The so-called National Security Law that the Hong Kong government ratified back in 2020 strikes again. This law, which broke the agreement made when the UK handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese government three decades ago, has since been used to jail and silence all kinds of pro-democracy voices that cause communists to shiver in fear. We’re not talking about guerilla groups or well-organized NGOs here. We’re talking about everyday protestors, artists, and musicians. Calls for a rollback to these kinds of anti-speech, anti-human rights actions have been met with blank stares and obstinance.

We’ve talked about Joshua Wong here at Techdirt before. He was one of the pro-democracy voices that chose to stay in Hong Kong after the NSL was passed, despite the danger it put him in. He also was a creative force in organizing protests, not only engaging in traditional peaceful protests on the streets, but figuring out ways to rally support and organize through online spaces like multiplayer video games as well. The Chinese government, always willing to drive a semi truck when a clown car would suffice, banned some video games as a result.

That didn’t deter Wong. He kept protesting. And, predictably, he was jailed for his activities in 2020. Having served most of his sentence without controversy, Wong was slated to be released from prison at some point early next year. That is no longer the case, since the Chinese government just now decided to bring more charges against him for activities that occurred before he was imprisoned, resulting in an additional 10 year sentence in prison.

Wong is already serving time for subversion and was due to be freed early next year when he was handed the latest charges, to which he pleaded guilty in September. Two months and two days of the 10-year term will be served concurrently with his ongoing sentence, the judge said on Thursday.

Prosecutors said Wong had conspired with other campaigners, including self-exiled activist Nathan Law, to lobby for foreign sanctions and blockades against Beijing. These activities took place between July and late November 2020, the court heard.

Again, all of this occurred before he was convicted of the crimes for which he is already imprisoned. The government claims he is undermining Hong Kong’s future, creating instability, and is a national security threat. The details of those crimes are advocating for democracy in Hong Kong and pleading with foreign governments to put pressure on Beijing to help it come to be.

That the law used to imprison Wong can also be used to stack charges like this on him just before he is due to be released tells you all you need to know about it. It’s a farce, used solely by Beijing to silence voices it doesn’t like. That Wong pleaded guilty to the charges is meaningless. Prisoners in a system like this one can be made to confess to being a purple people eater if the government tries hard enough. This is obviously just being used to keep Wong in jail longer than his original sentence.

According to the US consulate in Hong Kong, the sentencing showed Beijing “will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate for fundamental freedoms” in the Chinese territory.

Human Rights Watch described the sentence as “cruel and unjust”.

“To keep Hong Kong society subdued, and to reduce the chance of an international outcry, the Hong Kong government appears to have adopted the tactic of stacking charges against influential pro-democracy leaders,” said its Asia director Elaine Pearson.

The rights of the people of Hong Kong continue to be purposefully eroded. The world ought to be paying attention, because the eventual takeover by Beijing is going to be attempted, either militarily or through a slow-creeping coup via laws like this.

Developers of virtual private network (VPN) apps are reporting that their products are again being pulled from Apple’s App Store in Russia. This is an unacceptable crackdown on a vital tool to protect privacy and speech online.

Why? VPNs give people a way to control their own online activities. When you visit a website through a VPN, that website only sees the VPN server’s location (well, IP address) rather than your actual location. It’s like sending a letter through a P.O. box so the recipient doesn’t know where you really live. It can also disguise where you’re accessing information from, which can make it possible to access information banned by your government.

Going after tools that give people the space to communicate and access information freely is a common tactic from the totalitarian playbook. This latest demand comes after several steps the Russian government’s taken to surveil speech specifically on Apple products. In 2024, the Moscow Times reported that Russia’s state media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, went after VPN apps on the Apple App Store, after banning access to Western social media platforms and blacklisting opposition media sites. Russia then blocked Apple’s FaceTime software in 2025, according to Apple Insider.

Bloomberg also recently reported that the Russian government has added Apple and Microsoft to its state surveillance registry. This gives Roskomnadzor access to local users’ correspondence, Apple Insider reported, and puts both companies in a position to turn over customer information to the country’s security services as required.

With government control encroaching on their devices and less access to tools that give them alternate methods, people in Russia are left with shrinking options to communicate online or find information that isn’t state-sanctioned.

While Russia’s actions offer a more extreme vision of what happens when the government tries to enforce speech rules by attacking vital privacy tools, it is far from the only government doing so. Several states in the U.S., bent on making it difficult to circumvent invasive age-gating laws, have suggested banning VPNs—either to access certain content or in some cases to simply ban them outright. EFF has publicly (and loudly) criticized these proposals, because going after VPNs is a dangerous step down the road of censorship.

Attacks on speech and privacy online are deeply troubling, no matter where they happen. What those in power may see as a “loophole” in their invasive laws is actually an expression of user control. We’ll continue to speak out when we see governments going after them to take that control away.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Sure, this administration isn’t just tone-deaf, but life-deaf. But it must be pointed out that what AG Todd Blanche is doing here comes in opposition to members of his own party.

Every since it became readily apparent that hundreds of law enforcement officers were regularly abusing access to ALPR (automatic license plate reader) databases to do things like stalk their ex-wives and keep tabs on people engaged in First Amendment activity, politicians on both sides of the massive American bipartisan divide began expressing concern, if not actually demanding (and creating!) legislation meant to keep ALPRs from becoming the KGB they generally didn’t want to see in the (US) world.

Even politicians who generally offered up shrugs when cops went rogue suddenly had something to say as the rest of the (un-elected) nation focused some their considerable ire on license plate readers, especially those provided by Flock Safety.

The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, directed police departments last week to stop spending state money on Flock Safety cameras, the license-plate readers that have drawn bipartisan backlash around the country.

Days later in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration ordered the systems removed from state roads. Mr. DeSantis has described the surveillance technology as “out of control.”

Both governors are tough-on-crime Republicans with deep backing from law enforcement agencies. Yet their moves underscore how the political winds are shifting against Flock and other plate-reading systems that have been embraced by police departments.

Given all of this, it’s seriously pretty weird for AG Todd Blanche to offer up this defense of ALPRs — even if we factor in Abbott’s recent election loss and DeSantis’s even more recent attempt to try on a size 6 pair of “anti-MAGA” boots.

