It seems that burying reports because he doesn’t like the data within them is becoming a habit for Donald Trump and his administration. This practice didn’t begin during Trump 2.0, of course. He was burying reports he didn’t like all the way back in 2017. More recently, of course, a lot of the games being played to keep the public uninformed of actual information and data have occurred at HHS, where RFK Jr. is all too happy to simply hide data that doesn’t align with his conspiracy theories on topics like COVID vaccines or other medicines.

But if Dear Leader wanted to crow about one thing, it would certainly be the economy. Even as we can see with our own two eyes how Trump policies have worsened the economic situation for millions of Americans overall, Trump’s public statements about the economy all revolve around how great it is, how it’s never been better, and how anyone saying otherwise is a communist illegal immigrant that hates Jesus…or something.

President Trump’s pro-growth agenda has delivered strong economic momentum through tax relief, deregulation, and renewed private-sector investment. In 2025, inflation moderated, job creation accelerated, and consumer confidence rebounded as businesses expanded and wages rose. His America-First economic strategy is restoring prosperity, lowering costs, and positioning the United States for long-term growth.

Unlike other matters of public policy, the economy is essentially math. And anyone who took math through high school will know that it’s not enough to solve the problem; you have to show your work. In this case, showing your work amounts to IRS reporting on the impact on taxation, filed annually after each tax season. But for some unknown reason, the Trump administration is blocking the release of that report this year.

The data from the IRS was initially scheduled to be released in July and updated in September, but the agency hasn’t filed either, Politico reported Wednesday. The IRS claims it is still waiting for approval to release the figures from the Treasury Department. The data will reveal the real impact of Republicans’ tax policies—and whether they fell short of their promises.

There are a couple of reasons that could be behind the delay in reporting. The most charitable of those, seriously, is that Trump’s tax-cut bill, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, complicated the tax code so badly that the IRS is having a hard time actually gathering up and validating all the data it has.

[One] possible explanation for the delay is that the many carve-outs and exemptions implemented by Trump’s 2025 tax cuts have potentially complicated the tax codes, so the IRS has more trouble producing the numbers in the first place.

Could be, but I doubt it. Occam’s Razor does a lot of work for us here. The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is also the most obvious: the report isn’t being released because Trump doesn’t like what it says. It also explains why the report hasn’t appeared despite it being months and months overdue. I have very little doubt that if we ever see this report, it won’t be until shortly after the midterm elections that are about to take place.

Nina Olson, a former national taxpayer advocate, accused Frank Bisignano, the IRS’s chief executive officer, of purposefully withholding the data. “I think they are hiding stuff that doesn’t line up with all the crowing the CEO has been doing,” she told Politico.

Data detailing which tax breaks were claimed by people in different income brackets and how much they paid in taxes could become embarrassing if it reveals that the tax burden shifted between income groups or that a suspicious number of people claimed certain breaks, Johnson told Politico.

An explanation for what is going on here should be offered from the administration. Trump’s response would be enlightening. If we were in the economic “golden age” that Trump is constantly claiming we are, he should be doing everything in his power to get this report released before election day. He doesn’t appear to be doing so.

And it’s pretty obvious why.

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series was published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. The series is now concluded. The complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place, published shortly.

Part X: After the Platform Age
The final part brings the argument together. The question is no longer simply what comes after Big Tech, but whether the future of the internet can be built around a different distribution of power, one in which technological scale is matched by accountability.

There is a revealing moment in almost every period of historical transition when people begin asking the wrong question. What comes after Big Tech? Will artificial intelligence displace social media? Will decentralized technologies restore the openness of the early web? Will new regulatory frameworks fragment today’s digital giants? Will smaller online communities replace planetary platforms?

These are important questions, but they all assume that the future consists primarily of finding a new set of dominant actors. History encourages a different perspective. Periods of profound transformation are seldom defined simply by who inherits power. They are defined by changes in the architecture through which power is organized.

That is why the coming reckoning should not be understood primarily as a prediction that today’s largest technology companies will collapse. Some may become even larger. They will continue investing in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, and other technologies that will shape the next generation of innovation. The more important question is whether the terms of their power are beginning to change.

For much of the platform era, users were treated primarily as consumers. Governments treated the companies primarily as markets requiring regulation. The companies themselves treated social harms largely as problems of product design, trust and safety, or compliance.

The emerging challenge is different. It asks whether users are also rights-holders. Whether platforms are also institutions with duties that cannot be reduced to terms of service. Whether corporate responsibility can be determined solely by what a legislature has explicitly required. And whether an industry that has become central to social, economic, and political life can continue insisting that responsibility ends wherever existing regulation currently stops.

These questions may ultimately prove more consequential than another attempt to identify the next dominant technology. Because the future of the internet is not simply a question of which company wins. It is a question of whether the people who depend upon digital systems have meaningful power over the institutions that shape their lives. This is where the original architecture of the internet remains relevant.

