit fiber, the Journal informs us, because existing wireless and satellite is simply good enough:

“Congress appropriated $42 billion in the 2021 infrastructure bill for states to expand broadband to “unserved” and rural communities. The spending was unnecessary since satellite services like SpaceX’s Starlink and 5G fixed wireless services were rapidly closing the so-called digital divide. Upward of 99% of households already had high-speed internet.”

Again, these services are expensive. They’re congested. They’re spotty. They’re heavily monopolized by a handful of giant companies. They get slower as more people use them. Yes, you’ve technically “connected the public,” but you’ve done a piss poor job of it. Claiming it’s “unnecessary” to push fiber deeper in to more places shows the author is either lying or has no idea what they’re talking about.

The Journal is particularly incensed that the original infrastructure bill actually bothered to consult with local states, communities, and tribes to best determine their needs. Positively outrageous!

“States receiving funds had to consult with unions, native American tribes and “local community organizations” on their plans to expand broadband. This gave liberal special interests a veto and let them extort developers.”

Calling tribes “Liberal special interests” is very weird and gross, but no matter. The Journal is also extremely upset that the original plan for your taxpayer money was to ensure that the resulting fiber access was affordable. Republicans have already destroyed those efforts, but the Journal is still, somehow, very mad about it months later:

“Providers applying for funds were also advised to offer “low-cost” plans and provide “nondiscriminatory access to and use” of their networks on a “wholesale basis to other providers . . . at just and reasonable wholesale.” This was a back-door way to impose utility-style rate regulation on internet providers.”

The Trump administration not only has gutted all broadband consumer protection at the FCC, and destroyed all efforts to make sure taxpayer-funded broadband is actually affordable, they’ve illegally threatened states that they’ll lose already-awarded taxpayer money if they challenge the administration. This excites the very serious Wall Street Journal editorial board very much!

The real issue here is that the government engaged in some very light efforts to try and ensure broadband was affordable. This upsets regional telecom monopolies that have worked tirelessly to erode all local competition so they can rip you off. The idea that the government might come in and functionally prevent monopoly predation is unthinkable to these weirdos and Rupert Murdoch.

From here, the Wall Street Journal pushes a bunch of lies about how the corrupt Republican and Elon Musk hijacking of the program is saving taxpayers all sorts of money (several of the figures here are just foundationally incorrect):

“The average cost for each new household or business connected in Louisiana fell to $3,943 from $5,245. Louisiana’s most expensive project had run at $120,000 per connection under the Biden rules—almost as much as a starter home—but the Trump team brought the cost down to $7,547 per connection. Similar savings have occurred in other states.”

Again, many communities were going to get high capacity, gigabit fiber, in some cases as low as $60-$70 a month. Instead, they’re getting Elon Musk’s Starlink broadband access, which is not only much slower (which also gets worse as more people use it), but costs also upwards of $120 a month (plus hundreds of dollars in up front hardware costs, and in some cases, congestion fees).

Yes, that technology is cheaper to deploy, and useful in areas with no access, but it’s nowhere near as good as “last mile” fiber right to your doorstop.

It’s slower. It’s more expensive to use. And the primary company benefitting it is run by an overt white supremacist. Again, this all very much excites the Wall Street Journal editorial board, but it’s not going to be exciting to the millions of Americans who realize (hopefully) they got ripped off by a bunch of bullshitters three years from now.

Anyway, this is all to say that the Wall Street Journal is very excited that we redirected billions in taxpayer dollars away from affordable local fiber access and instead gave it to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for expensive, congested, satellite service that destroys the ozone layer, ruins astronomy, and isn’t affordable for most of the Americans who actually need it:

“The broadband program illustrates how the Biden combination of spending and regulation created market distortions and raised costs. It would be better if Congress let markets allocate capital, but the Trump Administration is ensuring taxpayer funds are spent in a more cost-effective way that does less economic harm.”

That Republicans hijacked a promising program to thrown billions of taxpayer dollars at billionaires for inferior product will be clearly borne out by data in the years to come. At which point the authors of this Wall Street Journal editorial will either be dead or have moved on to lying about something else.