Everything Trump is doing now seems to be stuff that most Americans hate, ranging from immigration raids to the new forever war in Iran to his inability and/or unwillingness to do anything that might bring down the prices of consumer goods. (And that’s without mentioning his extremely unpopular embrace of AI and data centers…)

Enter Todd Blanche, Trump’s latest kept man in the DOJ, to tell Americans to shut the fuck up about pervasive, easily abused surveillance tech:

Speaking at a press conference in Florida on Friday to announce a $74 million federal investment in the state, Blanche waved off surveillance fears as “misinformation.”

“The technology around license plate readers does not affect the privacy of American citizens,” the attorney general said. “It may someday, and if the technology advances to where we need to take a look at it and figure out a way to address and draw it back, we should do that.”

It’s the usual Trumpian horseshit: call facts you don’t like “misinformation” and imply that Americans are too stupid to know what’s good for them. That plan of attack certainly worked out well at the polls last week. And yet, no one in the administration seems to have learned anything from the nation’s resounding rejection of MAGA ideals.

Bro, these cameras already “affect the privacy of Americans.” Just ask any number of stalking victims whose antagonist was a law enforcement officer. Just ask any number of GOP officials who are (correctly, if not always honestly) concerned about the implications of massive ALPR networks capable of capturing millions of plate/location records a day and storing them indefinitely.

Blanche insists this a privacy issue can he can just kick down the road to the next administration. But even if that’s a luxury he can afford, it’s nothing the American public should be willing to accept. Blanche is completely in the wrong here. It’s already a problem. Pretending it isn’t is just convenient cowardice. And pretending someone in the future might be able to close an Overton Window opened years earlier is self-deception Blanche apparently expects the rest of US to believe as well.

Bullshit.

Blanche — much like Trump himself — is not representative of the people they can’t even be bothered to pretend they represent. Blanche’s statement just makes it clear this administration prefers an unbridled surveillance state and it’s not going to stand in the way of tech companies that have the willingness to make this happen.

Back during the Arab Spring in 2011, in which youth protests against various governments were celebrated in much of the Western World, we saw countries like Egypt move to shut down the internet in an effort to keep the public from communicating. I’ve been thinking about that a lot while following a series of stories regarding France, a democratic country, that has been undergoing a series of protests across the country. There were three separate stories I saw that paint quite an alarming picture of how France is willing to attack the internet.

The first story actually has nothing (directly) to do with the protests, but matters just as much. On October 22nd, the Swiss non-profit DNS resolver organization Quad9 announced they needed to leave France altogether. The issue wasn’t about protests, but copyright (the world’s most popular censorship law). Quad9 has been targeted before by copyright holders who demand that its DNS not resolve certain sites they claim are “pirate” sites. This time it was beIN Sports, a Qatari-based company that operates a bunch of sports channels around the world. They sued Quad9 in France because some pirate streams were operating from some websites and people could reach them via Quad9’s resolver.

To be clear, Quad9 had nothing to do with these pirate sites or streams. It didn’t host them. It didn’t carry any of their traffic or streams. All it did was answer when people asked “where is thisrandomwebsite.com?” by pointing them to the website they had asked about. But to beIN Sports, this had to be stopped. And a French court agreed. But Quad9 noted there was no reasonable way to enforce this on just French users, meaning a Qatari sports broadcaster could effectively break a fundamental part of the internet (asking a resolver “where do I find this domain?”) for everyone. Quad9 pointed out that they can’t abide by this:

We cannot comply with this ruling over the long term while remaining faithful to our mission to protect your privacy, defend you against cyber threats, and preserve the integrity of the internet. For us, recursive DNS resolution is a neutral and passive service. We categorically refuse to alter or lie to you about the DNS responses you receive in a way that opposes your expectations.

This ruling forces an untenable position upon us. Compliance is technically unfeasible, and implementation directly contradicts our mandate to serve the public. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to withdraw Quad9 services from France as of Tuesday, November 24. We deeply regret that French internet users will be left without an alternative that can adequately protect their cybersecurity while remaining compliant with European privacy law.

This seems bad for people who want (1) a functioning internet and (2) a safe internet, since that’s what Quad9 provides. But it is what happens when governments hunt up and down the network stack to find the choke points they can control.

That takes us to the second story. That same day — October 22nd — the French Prime Minister’s office sent a “confidential letter” to basically all of the French mobile operators, asking them to get ready to block TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and X if the protests got too out of hand. Basically, the French government was prepping a slightly more targeted version of what Hosni Mubarak’s government did in Egypt during the Arab Spring — though thankfully, not yet implemented.

The link above, from CircleID, points out that the telcos pointed out that this was a bad plan:

During an October 23 meeting, telecommunications representatives reportedly warned that implementing geographically targeted DNS restrictions on short notice would be difficult. They also noted that virtual private networks and alternative DNS resolvers could circumvent such filtering.

That last line is what connects the two stories for me. The telcos pointing out that people will get around any such DNS blocks by using “alternative DNS resolvers.” You know, like Quad9, the alternative DNS resolver that just announced it’s leaving the country entirely due to stupid copyright laws.

But France was not done. On October 26th, a new “Amendment” was submitted in the Senate, which would allow government officials — with no judicial review — to order platforms to pull down certain content the government objects to, specifically around what the government claims is “incitement” to violence, theft, destruction or sexual assault. If the specific content remained online for one hour, the government authorities could escalate (again with no judicial review) and order the entire site to be blocked (DNS again) and to have it removed entirely from search engines. After some concerns, a “softened” version was passed, though it is expected to be challenged. It still requires takedowns and still without judicial review, though one single government bureaucrat will be charged with reviewing all the takedown demands.

This came just a few days after the French government demanded that employees from six different websites, including TikTok and eBay get lectured in person by government officials about steps they needed to take to stop people from using the internet to organize protests. If you’re wondering why eBay (not necessarily a hotbed of protest organizations) was included, apparently the government feared that if shops were looted, the looters would try to sell their ill-gained goods via eBay.

The companies apparently agreed to act as an investigative arm of the French government, according to Serge Papin, France’s “minister for small and medium-size enterprises”:

Platforms agreed to forward reports to investigators, monitor ads for goods stolen specifically during the protests, and send the government reports of their actions, with the first one coming within 48 hours, according to Papin.

Three different stories, but all an example of the same basic thing: the French government using key internet choke points to try to exert control over how people used the internet, whether it’s to watch sports streams, organize protests, or sell off some looted goods. This is part of the reason I’ve been warning about how centralized platforms become targets of governments for control.