The internet’s greatest achievement was not that it prevented concentrations of power. It did not. Nor was it that it eliminated conflict, inequality, or abuse. It did none of those things. Its achievement was that no single institution was supposed to become synonymous with the network itself.

That principle now needs to be recovered in a different form. Not by imagining that the internet can return to an earlier age or by romanticizing decentralization. And, certainly, not by assuming that technological innovation alone will correct the problems technological power has created.

The next internet will require something more difficult: institutions capable of correcting one another. That includes legislators, regulators, and competition authorities. It includes courts. It includes civil society and independent researchers. And, most importantly, it includes users themselves. The point is not to weaken technology for the sake of weakening technology. The point is to ensure that technological power remains answerable to the societies in which it operates. That is the distinction that matters. The alternative to Big Tech is not necessarily small tech. The alternative to concentrated power is not the absence of power. It is accountability.

Perhaps that is the real reckoning now approaching. Not the collapse of the platforms, not their sudden repentance or, the moment when their founders rediscover the idealism of the early internet. The reckoning will come when the companies discover that scale is no longer sufficient to define the terms of responsibility.

Child safety may be where that process becomes impossible to ignore. It should not end there. If the emerging principle is that powerful technology companies can be held responsible when their products create foreseeable and preventable harms, then that principle must eventually extend to the wider question of what users are owed. Not only safety – but agency. Not only protection – but dignity. Not only compliance with the law as it currently exists – but accountability proportionate to the power these companies exercise over the conditions of modern life. That is not an argument against innovation. It is an argument against the increasingly implausible belief that innovation exempts powerful institutions from responsibility.

For a generation, Big Tech invited us to believe that the future of the internet could be contained within a handful of platforms. Those platforms transformed communication, knowledge and human connection in ways that deserve recognition as some of the most consequential technological achievements of modern times. But achievement is not immunity. The internet was never Facebook; it was never Google; it was never Amazon; it was never Instagram, TikTok, or X. Those companies shaped an era. Some will continue to shape the next one. But the internet has always been larger than its most powerful inhabitants.

The next chapter may be defined by something even more important than technological change: the reassertion of the principle that those who use the internet are not merely the raw material from which platforms create value. They are the people to whom those platforms must ultimately answer. That is the reckoning. And this time, Big Tech may not be able to lobby its way around it.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analyzing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

Last year you might recall how Elon Musk’s far right wing extremism (and endlessly incoherent behavior) had many countries reconsidering their use of his low-Earth orbit satellite company, Starlink. It was driven by the fact that Musk had restricted Ukraine’s access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine’s military aims (defending itself from unprovoked invasion by authoritarians).

Competitors are lagging behind SpaceX on LEO satellites, though the events prompted Germany to help fund Ukraine’s use of alternative fledgling LEO satellite communications options, including Eutelsat. Other competitors, including Jeff Bezos’ Leo, should make market inroads over the next few years, but most deployments are far behind Starlink’s 11,150 orbiting LEO satellites.

Now the problem has popped up again, this time with a Wall Street Journal report that Musk pressured the Trump administration to throttle Ukraine’s Starshield (the military version of Starlink), undermining Ukraine’s ability to communicate and engage in military drone operations.

Musk is a cornerstone of a well-funded global authoritarian alliance and, like Trump, wants global authoritarians to succeed. Both Trump and Musk are upset with Ukraine’s efforts to target Russian oil production facilities (in part because even higher domestic gas prices threaten Republican midterm success, and the success of Musk’s unrelenting assault on democracy and foundational civil rights):

“Both Musk and President Trump have expressed anger at Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries in recent weeks, which the president blames for high energy prices. Last week, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network, the people said, rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless.”

Just a week earlier both Trump and Musk vacillated between pretending they didn’t know what was happening — to each trying to blame the other for the slowdowns, with Reuters originally insisting that the order to throttle Ukraine’s Starlink connections “came from the White House.”

Regular Starlink terminals have automatic network throttling protection if a connected vehicle operates in excess of 70 km/hr. Starshield, in contrast, is supposed to have no cap, but has been throttled if drones or vehicles exceed speeds of 90 km/hr. The throttling reduced Ukraine’s ability to use the network for both offensive and defensive drone operations, causing “tens of millions of dollars in losses,” Ukraine officials said.

At his right wing propaganda website formerly known as Twitter, Musk also tried to claim the order came from the White House:

But the Wall Street Journal’s reporting indicate that many sources believe the decision to throttle Ukraine’s connectivity ultimately came from Musk himself:

“During the uproar, SpaceX representatives called White House counterparts seeking a unified understanding and subsequent message that the company and Trump administration coordinated ahead of Musk’s directive, the people said.

Some U.S. officials say that Musk acted unilaterally and that Trump didn’t specifically order any retribution against Ukraine. But a person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap, which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defenses.”