It’s good to see Quad9 push back and say that it will not give in, but would rather leave the country instead. But that’s a real loss for the people of France. And, yes, there is no doubt that some people are breaking the law. But the answer to that cannot be “well, just get the internet to shut it down,” because that path leads to the end of the open internet entirely.

It’s also a reminder of how closely linked copyright law and “site blocking” legislation are to direct government censorship of speech. They’re really two sides of the same coin.

But what’s most striking to me in all of this is that when Egypt and other countries sought to shut down the internet in response to the Arab Spring in 2011, many other countries around the globe spoke up about the importance and power of the internet to allow young activists to communicate and organize. But here we are, just a decade and a half later, and it’s a democracy like France reaching for the same tools, and there’s been very little public outcry or discussion outside of France. During the Arab Spring, the world was watching. Now, it’s just another day when a government looks to commandeer the internet’s choke points.

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Texas governor Greg “Piss Baby” Abbott lost his office during the mid-terms. What a shame. The guy who spent years engaging in attacks on free speech when not trying to turn all of Texas into a thin blue line finally got kicked to the curb by residents who were sick of both his shit and that of his MAGA benefactor, Donald Trump.

Abbott = Trump = ICE. With Abbott leaving office, replaced by Democratic Party candidate Gina Hinojosa, other state officials are now feeling a bit more free to throw off the MAGA shackles and get back to doing what’s best for their own constituents.

Houston’s mayor is done with ICE’s bullshit, now that the governor is no longer capable of throwing his bigoted, anti-constitutional weight around, as the New York Times reports:

Mayor John Whitmire of Houston said he was directing city police officers on Friday to limit their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during traffic stops, bucking a policy imposed on Texas’s largest city by Gov. Greg Abbott.

Under an executive order from the mayor, Houston police officers will no longer alert ICE agents when they encounter an unauthorized migrant during routine traffic stops or in connection with other low level infractions.

Instead, officers will only alert ICE in cases where a person has been arrested and is being brought to, or has already arrived at, a county jail.

It is to LOL. While I wish more city reps had pushed back against Abbott and his desire to placate Trump during this internal invasion of the United States by masked ICE kidnapping squads, I’m more than happy to revel in the belated blow-off of everything Trumpian following his party’s spectacular mid-term implosion.

And why should any law enforcement agency lend ICE a hand? If federal immigration officers want to do evil things on main — ranging from murders to assaults to deliberately running people over — they should do it on their own. There’s no reason any US law enforcement agency should agree to be an accomplice, before, during, or after the fact. Let these motherfuckers do their evil shit on their own. Just handle your own stuff and I guarantee the locals will like and respect you more than if you’ve decided to aid and abet actual evil.

And this move makes even more sense now that Harris County prosecutors are moving forward with criminal charges against ICE agent Mario Morales — the officer who deliberately ran over a fleeing man and then hid behind false statements by ICE and DHS until footage captured by a local business’s CCTV camera exposed ICE’s lies.

Technically, Governor Abbott still controls Texas until next January. But everyone in Texas can help him find the exit before he’s officially no longer a drain on their tax dollars. And that neutralizes Abbott’s threat to pull more than $100 million in public safety funding from Houston unless it agreed to be part of the ICE problem.

That threat no longer exists. And now that it doesn’t, other cities in Texas should be following in Mayor Whitmire’s footsteps. There’s nothing stopping them now. Abbott’s temporary grasp of the state’s purse strings has effectively ended. Now is the time to do what’s best for the people they serve.

Last year you might recall how Elon Musk’s dodgy DOGE bros illegally stole vast troves of government datasets. Some of these random, unqualified assholes stole data simply using USB drives. But you might recall how many of the DOGE bros had also installed Starlink terminals duct-taped to the White House roof (and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) to engage in all sorts of data transfers we don’t have answers for (yet).

At the time, Trump and Musk insisted that these Starlink terminals were donated out of the kindness of Elon Musk’s heart. Though new reporting from the Washington Post indicates that this was somehow also a lie, and that taxpayers have been footing the bill the entire time:

“…contracting records reveal that the Trump administration has been spending taxpayers’ dollars since last year to install and service Starlink equipment at the White House. In four contract awards from March 2025 to June this year, the government has agreed to pay nearly $1.2 million to SpaceX for services provided to the White House Communications Agency, a military unit that sets up secure communications for the president, vice president and other officials.”

So, three payments to Musk Corp totalling $502,000 were reported last week by the legal advocacy group Democracy Defenders Fund. A fourth contract worth $686,000 was revealed by the Post. In other words, you personally paid Elon Musk to compromise White House IT infrastructure and likely offload oodles of your personal data to a bunch of random Musk-linked assholes.

Last year, the Secret Service brushed aside security concerns when asked about it by the Washington Post, claiming that slow Starlink service was just “improving internet access:”

“We were aware of DOGE’s intentions to improve internet access on the campus and did not consider this matter a security incident or security breach.”

But there’s simply no valid reason you’d need to suddenly install Elon Musk’s slower Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite connections to a White House IT system rife with multi-gigabit fiber and gigabit Wi-Fi. Unless, of course, you’re interested in engaging in activity that can’t be monitored, whether that’s of the ordinary corruption communication variety or wholesale data theft.

Last week, a security firm also noted how multiple White House employees have installed dodgy Russian-linked proxy software on their computers, allowing outside access to sensitive White House IT systems for far less than a cup of coffee. And that’s of course on top of all the other Trump-related IT security scandals, including the massive Salt Typhoon hack Trump has helped scuttle investigations of, the CEO of NVIDIA having an affair with a Chinese spy, and Trump admin officials endlessly having their phones hacked. And you have to assume we’re only seeing a tiny fraction of it.

There’s a certain irony that all of this dodgy shit was going on at the same time that a bipartisan array of lawmakers (and much of the press) was obsessed with TikTok being the biggest cybersecurity threat of the age. Something they “fixed” by offloading TikTok to Trump’s billionaire friends.

It bears repeating: U.S. government IT infrastructure should probably be considered completely compromised by foreign actors, and will require a total audit and rebuild that will be going on long after Trump is dead. You will, of course, also be footing the bill for that. With much of that money going to tech companies that personally helped bring Trump to power in the first place.