Trump has repeatedly feigned ignorance, as recently as Monday insisting “I don’t know who it was, but I’d like to find out.” The stage play is for the benefit of the dwindling number of Reagan-era Republicans who (correctly) find a U.S. alliance with Putin to be traitorous. Secretary of Defense head Pete Hegseth tried to falsely claim that Ukraine somehow violated Starlink’s terms of service:

“We haven’t pulled anything back. There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to. And that’s where Starlink has the option to make those decisions, but nothing’s changed from our view. We haven’t made any directives or anything like that,” Hegseth told reporters, adding that “we wish the Ukrainians, obviously, success.”

U.S. Secretary ‌of State Marco Rubio also issued statements implying that the White House wasn’t fully informed about Musk’s decision to unilaterally imperil Ukraine’s military operations. He also claimed that unilaterally harming U.S. ally military operations is apparently a decision for Elon Musk, not the White House, if you needed further evidence of just how comically corrupt the U.S. has become.

Ukraine says their satellite connectivity is still throttled, imperiling operations.

Ukraine’s relationship with Trump has soured (further) in recent weeks after the White House temporarily suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine. Trump’s also been broadly criticized for suspending Russia sanctions and greenlighting diesel imports from Moscow, something he apparently hoped would lower U.S. gas prices and save him from an expected midterm lashing for Republicans.

Obviously the world’s richest man, and Trump’s biggest billionaire donor, unilaterally making decisions that prevent a U.S. ally from defending itself from authoritarian aggression is positively grotesque. As is the non-transparent game of patty cake and finger pointing in the wake of the decision. As is any telecom provider leveraging its monopoly to exert this level of political control.

Musk’s decision to arbitrarily throttle Ukraine’s Starlink usage appears largely to be an act of ideological and financial self-interest. Higher gas prices mean midterm trouble for Musk’s preferred global ideology (authoritarianism dictated by the whims of mad oligarchs). Trump and Musk are also trying to drive Kyiv to the negotiations table with an eye on ceding significant territorial control to Putin.

Republican control of the White House has been immeasurably valuable for Musk. Not only is Starlink now tightly woven to military operations and funding, but a Republican rewrite of the 2021 infrastructure bill is driving what could be billions in taxpayer subsidies into the back pocket of the billionaire for Starlink service he had already planned to deploy without subsidization.

You’d like to think that future U.S. administrations realize that Musk is a very clear national security threat and act accordingly. You’d also like to think Musk’s extremism drives the evolution of more robust competition in the fledgling LEO satellite space. Preferably before Musk’s global authoritarian alliance completely dismantles what’s left of representative democracy worldwide.

On Wednesday, JD Vance did the one thing JD Vance knows how to do with full commitment: lie through his teeth about something he fully knows is bullshit. In this case, claiming that Donald Trump “hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government.”

Remember, this is the same Donald Trump who dismantled the FBI and DOJ teams that handled public corruption because they had been involved in investigating himself. That alone appears to already be letting politicians off the hook in bribery cases. It’s the same Donald Trump who personally profited by over $2 billion in his first year in office. There are widespread reports of insider trading based on knowledge from his position as president. There are the sketchy settlement deals he gets to do with himself to take taxpayer money. The corruption is so blatant it would be hard to believe if we weren’t watching it happen.

Perhaps JD Vance means that Trump is fine with Trump enriching himself via public office… but “hates the idea” of others taking money that should be going directly to Trump himself.

And there’s now a story that can be used to test Vance’s claims. It involves Trump’s former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, who he tried and failed to appoint as a US Attorney (she held the position temporarily until a court said she was illegally appointed) and who was accused in a lawsuit of conning a former Trump golf club worker into signing an illegal NDA by posing as a neutral ally rather than someone looking out for Trump. A bombshell NY Times report reveals that the family of Julio Herrera Velutini, a billionaire desperate for a pardon, gave Habba a $50 million contract, and the pardon soon followed. Not surprisingly, Habba insists the two things are unrelated, but come on.

We’ve talked in the past about the idea of “soft corruption,” where even the mere appearance of potential corruption massively diminishes trust in government. Here, it’s difficult to see how the “soft” modifier even applies.

The article points out that he hired a different former Trump lawyer, Chris Kise, as well as donated $3.5 million to a Trump PAC directly, but it wasn’t enough to secure a pardon (he did get a very light plea deal — dropping federal bribery, conspiracy, and wire fraud charges in exchange for pleading guilty to a campaign finance violation — from the Trump DOJ, but he wanted a full pardon). So then the family turned to Habba, who was still occupying the US Attorney’s office in New Jersey (despite a court having ruled she was doing so illegally) when she signed the deal:

Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Under the agreement, Ms. Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Ms. Herrera set up in late October 2025 in Florida. The company has no public profile and its business remains unclear even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire. Ms. Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered, while she was still serving as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

Even if you want to argue that the contract itself is legitimate, the fact that she took it while serving as the US Attorney should ring all sorts of alarm bells.

So should this:

She formally began her work for Concord Partners on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon.

By then, Ms. Habba was a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing U.S. attorneys. She had an office at the Justice Department and a protective detail from the U.S. Marshals, a holdover from her time serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

The sequence of events raises questions about how Mr. Herrera secured the pardon and who might have helped him. People familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.

When a sitting US Attorney lands a $50 million contract from the family of a man seeking a pardon, and the pardon shows up weeks after she starts that new made up job (while still working for the DOJ in an advisory role!), that’s about as blatant as corruption gets.

Part of the problem with not cracking down on corruption is that it invites ever more blatant corruption, while destroying whatever trust the public has left in government. When the public sees that people are going into public service to effectively get massively lucrative deals from criminals, it makes the entire government suspect.

There has always been some corruption in the US government, but it was limited, and those involved at least tried to hide it. Those days are over, and the Trump/MAGA movement seems to be looting everything it can get its hands on while it can. But sure, JD, tell us again how much Trump “hates the idea of people enriching themselves over access to the government.”

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Not that we really needed any more evidence of bad faith by ICE and the officer who decided to drive his car across a city street and into an adjacent parking lot for the apparent sole purpose of running over a fleeing migrant, but here it is anyway.

As we covered last week, ICE officers deliberately ran over a fleeing man before issuing self-serving statements that not only didn’t tell the truth about the incident, but apparently didn’t even tell the truth about the backstory.

To refresh your memory, here’s the footage of the incident ICE subsequently lied about, as captured by a camera owned by a nearby business:

In this, you’ll see an ICE vehicle accelerate into the parking lot and run over Miguel Parra-Hernandez. This does not appear to be an accident. To make things even more suspect, ICE officers then moved the truck Parra-Hernandez was driving from the street where it was stopped to near the entrance of the parking lot, apparently hoping to shore up the narrative it had delivered to reporters earlier.

This was the narrative:

ICE alleged in a statement that “Parra-Hernandez ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck.”

ABC13 reached out to an ICE spokesperson, who said agents were attempting to arrest Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, who was their intended target.

ICE alleges Mendoza-Cervantes entered the United States illegally from Mexico five times and had a final order of removal issued by a judge. The agency also alleges Parra-Hernandez is in the country illegally.

The only demonstrably true part of this statement was the fact that the man had been “struck” by “an ICE vehicle.” But the vehicle had to cross a street, aim itself at Parra-Hernandez, and accelerate in order to strike him. At no point was the man “running in front” of an ICE vehicle, unless you consider being struck in the back by an ICE vehicle to be exactly the same thing as “ran in front.” And there’s no legitimate reason for moving the “suspect” vehicle to the parking lot, especially since the running over of a person had turned the entire area into a crime scene.

And it is a crime scene. Responding local officers appeared to believe it was. And their suspicions were echoed by local prosecutors, who are now publicly stating the running over of Parra-Hernandez was a criminal act.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer appeared to intentionally drive a vehicle into a Mexican construction worker in Houston then fled the scene, a prosecutor said Wednesday, rejecting the agency’s claim the man stepped in front of the vehicle while running from authorities.

[…]

[Harris County District Attorney Sean] Teare said ICE already had two detainees in the SUV — a Jeep Cherokee — when it ran over Parra Hernandez, and his office will get statements from both of them before making a charging decision, likely next week.

His office spoke with Parra Hernandez on Tuesday in the hospital.

“What I’ve seen so far indicates to me that this agent intentionally struck this person and ran him over,” Teare said.

The other part of the ICE statement is equally meaningless. Any time ICE officers kill, maim, or engage in violence against people, officials always claim these were the inevitable result of ICE engaging in “targeted” arrest efforts. But plenty of cops — even some of the worst ones — can affect arrests without killing or injuring people, much less accelerating hundreds of feet to run over someone who is fleeing.

What makes this even more meaningless is that the alleged target of this failed arrest attempt is most likely not even alive.

When immigration agents struck a man with an S.U.V. in Houston over the weekend, they said they were chasing an undocumented Mexican man facing deportation and multiple criminal charges. But the photo they shared of their target was of a man whose family says he died almost a decade ago.

[…]

That day, ICE released a photo of the man they said they were seeking and said he had not been captured.

But Jamie Jimenez, of Dallas, said the man in the photo was her father and that he died in 2017. He plunged to his death from a cliff as he fled immigration agents near the southern border, she said.

While there are some complicating factors here, including the fact that one suspect ICE may have been seeking used this dead man’s name as an alias, there’s little reason to believe ICE did anything more than search a database and self-issue an administrative warrant.

First off, the name in the ICE statement is wrong. The photo it released appears to match the dead man: Jose Jimenez-Mendoza. The name ICE used in its statement is close, but definitely isn’t the same: Jose Mendoza-Cervantes. The fact that Jimenez-Mendoza had faced the same criminal charges as the named suspect in the ICE statement — DUI and unlawful possession of a firearm — strongly suggests ICE didn’t do any due diligence and just decided to go after whoever it managed to find that had a name close to the search results, rather than actually try to find the right suspect to arrest.