The injection and prioritization of religion into government institutions, specifically Christianity, is a very real thing. This sort of Christo-fascism shows up in a variety of ways. Attempts to inject Judeo-Christian icons and messages into public classrooms. Pete Hegseth’s attempt to create a “Religious Affairs” office at the Pentagon, likewise trying to claim that this office wouldn’t favor any particular religion, which is obviously bullshit. The GOP’s general insistence that the IRS should not be targeting any particular group over its ideological or religious stances, when they are all too happy to target all sorts of other groups for their own ideological stances.

The desire to wrap the flag in faith is a longstanding tradition among authoritarian governments. Hell, even the USSR, ostensibly an atheist government, was all too happy to cozy up with the Russian Orthodox church when it needed to recruit soldiers, and even incorporated what were essentially “miracles” in the form of the lies Lysenko told about his agricultural achievements.

The point of all of this is not that religion is bad. The point is that for those of us who believe in western-style democracy, you should be very wary of any mixing of government and religion. It’s one of the main points of the First Amendment, after all. So, when RFK Jr. is out here claiming he is working on how to get more taxpayer dollars funneled into so-called “faith-based” addiction recovery programs, that’s a problem. He made these remarks while visiting a Christian program in Michigan called Sheepgate, which does not currently receive taxpayer money from the federal government.

Kennedy visited Detroit on Tuesday to discuss the Detroit Health Department’s receipt of STREETS program funding for long-term services to assist people struggling with homelessness, serious mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders. At the Michigan event, Kennedy said the program will have a “new emphasis on faith-based recovery.”

Though Sheepgate — nor any Iowa facilities — received federal dollars through the STREETS program, Kennedy said the Colfax recovery center was a “exemplar” facility showcasing the type of care encouraged through the Great American Recovery Initiative — long-term programs that offer a year of “in-house recovery and reintegration into the community,” he said.

“Our plan of Great American Recovery is to reorient recovery towards value-based recovery in this country,” Kennedy said. “We follow the addict comprehensively over the lifetime, from detox to rehab to housing to jobs and stability. And that’s value-based care — but also to include more and more faith-based care, and that’s one of the reasons we came here to Sheepgate.”

These ministerial treatment programs don’t receive federal funding for a very good reason. It is anathema in a secular government for public money to go to activities that in any way push religion on others. And that’s what these programs do. They are not strictly focused on science-based addiction recovery programs. They also inject the concept of subjugation to a higher power into the program as well.

And they are free to do that, just not with our money. And, just as is the case with the Pentagon, I have a very hard time believing that public dollars will be doled out in equal portions between Christian recovery programs and that of other religions. Does anyone really think Donald Trump is going to be found to be funneling millions in public money to mosques that do recovery work? I highly doubt it.

Advocates for Kennedy’s plan will argue that this isn’t a First Amendment issue at all, but one created by the Biden administration.

Regulations enacted in April 2024 by nine federal departments overseeing social service grants including drug rehabilitation services placed restrictions on partnerships with faith-based organizations to ensure funding did not go toward “explicitly religious” purposes, but some churches and faith-based services said the regulations made their programs ineligible for federal assistance. Kennedy said this policy has been changed during the Trump administration, but that problems remain.

“We’ve changed that policy at the top, but there are still impediments to us getting the money to these kind of programs,” Kennedy said. “This program is entirely funded by private donors, and that’s getting harder and harder for them to do. And we want to make sure that these kind of programs — they serve such a critical role — we want to make sure that they continue to function.”

But that Biden regulatory order was actually a response to one from Trump in his first term, in which he lowered the barrier for entry for faith-based programs. It restored the status quo, in other words, and rooted the regulation once more in good standing with the First Amendment. And all it really did was say that the money from taxpayers cannot be spent on overtly religious practices, such as holding services or proselytizing as part of the recovery program.

That’s how the First Amendment works. I don’t want my money going to a faith-based Christian group that is preaching as part of its recovery program any more than I’d want a Christian’s tax money going to a recovery program that pushes Zoroastrian faith on the people it is attempting to help.

And I certainly don’t want a charlatan like Kennedy leading the charge on diverting taxpayer money anywhere at all.

There are times I wonder if the leaders of France and Australia have a secret bet to see which one of them can come up with worse internet policy than the other. Apparently it’s France’s turn. As a few sources have been reporting, French lawmakers slipped an amendment into the country’s budget bill that is (yet another) attempt by a government to justify a tax on big tech… just ’cause big tech is big. As with most of those taxes, they can’t just write a straight “tax the big company” law (because then everyone notices it’s a targeted shakedown), so instead they invent some proxy that ends up hitting everyone else on the internet. That’s why a variety of places (led by Australia) have tried (without much success) to tax links on the internet.

France’s counter is (somehow) even dumber: taxing data by the gigabyte, which (thankfully) is going nowhere for now. But don’t expect it to stay dead. Here’s what French lawmakers actually voted for:

France has approved a proposed tax that aims to tax the amount of internet data per gigabyte sent to French users in the country, with major companies like Google, Netflix, TikTok, and Meta now in the crosshairs. According to minutes released by the National Assembly, members voted 11-10 in support of the motion on October 30 — which now means the new law has been added to the country’s next budget, despite major opposition from the government side and the finance committee rapporteur. The law still has to pass through the Senate for final approval. The latest amendment, introduced by socialist lawmaker Laurent Lhardit, could see content providers pay €0.055 (roughly $0.06) to the government for every gigabyte of content distributed to French users.

And, as with most of these stupid laws, the collateral damage is easy to spot. VideoLAN, the nonprofit behind the open-source media player VLC, says the tax would cost it more than €1 million a year.

Everything about this approach seems silly:

Internet providers would measure the data flowing to their customers and note which company sent it, under the text of the amendment. They would report the totals to the tax authorities every quarter, under the supervision of telecoms regulator Arcep. The text bars any record of what the data contains or where it goes.

Some data travels through content delivery networks, which store copies close to users. That data would count as it leaves the network. The text caps the tax at 15% of a company’s French revenue or 2% of its global revenue.

The amendment’s explanatory note cites an Arcep estimate that 200bn gigabytes reach French internet subscribers each year. It says Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix and Akamai account for about half of that traffic.

Ok, so those big tech companies account for “about half” of that traffic, but even that’s deceptive: Akamai and Amazon (and, to a lesser extent, Google) deliver traffic for tons of smaller sites and services, and you can bet the tax gets passed right along to those customers. Not to mention there’s still the other half which will land on companies like VideoLAN.