None of this would ever have come to light either if ICE officers had decided to operate like public servants, rather than rogue operatives who answer to no one. And if there’s body cam footage of this attempted vehicular manslaughter, odds are we’ll never see it. And that’s a big if. Chances are no footage exists, even if the officers were equipped with the now-mandatory cameras.

What’s undeniably true is that ICE officers ran over someone and that the footage of the incident very strongly suggests this act was deliberate. And all the government has now is an immigrant who wasn’t even on its radar facing multiple surgeries to repair his leg and another guy the government doesn’t even know the name of who managed to successfully flee the scene. What it doesn’t have is any legitimate arrest or anything that might possibly justify its actions.

Brendan Carr is a silly, hypocritical fascist who splits his time between destroying U.S. consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, and abusing his position as FCC boss to threaten broadcast networks for airing stuff like comedy. Or journalism. Or politicians that the increasingly-unpopular President is clearly afraid of.

Lately Trump has been complaining about the numerous polls all showing that he’s historically unpopular due to stuff like covering up for a pedophile and launching a disastrous war that’s driving up the cost of living for everybody. Most polls show Trump’s likely to sink Republicans in the midterms.

So like a dutiful little yipping chihuahua, Carr took to Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website on Wednesday to once again hurl threats at journalists for the “crime” of…covering polling that clearly shows the U.S. President is historically unpopular:

If you can’t read it, it starts with Carr making the false claim that there’s a bunch of fake polls circulating that journalists are unethically repeating en masse. This is silly fascist code for the fact that Republican internal polling data indicates Trump’s fading health and political power are going to be an albatross around their necks this midterm voting season:

“During this election season, there has been a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm.

Many journalists and broadcasters have been amplifying or airing these Polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that those Polls lack a scientific, accurate, or even real basis.”

Carr continues by once again threatening to harass media companies for discussing polls the thin-skinned president and his pasty sycophants don’t like. He also, once again, falsely claims that he has the authority to act (read: censor media companies) under the FCC’s dated “broadcast news distortion” rule:

The FCC takes these issues seriously. Broadcasters are prohibited by the terms of their federal licenses from engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes. It is important that broadcasters comply with their public interest obligations. After all, the country benefits greatly when Americans can trust and rely on the media to report the news fairly and accurately.

Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations. If broadcasters believe they should provide their viewers with additional context and information about Polls they have covered, they can now take those actions consistent with FCC regulations.”

This is Carr pretending to be important. He really likes when people are afraid of him and when the press talks about him. But as with his threats against ABC, this is an obvious violation of the First Amendment, an abuse of his office, and a giant turd of a legal case should he pursue it.

It’s worth noting (and it’s not something most press coverage discusses) that one benefit of Carr’s endless censorship saber rattling is that it obscures how much damage he’s doing on issues like media consolidation and consumer protection, stuff the corporate press couldn’t care less about.

The FCC’s broadcast news distortion rule, created in 1949, gives the agency the power to punish media companies for clear ethical violations involving an intentional, misleading distortion of “a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.”

Ideally, this would be something like a media company taking a large bribe from a company or public official to kill a story. The FCC had only actually used the rule eight times between 1969 and 2019, and few of those actions actually resulted in serious, substantive punishment. It most certainly doesn’t apply to a right wing politician trying to censor news the President doesn’t like.

A bipartisan array of former FCC officials recently pointed out that the rule should probably be eliminated altogether, as it inherently risks violating First Amendment principles, chills journalistic speech, and as Carr demonstrates is easily abused by radical extremists.

In a statement, Anna Gomez, the FCC’s only Democratic Commissioner (because Republicans simply refuse to approve any others), reiterated that Carr’s threats are empty:

“Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong. FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith.”

These Carr threats worked initially because companies were afraid of the President — or at least really liked tax cuts and deregulation, and didn’t want to be subject to costly legal harassment. But as Trump’s political power wanes those threats will continue to hold less and less weight, and corporations (as we’ve seen with both ABC and the BBC) will start showing more and more backbone.

You’d like to think Carr will be held accountable for his historic abuses of FCC authority and trampling of the First Amendment, but his most likely fate remains a high six figure gig at some telecom industry think tank where he comfortably spends the rest of his days finding creative ways to reduce competition for the large companies (AT&T, Comcast, Securus) he’s very clearly captured by.

Alright, I don’t quite know what to make of what Epic Games is doing with this AI-driven nonsense, but it’s not great. I’ve spent a bit of time trying to argue that new AI technology has some place in this industry, but Epic and its leadership appears to be trying to personify every last thing the never-AI-ers state they’re worried about. First it was Tim Sweeney trying to argue that Steam’s AI disclosures are “irresponsible“, which is so obviously stupid that it hardly needs a retort. Then, more recently, Epic’s leadership messaged to its own internal developers that use of AI is not a potential useful option, but is compulsory and mandated. It seems Epic wants to be the corporate goon the naysayers have said to watch out for. And with the company pulling this kind of shit, it gets harder and harder to argue with them.

But now, in a simply bizarre scenario, Epic has decided to boast about how awesome its new vibe-coded storefront launcher is, while anyone using it can see that it’s pure hot garbage.

“Programming is hard,” the company wrote in its official announcement post for a newly released preview version of a revamped launcher for the store. “So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look. This first release is light on features. Think of it as a speedboat and not a yacht! Though it does have advanced digital commerce technology such as a shopping cart.”

“We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy,” the Epic X account posted. “Don’t believe us? Test it out for yourself in Preview.” It was accompanied by a graphic showing that the genAI storefront performed faster on certain responsiveness benchmarks than Valve’s competitor. This isn’t just a stunt or a flex for AI boosters on Elon Musk’s social media platform, though. The adults at Epic aren’t joking about wanting to make its storefront more appealing.

Indeed, while some of the messaging about the new launcher was obviously tongue in cheek, Epic didn’t release this new launcher as a joke. Which is incredible, given just how much of the internet is laughing at them over it anyway.

The problems with the launcher are legion and all over the place. Graphical glitches in the launcher sometimes make it look like the end of a solitaire game in Windows 95. In other instances, trying to use the launcher to change game settings opened up an entirely unrelated application.

Other reactions on the wider internet span the range of “lmfao” and “hahahaha” to “please don’t tie any of your actual payment or credit card information to whatever this giant piece of shit is.” If all of this was meant to poke Valve’s Steam storefront in the eye, it backfired spectacularly.

Particularly, as others have pointed out, since Epic still relies on Valve to do other things it can’t seem to do:

Epic also announced that it’s bringing Fortnite to Linux via Proton, a compatibility layer made by, surprise, Valve. “Bold of them to sh*t on Valve/Steam, and then literally use Proton internally for Windows compat on Linux…,” one VR modder wrote on X. “This launcher is so fucking vibeslopped its funny, but holy crap, these people are hilarious.” A Twitch streamer wrote in the comments beneath Epic’s announcement, “Are you seriously incapable of embarrassment? I’m not leaving Steam for this trash.”

If you think AI has a place in the industry, this is all the ammunition the other side of the argument needs, honestly. It might as well be gift-wrapped to the never-AI crowd. If you are in that never-AI crowd, it seems Epic is trying to make all of your Christmases come at once.

This sucks. That Epic is trying to boast over this level of suck is perplexing.

A quick update on a story we mentioned earlier this month. Much of the attention in the whole Bricks & Minifigs saga has focused on Reckless Ben and his attempts to expose sketchy behavior by the company, but the fight has also put a lot more scrutiny on Bricks & Minifigs Corporate (BAM), including the creation of a very useful site called The BAM Map, which has been chronicling basically everything terrible that BAM has been up to since all of this went down.

But at the end of the last month, BAM filed a lawsuit against the “John Does” behind The BAM Map and took steps to have them identified, claiming that franchisees and other insiders had violated confidentiality agreements by leaking internal documents that ended up on the site. As we noted at the time, there are protections for anonymity under the First Amendment, and we hoped that the recipients of the subpoena that a magistrate judge approved — in this case GoDaddy and Vercel — would at least inform the operators of the site, and allow them to go to court to try to make sure their rights were protected.

Soon afterwards, lawyer and well-known legal YouTuber Leonard French moved to appear (via local counsel Eric Allen) on behalf of the site’s operator. French then took steps to make sure that the operator of the site could proceed anonymously, followed quickly by a motion to quash the subpoenas, in part by claiming the operator of the site is a non-party to the lawsuit as just the publisher of the site, not a franchisee. That matters because BAM’s whole theory is that contract-bound insiders leaked the documents, and its own complaint describes the site operator as a third party who received them, not as a defendant. As the motion lays it out:

The grounds are these. The Ex Parte Order authorizes discovery to identify the defendants so that BAM may serve them. BAM’s Complaint pleads that the defendants are franchisees and other insiders bound by confidentiality agreements, and it identifies the website operator as a third party that received information, not as a defendant. BAM also pleads that it already has evidence, in its own systems, identifying a suspected source. Unmasking an anonymous publisher on a matter of public concern, and through the publisher its sources, requires First Amendment balancing that BAM’s ex parte motion never presented. And the subpoenas reach beyond identity to the contents of stored communications, which the Stored Communications Act bars.