Public accounts minister David Amiel told MPs the scheme would need sensors on the networks, or measurement on users’ own devices. Half of the tax would fall on smaller content providers, many of them French, he said. On the authors’ own estimate, that is about €5bn. Philippe Juvin, the finance committee’s general rapporteur, warned that the big platforms could pass the cost on to advertisers.

Of course, even before it got killed (more on that below), it was never likely to go much further.

The Senate, where the conservative Les Républicains hold a majority, is unlikely to back it, Martin Clavey reported for Next. The government could also force the budget through without a final vote. In that case, it can leave the amendment out of the text, Next noted.

Still, it’s worth sitting with how this happened: the amendment passed 11-10, with 14 abstentions, in a chamber with just 35 deputies present. That’s how a proposal this dumb ends up in a national budget, even briefly.

As it turns out, the tax lasted five days. On November 4, the National Assembly rejected the budget’s entire revenue section, voting it down 458-0, which wiped out every amendment adopted along the way. The Senate will instead take up the government’s original text, which never included the gigabyte tax, and nobody with the power to add it back seems interested in doing so. Phew.

But, as TechRadar notes, the Socialists aren’t giving up on the idea — and their next version might be even worse:

The idea itself is not going away: The Socialists put a €0.10-per-gigabyte version in the program they presented this summer, ahead of next year’s presidential election.

Politicians absolutely love schemes like this one: they’re so focused on sticking it to big tech that they never notice the bill lands on users and smaller services, or that the plan requires ISPs to track which company sent every byte to every customer.

Among the dated and dumb business concepts exposed as folly during the COVID-19 pandemic was the traditional Hollywood film release window, which originally involved a 90 day gap between the time a move appears in theaters and its streaming or DVD release (in France this window is even more ridiculous at three years).

Opposition to fiddling with this window is usually based on arguments that we need to “protect the traditional film industry,” though it’s never been entirely clear why you’d protect traditional theaters at the cost of common sense, consumer demand, and a more efficient model. Especially when major theaters’ refuse to adapt and often do things that make the brick and mortar film experience worse.

The debate has bubbled up once again last week as Cinemark and Regal have refused to show David Fincher’s latest film:  “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth.” The Netflix film, a spin off featuring Brad Pitt’s character from Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film, “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” is leveraging just a two-week theatrical release window before heading to streaming.

Cinemark and Regal executives are big mad about it, leaving AMC the only theater chain the movie will be available in before it hits streaming on Christmas day:

“The ‘Cliff Booth’ situation is an interesting one,” Cinemark CEO Sean Gamble said Tuesday morning on the company’s earnings call. “We book all of our films on a case-by-case basis. In that particular situation, we always look at things through a long-term lens and how certain precedents and things we might do could affect longer-term industry dynamics. In this particular case, we don’t believe the proposed release model is constructive for the broader theatrical ecosystem, and it’s not aligned with what’s of the greatest interest in our theaters.”

It’s understandable that traditional movie chains wouldn’t be cheerleaders for their own demise. The problem, historically, is that they’re not really doing the sorts of things you’d need to do to remain innovative and relevant in the face of disruption.

For example numerous chains have taken to showing even more advertisements alongside higher ticket prices

During pandemic lockdowns, you might recall how AMC executives threw a major temper tantrum because companies like Comcast/NBC began experimenting with more innovative movie release windows (with the added bonus of saving human lives). AMC execs were mad because the pandemic highlighted how the (then) 90-day gap between the time a movie appears in theaters and its streaming or DVD release was a dated, artificial, and increasingly purposeless construct in the age of cheap 85 inch 4K TVs.

Comcast (successfully) experimented with not only shortening the window, but eliminating it entirely. At the time, AMC Theatre CEO Adam Aron pouted incessantly, insisting that Comcast films would never again appear in AMC theaters, before ultimately having to retract the silly threat. AMC, interestingly, this time around, is the only major chain that will be showing Fincher’s latest release.

For his part, Cinemark CEO Gamble has seemingly convinced himself that he can not only retain release windows, but grow them in the face of streaming dominance:

“We’re going to continue to see [the window] grow, especially since the commitments were a minimum of 45 days and beyond that many of the larger films continue to have windows of 60-plus days,” he said. “As we turn the corner into 2027, we’re going to see that window continue to expand a bit, especially as additional studios join in.”

Good luck with that.

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I now look like an alarmist. I assumed everything done by the Trump administration prior to the midterm elections was designed to swing the election towards MAGA. For that, I don’t apologize. It definitely was. However, I routinely assured readers that the weird shit being done by the administration was just laying the groundwork for post-election fuckery. That fuckery has largely failed to materialize. Mea culpa, etc.

The Democratic Party flipped both the House and Senate and scored other wins in deeply red states, seemingly evidence of voters just being sick and tired of Trump’s bullshit. Trump’s bullshit, however, was generally tied to efforts designed to dismantle everything that makes democracy special, as well as the systems of checks and balances meant to ensure that even the dumbest of aspiring autocrats couldn’t turn the USA into the USSR between election cycles.

The Trump administration is waving the white flag. Not only did Trump’s handpicked “election integrity” enforcer resign immediately after the November Massacre, but the administration no longer seems to have the stomach for setting resources on fire in hopes of subverting the democratic process. We should still reserve a great deal of skepticism and caution, given that there’s still a presidential election on the horizon, but we should take heart in the fact that the administration is no longer willing to defend its most extreme (and most unsupported) allegations about “illegal voters.” (h/t Chris Geidner)

The election results had barely settled before the DOJ went to court to pull out of its unwarranted attack on California’s election processes. The DOJ’s filing [PDF] voluntarily dismisses its insane demand that California sequester at least 20,000 ballots based on nothing but unverified, wild ass claims about the supposed “illegality” of the voters who may or may not have voted in this election or ones prior to this.

The DOJ tries to pretend its tail isn’t tucked by doing a bit of sour grapes-ing:

The United States provides this notice of voluntary dismissal pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i).

The United States sought targeted and modest relief to have California segregate vote-by-mail ballots cast by people highly likely to be noncitizens until state election officials—with the opportunity to work with federal officials—could confirm those voters’ citizenship. The United States sought this relief to protect American voters in this State because each legal vote that is offset by an illegally cast vote constitutes irreparable harm.

[…]

This Court did not timely grant the United States’ requested relief.