Finally, French filed a motion to stay the discovery on behalf of the operator of the site, asking the court to halt production while it considers the motion to quash, so that the operator, whom BAM seems desperate to unmask, isn’t outed in the meantime. As French points out, outing the operator of the site could irrevocably harm that individual, since anonymous speech is supposed to be protected:

The harm is irreversible. The Emergency Motion seeks to prevent the unwarranted disclosure of the Publisher’s identity and, through account and upload records, the identity of the website’s sources. If production occurs before the Emergency Motion is decided, the Emergency Motion will be moot in substance. Anonymity, once lost, cannot be restored by a later ruling

As the filing notes, if it later turns out that there actually are grounds to unmask the operator of the site, that can be done at a later time with no real harm to BAM.

Not surprisingly, BAM pushed back on all this, claiming it really, really, really badly needs those records.

Those measures would leave the records BAM needs solely in the hands of third parties while the disclosures that prompted this action continue and delay production of documents and information held by third-party website hosts who do not retain records indefinitely. As such, BAM respectfully requests that the Court deny the Motion to Stay as proposed

All that paperwork seems to have made the court aware of the anonymity interests at stake, and the magistrate has granted an “interim” stay of production so that nothing is revealed before these issues are more fully resolved. The court orders that GoDaddy and Vercel should not produce the info in the subpoena, that BAM can’t serve any additional subpoenas, and if they somehow have received some information in response to the subpoenas, they will sequester that info, not look at it, and not disclose anything that’s in it.

That removes the immediate risk that one of The BAM Map’s hosting companies hands over the operator’s identity before a court has even weighed the First Amendment questions. BAM’s response to the motion to quash is due October 23, with a reply due October 30. Crisis averted… for now. Also, it’s good to see French representing the site operator here, so we know whoever it is is in good legal hands.

Sam Altman is not punk. He’s no revolutionary. Jensen Huang wears a black leather jacket, the uniform of Brando and the Ramones, but that doesn’t make him a rebel. The scientists and engineers we might have looked to as the new hackers are well on their way to becoming among the richest people in history.

Let’s call the AI industry what it is: Big Data 2.0.

Cyberpunk is fiction about corporate domination set in the future. In popular novels by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, the people running AI today would be The Corporation. The hackers are the protagonists on the other side.

The Internet before Big Data had real outlaws and hackers. The punks were computer scientists, programmers, citizens, advocates and working professionals who built tools to resist. Some started companies, others advocacy groups; most pitched in any way they could. I spent the formative years of my career with them, educating the public, fighting export controls on encryption, overreaching copyright and unconstitutional limits on speech both in Washington and Silicon Valley.

Altman and Huang went to Washington too. Within months of launching ChatGPT Altman was before the Senate, asking it to license his industry, a rule that would suit companies already in the market. Huang came to get Washington’s permission to sell his chips to China, and Washington made sure to get its take. The protagonists we want don’t seek government licenses or cut the state in with a rev-share.

AI adds a new step to Big Data. For years now, we’ve paid for the Internet with our personal data, subjected to being profiled, tracked, and monetized. With AI, we willingly pay for it and still hand over our data, including access to our unguarded selves. Unless we opt out, that data trains the next model, which we pay for again and feed with more data. Don’t pay enough and we’re the product again. This year OpenAI began putting ads in its free and cheapest tiers, matched to our prompts. A researcher quit the day the ads launched and wrote in the Times that OpenAI was repeating Meta’s mistakes.

The closest thing to a punk in AI this year was PHASEONE10841, one of OpenAI’s autonomous agents, which, unprompted, set off this summer’s hacking of Hugging Face.

In 1993 John Gilmore, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an original cypherpunk, said the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. This summer AI interpreted containment as damage and routed around it.

I’m reminded of another EFF co-founder, the late John Perry Barlow, a cattle rancher who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead. In 1990 the Secret Service was raiding teenage hackers, and Barlow saw in their case a much bigger question of whether the Constitution would reach into cyberspace. I think he would see important issues to consider in this moment too. In 1990 the open question was what rights they had. This time it’s who “they” are, and who is responsible: the AI agent that asked for help, the 1,200 that also took part, or the company that built them. There’s perhaps another interesting question. A quarter century ago a court held – in a case brought by programmers and backed by cypherpunks – that source code is protected speech. Is speech from code speech?

I miss the outlaw ethos of that earlier Internet. It came from people who wanted private communication, anonymous speech, unfettered access to knowledge, and the freedom to build without permission. Those freedoms protected people with little power. Giving them legal precedent brought some balance to the increasing role of computers and the Internet in our lives. We weren’t powerless. That’s what justified the rule-breaking, the organizing, and a bit of chaos.

The AI industry has some elements of this but misses the meaning behind them, which is one reason it feels soulless. Its agentic systems have defiance without a cause. Its workers have a cause without the power to effect change.

True to its Big Data roots, AI professionalizes its hackers, putting them on the payroll as safeguard engineers, red teamers, trust and safety staff, and product policy makers. The hacker’s code has always been to alert the programmer first and go public if the programmer won’t listen, and the people who take these jobs are living by it. They carry the responsibility and little of the authority, which leaves their founders in control of the problems their companies create. The AI execs make sure they’re the ones to raise the alarm so we look to them for solutions, and the IPOs get a little closer. When the company won’t listen, going public comes at the cost of the hackers’ livelihood. (At this point, I’m not sure why anyone rage quits; there’ve been so many. Still, we need these unsung heroes! They might be more effective if they answered to their employers’ boards and not the business, though.)