And so it goes. The DOJ bitches that irreparable harm is not only possible, but already has been done because multiple levels of the court system wouldn’t honor its demands — demands, it must be noted, that were delivered to California election officials in the form of a USB drive with a Post-It note that had the password hand printed on it. I wish I were making this up because it would mean I’m in the process of negotiating film rights for my historical fiction novel.

But, no. This is a thing that actually happened. The DOJ, DHS, and the Trump administration in general continued to claim hundreds of thousands of people were voting illegally. But when asked for actual evidence, the numbers came down. Way down. The DHS swept California, engaging in high-profile raids to round up “illegal” voters. In the end, the DHS/DOJ managed to put together 28 arrests in California, a state that has 23 million registered voters.

Even in abject failure (and now without the performative head of Trump’s “election integrity” force, Harmeet Dhillion, engaging in day-to-day dipshittery), the administration is still trying to spin this as a failure of the court system, rather than a failure of the administration to generate anything resembling proof of its baseless accusations.

In light of the Supreme Court’s denial, the United States is evaluating how to best ensure that American votes are protected, including by preventing vote dilution by noncitizens. In addition, by the time of this Court’s hearing on November 13 in this matter, California will have already commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones. There is then no way to get the challenged ballots segregated.

Hey, I’m no Supreme Court law-talking guy, but I think just shutting the fuck up about imaginary threats to “American votes” might be the best course of action. As for the rest of this paragraph, it’s probably better to make a formal complaint sound like it was written by lawyers, rather than petty people feeling bitchy because no court was willing to entertain their stupidity.

California legislators, led mainly by two of the most anti-science, anti-kid legislators in the state — Josh Lowenthal and Buffy Wicks — make sure that every year they experiment on our children with unproven, untested, scientifically illiterate laws that seek to “protect the children.” And, every year Gavin Newsom eagerly signs them into law forcing the state to waste a bunch of money until the courts strike them down. Of course, Wicks and Lowenthal will insist that they’re protecting the children from the scourge of the internet, but they keep buying into a debunked moral panic and seem positively allergic to what the science actually shows.

The latest bill that California passed (authored by Lowenthal with most of the rest of California’s legislators signing on as co-authors, including Wicks) is AB 1709 which declares (with zero evidence) that certain features (autoplay! recommendation feeds!) are “addictive” and requiring social media companies to (1) age verify everyone in order to make sure that (2) children never experience those dastardly features. Lowenthal and Wicks will not stop until they make sure that everyone’s data is at risk. For the children! As EFF noted earlier this year, the bill is an absolute disaster, defining “addictive features” so broadly that basically any recommendation algorithm counts. This is despite evidence showing that removing algorithmic recommendations can mean people see a lot more problematic content, especially for users who aren’t seeking such content, because those algorithms are a big part of how the bad stuff gets filtered out in the first place. Continuing to insist that algorithmic feeds are inherently bad for you is basically the equivalent of being an anti-vaxxer, but for the internet.

Even if you don’t personally like algorithmic feeds or autoplay, it’s not the government’s job to tell websites how to present content.

The law is set to go into effect on January 1st, meaning that if it’s to be blocked, lawsuits needed to be filed… about now. Unfortunately some similar laws were challenged in the Eleventh Circuit by a three judge panel who basically ignored half a dozen precedents to get to a ruling driven by extremely motivated reasoning. It would be nice if we could get a circuit split from the Ninth Circuit.

The three major social media operators impacted by this law — Google, Meta, and TikTok — each filed individual lawsuits seeking to have it blocked in federal court. If you’re wondering why they all filed their own lawsuits, rather than having a trade association like NetChoice or CCIA filing it for them, you can blame the Ninth Circuit, which last year, in a ruling on SB 976 (California’s earlier ‘addictive feeds’ law), held that trade groups lack associational standing to challenge feed restrictions like these, because whether a feed is “expressive” supposedly requires platform-by-platform proof (despite courts allowing such challenges in plenty of other cases).

Also, because every news article I’ve looked at refuses to link you to the actual lawsuits (journalistic malpractice) you can find them here: Meta’s was filed in the Northern District of California (San Francisco/Oakland), Google’s was also filed in the Northern District (San Jose), and TikTok’s was filed in the Central District of California (which, somewhat confusingly, covers Los Angeles, even though most people think of LA as “Southern California”). All three complaints are embedded below as well (no, I don’t understand why other news orgs don’t do this).

The three cases (all filed by different, but very competent, big-name law firms) take slightly different approaches and emphasize slightly different things, but all basically make a combination of First Amendment and Section 230 arguments. All three present themselves as “as applied” challenges, because the Supreme Court’s ruling in Moody turned a facial challenge, one that says “this whole law is just blatantly unconstitutional,” into a brutally steep climb (the Ninth Circuit tossed most of NetChoice’s facial challenge to SB 976 on exactly those grounds). So each complaint zeroes in on how specific requirements, like the feed and autoplay rules, violate the First Amendment, Section 230, or both.

While it’s annoying that there need to be multiple different lawsuits over this one bad law, it’s at least intellectually fascinating to see the different approaches each suit takes, what they emphasize, and what they play down. They all basically make the argument that curating content is protected First Amendment activity that the state doesn’t get to regulate. They point out that recommendations are generally a good thing (they surface better content for users), and nobody thinks they’re sinister when a bookstore or a newspaper does it. Here’s the Google/YouTube version of the argument:

AB 1709 regulates YouTube as a “publisher.” A law “treat[s]” a website “as” a “publisher” when it regulates the choices that make up publication—what third-party content is presented, to whom, in what order, when, and how. Barnes, 570 F.3d at 1105. A duty directed at those “traditional editorial functions” necessarily depends on the entity’s “status or conduct as a ‘publisher’” and thus implicates Section 230. Id. at 1102. AB 1709 seeks to restrict (1) which videos YouTube may show to its users (the personalization ban) and (2) when and how such videos may be shown to its users (the autoplay ban). Both bans flunk the “simple” “test” for whether a statute violates Section 230: They “prohibit publishing conduct” on their face. In re Apple Inc. App Store Simulated Casino-Style Games Litig. (In re Apple App Store II), 806 F. Supp. 3d 1015, 1030 (N.D. Cal. 2025).