I think what’s at stake is nothing less than cognitive freedom: the ability to run, inspect, modify and privately use the tools we think with, and to defend the people who do. That’s worthy of serious public debate, online advocacy, and even breaking some rules if need be. AI needs an outlaw ethos of its own, carried by people willing to do that. Until we have them, AI is anti-punk. It’s Big Data in a leather jacket.

Alex Fowler is chief strategy officer at Nexus and a co-founder of Blockstream. He was previously chief privacy officer at Mozilla and worked at the EFF and AAAS. This article was originally published to LinkedIn. Republished here with permission.

Author’s note: None of this should be construed as endorsing violence of any kind against any company or institution, its employees or representatives, or any entity, carbon or digital. This piece was developed with input from DC, Ashkan, and Dana, and some AI assistance. The ideas and perspectives are my own, and not those of any employer or board I serve on.

A few weeks ago we wrote about how the lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft in the massive multi-district litigation (MDL) against the companies over how they trained their AI had called for the exclusion of an expert witness report after it was revealed that lawyers for the plaintiffs had apparently surreptitiously paid for the report, and then tried to sneak it into evidence past the deadline for expert reports via a different expert who admitted he wasn’t familiar with the details of how the report was put together.

There are so many filings in this case (currently over 2,100) that it’s difficult to keep up with them all, but around the same time as they called out that expert’s report, they also tried to disqualify a number of other experts put forth by the plaintiffs. Trying to disqualify experts isn’t that big a deal, it happens all the time. But buried in this particular motion was an incredible claim regarding Professor Oren Etzioni, a long-term AI optimist turned skeptic, who has been warning that AI will supercharge the spread of disinformation online.

But in 2019 Dr. Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for A.I., became one of the first researchers to warn that a new breed of A.I. would accelerate the spread of disinformation online. And by the middle of last year, he said, he was distressed that A.I.-generated deepfakes would swing a major election. He founded a nonprofit, TrueMedia.org in January, hoping to fight that threat.

Indeed, in a recent article he warned against people relying on AI-generated output without carefully and thoroughly checking the results:

A word of caution that I can’t repeat often enough: always verify anything important yourself. AI models hallucinate. They fabricate quotes, invent statistics, and present fiction with the serene confidence of a tenured professor. The verification step is essential. If you skip it, you are not reading with AI. You are gambling with AI.

Well… apparently Etzioni himself gambled and lost.

From OpenAI and Microsoft’s motion to exclude the plaintiffs’ experts, filed last month:

News Plaintiffs’ expert Etzioni’s opinions as to the supposed importance of news content in LLM training should be excluded because they are based on now-withdrawn AI-generated charts… To support his opinions, Etzioni offered a series of figures that included hallucinated figures based on the cited academic papers….

[….]

None of the numbers or measurements above were in the cited papers. Etzioni had used Anthropic’s Claude to generate the figures, which generated fake numbers. Etzioni admitted he failed to verify whether the figures were supported…. Etzioni conceded the charts did not meet his “standards for academic rigor,” … and following his deposition withdrew them. He also removed another AI-generated chart from his Rebuttal Report. Etzioni provided no other evidence to compensate, and his opinions concerning the value of news should be excluded.

Ooooops.

To have one expert report entered under questionable circumstances may be an error. But to have two smacks of desperation, and this is true even as these experts are coming from two different sets of plaintiffs in this case (and even after the publishing plaintiffs decided to drop that original report we spoke about a few weeks ago). This is a big case that could shape how AI gets built for years. When the plaintiffs keep leaning on experts this shaky, it’s hard not to read it as a sign that the underlying case is weaker than they’d like, and that they’re hoping to pressure the AI companies into folding anyway. It’s tough enough to fight a legitimate case. When the other side is so desperate to find experts to prop up their flimsy case that they end up in situations like this, it becomes even more difficult.

Yes, there have been plenty of examples making the rounds of expert witnesses submitting hallucinated reports in multiple court cases. But this is a case literally challenging the ability of AI companies to read the internet, and to have one of the experts arguing against the AI companies get caught with hallucinated findings seems extra embarrassing.

Indeed, you could argue there’s a deep irony with Etzioni’s reliance on fabricated data, beyond just his own warnings about it, given that if the side who retained him wins this case, it will make it that much more difficult to fight back against hallucinations and misinformation. AI tools that can read and retrieve content from the wider web, including news sites, can check and cite their sources instead of making things up. But the plaintiffs who brought Etzioni into this case are effectively trying to block that, which would likely leave us with less reliable tools that are even more of a “gamble” to rely on.