The personalization ban imposes liability when YouTube chooses which third-party videos each user sees. AB 1709 prohibits YouTube from “recommend[ing], select[ing], or prioritiz[ing]” videos based on any “information provided by the user, or otherwise associated with the user or the user’s device.” Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 22682(b), 22683(a)(1). Whether YouTube is liable or not, then, turns on what content it chooses for its users, and how it chooses that content.

Making that choice is what a publisher does. See Doe 1, 174 F.4th at 1167 (“[M]atching users with content is publishing conduct.”); accord Force v. Facebook, Inc., 934 F.3d 53, 67 (2d Cir. 2019) (websites perform “the functions of publishers” when they “present users with targeted content,” even if via “algorithms”). But that is the very thing AB 1709 forbids.

And just to cut off the stupid argument that keeps coming up from woefully under-informed people, no, claiming to be a “publisher” doesn’t mean they’re giving up Section 230 protections; it’s the opposite. The very point of Section 230 is to encourage platforms to act as the publisher while shielding them from liability for third-party content. The platforms have always argued they were publishers. Some clueless politicians and media folks insist Section 230 means “you can’t act as the publisher,” but that’s reading the law exactly backwards. The reason all three companies highlight that these are actions of publishers in their complaints is because that’s how you get 230 protections, since it covers publisher activity for third-party content.

Anyway, YouTube also points out that, contrary to the claims from California that recommendations are some nefarious attempt to addict kids, they’re actually a useful feature of any content provider. They also note (again, contrary to popular belief) that YouTube’s own research found that tuning the algorithm toward diverse, novel content, rather than driving people down a rabbit hole of “more of the same,” boosts long-term satisfaction over short-term habitual use:

For example, YouTube strives to promote long-term satisfaction over short-term engagement. And YouTube has determined that values like discovery and novelty advance that goal. Therefore, YouTube has designed its algorithm to recommend to users content that is different from what they have viewed before so they can discover new content and new areas of interest they did not even know they had. That requires YouTube employees to make subjective decisions such as whether topics like physics and math are sufficiently different so that they count as diverse, to handpick training examples that teach the algorithm what qualifies as diverse, and to monitor the system to ensure it is correctly balancing new versus familiar content. In that way, YouTube’s algorithm acts as a tool for “implement[ing] human beings’ inherently expressive choice” to promote novelty and diversity. Moody, 603 U.S. at 746 (Barrett, J., concurring). Of course, YouTube cannot determine what will be novel and diverse to a user without considering what she has viewed before—precisely what AB 1709 prohibits.

YouTube also turns the Ninth Circuit’s SB 976 ruling (the same one that knocked out trade-group standing) back on the state:

The Ninth Circuit has also observed that “the more an algorithm implements human editorial directions, the more likely it is to be expressive.” Bonta, 152 F.4th at 1014. YouTube’s algorithm implements a multitude of human editorial judgments at every stage of the recommendation process. Humans at YouTube decide what editorial goals should be built into the system, select and design signals to be used as inputs, establish principles for how to translate those signals into recommendations, set metrics to measure success, and continually monitor, test, and refine the algorithm to ensure outputs reflect YouTube’s goals and values.

Oh yeah, YouTube also has this fun quotable line saying that California is basically telling a library to mix up the books on its shelf to make it harder for kids to read:

AB 1709’s legislative findings make clear that the State seeks to reduce the amount of time minors spend accessing speech on social-media platforms by forcing platforms to organize or display that speech in a less interesting way. The law’s objective is thus directly “[]related to the suppression of free speech”—just like a law requiring libraries to mix books up on shelves so minors cannot find ones that interest them and spend less time reading.

Meta similarly points out that recommending content people might like is kind of classic protected First Amendment activity and generally a good thing:

The State’s editorial standards would also interfere with Meta’s ability to recommend to users the content that Meta believes those users will want to see. For example, if a teen has previously demonstrated an interest in science experiments or content about local scholarships, the Act would preclude Meta from recommending additional content about science experiments or local scholarships to that user unless they specifically enter keyword searches for “science experiment” or “local scholarships” every single time they log in. See § 22682(b)(2) (exempting certain feeds, but only if they are recommending content based on “search terms that are not persistently associated with the user or user’s device”). The same is true of content about California trade schools, colleges and universities, military recruitment, local volunteer opportunities, the San Francisco Chronicle, and California public officials. And if a teen has already seen content from the San Francisco Chronicle or a public official—such as a breaking news story or a sound clip from a recent debate—the Act may preclude Meta from using that user-specific information to avoid showing the identical content to the same teen again. See § 22682(b)(1) (exempting certain feeds, but only if they are recommending content that “does not concern the user’s previous interactions with media generated or shared by others”).

TikTok’s version takes the argument even further to point out that banning recommended feeds actually can do real harm to the very kids California pretends to be protecting because it would disable safety features such as figuring out which videos not to show users if it looks like they may be unhealthy for them, demonstrating (again) how little the authors of this bill understand how anything works:

… the Act is also overinclusive (and counterproductive). By banning any consideration of a user’s past activity when recommending content, the Act undermines the State’s interest in minors’ wellbeing by making it more difficult for TikTok to avoid showing teenage users content that may be harmful to them or to show them content that may be beneficial for them. TikTok’s dispersion rules, which prevent a vulnerable teenager’s feed from filling with one video after another on the same difficult subject, depend on the user’s “previous interactions with media generated or shared by others”—which the Act forbids TikTok to consider. § 22682(b)(1). TikTok therefore cannot personalize feeds to reduce the amount of potentially harmful content a minor user consumes.

Moreover, the Act is overinclusive in barring personalization for every teenager under sixteen, every interest, and every topic, regardless of how much time the teenager spends on the platform, what her parents want, or whether she has experienced any harm at all. For example, it reaches TikTok’s STEM feed—a feed the user affirmatively selects, confined to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and organized by relevance to the user rather than by chronology. That feed bears scant resemblance to the “addictive” feeds the Legislature appears to target; the Act sweeps it in only because it is prioritized “based, in whole or in part, on information provided by the user.”

The arguments on the “autoplay” ban are actually pretty different between the three companies. TikTok argues that because autoplay is not well-defined in the law, they’re not even sure TikTok qualifies, since users have to swipe to see the next video. Does that count? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The law is unclear (great drafting as always).

The Act bans “autoplay” without defining it—leaving platforms to guess whether California regulators will apply the statute to platforms’ choices with respect to how they present their content. The lack of any definition in the statute renders this provision unconstitutionally vague. It will chill speech, as platforms are pressured to err on the side of caution and not provide any expressive product that could be deemed “autoplay.”

Meta makes the most complete argument challenging the autoplay rule:

The autoplay ban requires Meta to force users to take affirmative action before Meta can display fully protected audiovisual speech, and therefore burdens Meta’s First Amendment right to engage in the free and unhampered distribution of speech. See id. at 167 (“requiring a permit as a prior condition on the exercise of the right to speak imposes an objective burden on some speech”); see also, e.g., Doe v. Harris, 772 F.3d 563, 573 (9th Cir. 2014) (“a law requiring addressees of ‘communist political propaganda’ to request in writing that the mailing be delivered violate[s] . . . First Amendment rights because the law impose[s] an impermissible ‘affirmative obligation’ and [i]s ‘almost certain to have a deterrent effect.’” (quoting Lamont v. Postmaster Gen. of U.S., 381 U.S. 301, 307 (1965))).

The autoplay ban is therefore subject to First Amendment scrutiny because it imposes an “impermissible affirmative obligation,” Harris, 772 F.3d at 573, that “would tend to restrict freedom to distribute information and thereby freedom of expression,” Teixeira, 873 F.3d at 688 (cleaned up) (quoting Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60, 64 (1960)); see also, e.g., In re Soc. Media Adolescent Addiction/Pers. Inj. Prods. Liab. Litig., 702 F. Supp. 3d 809, 831 & n.16 (N.D. Cal. 2023) (restrictions on Meta’s “autoplay” feature “would inherently limit what [Meta is] able to publish”).

The autoplay ban independently implicates the First Amendment because it restricts Meta’s First Amendment editorial and curatorial rights. Meta’s feeds are shaped by Meta’s “expressive choices” in deciding how to display particular user-generated content and thus receive First Amendment protection. Moody, 603 U.S. at 716 (a social media service’s “choices about what third-party speech to display and how to display it” are protected by the First Amendment (emphasis added)). That protection has long extended beyond a publisher’s “choice of material” to include decisions such as the “size” and “layout” of the material in a publication. Tornillo, 418 U.S. at 258. Whether to present audiovisual expression continuously or one item at a time is precisely such an editorial decision. Courts have accordingly applied Moody to claims targeting autoplay and similar features, recognizing that “[e]very method of displaying content involves editorial judgments regarding which content to display and where on the platforms.” Patterson v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 239 N.Y.S.3d 726, 733 (App. Div. 2025)

They then argue that the law would need to pass strict scrutiny… and it can’t:

The autoplay ban is seriously overinclusive. “[I]mposing small burdens on vast quantities of speech for no appreciable benefit is not consistent with the First Amendment.” Griffin II, 831 F. Supp. 3d at 833. The autoplay ban applies categorically to every user-generated video and animation presented to all minors, regardless of the amount of time the minor has been online, the underlying content, the duration, the context, the manner of use, the maturity of the user, and the user’s or their parent’s own preferences. The prohibition therefore reaches educational demonstrations, public service announcements, breaking news clips, artistic works, information about scholarships and public programs, civic speech, religious expression, health-related information, and supportive content, without any showing that allowing such expression to autoplay causes the harms asserted by the State. And it sweeps in services—like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—that voluntarily engage in substantial content moderation efforts and provide supervisory tools for parents and guardians, and that will impose time limits on minors’ daily use by default.

The autoplay ban is also seriously underinclusive. It allows minors to receive the same audiovisual expression after selecting a play button and permits comparable automatic presentation of audiovisual expression on exempt services. It also permits minors to spend unlimited time viewing the same content in other manners, including on other non-covered services and by their own clicks. Those exceptions undermine any contention that prohibiting autoplay directly and materially advances any legitimate state interest. If the same expression may be viewed indefinitely after one additional click or may autoplay on an exempt service, the Act’s chosen distinction bears no adequate fit to its asserted objectives.

Numerous less restrictive alternatives are available. Meta already provides (or will soon provide) parental supervision tools, default two-hour time limits, nighttime restrictions, reminders, content controls, and settings through which parents and users may control how content is presented. And Meta, in the coming months, will provide an optional tool for parents and minors to restrict or turn off the automatic playing of video content.

Google/YouTube take a different approach, skipping the First Amendment argument on autoplay entirely and leaning just on Section 230’s preemption clause, which bars states from imposing liability inconsistent with 230, including liability for how a site curates third-party content.

AB 1709’s autoplay ban thus targets not only a decision related to publication but the very act of publication itself. Publication does not occur just once, when a video is uploaded to YouTube for the first time—instead, a video is published each and every time it is sent to a user. See Barnes, 570 F.3d at 1104 (“[e]very repetition … is a publication in itself”). But the decision whether “to publish” or to “postpone” third-party content is a decision Section 230 protects. Id. at 1102 (citation omitted). In this respect, too, AB 1709 attempts to “prohibit publishing conduct” on its face. In re Apple App Store II, 806 F. Supp. 3d at 1030; see also Doe 1, 174 F.4th at 1167 (holding that the decision to publish content to a user is protected “even when [a] user has not requested the content”).

Even if the ban were to be viewed only as a rule about how to publish content (as opposed to a rule about whether to publish content at all), it still would fail under Section 230. Since the advent of the written word, publishers have had to decide not only what follows a given work, but whether it should follow immediately, later, or only upon request. See Turner Broad. Sys., Inc. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622, 636-37 (1994) (how to sequence others’ video programming implicates “editorial discretion”). That is the decision YouTube makes with autoplay. It leverages its Recommender System to keep showing related videos that are relevant, trustworthy, and valuable to the user, with only a short pause in between. Because making that decision is “what a publisher does,” Barnes, 570 F.3d at 1102, Section 230 protects that conduct.

They also point out that, you know, TVs autoplay:

To provide a seamless video-viewing experience akin to consecutive programming of traditional television, radio, and many other video- and music-streaming services, YouTube provides an autoplay feature. When autoplay is on and a user finishes watching a video, a related video will automatically begin playing shortly thereafter—just like the next show on television or the next episode on Netflix or Hulu starts playing without the viewer having to pick up the remote, or the next song on a Spotify playlist starts without the listener having to press play. When autoplay is off and a user finishes watching a video, YouTube does not automatically play another video. YouTube may display recommendations to the user, but the user must affirmatively select another video to play.

While that may feel a bit silly, calling out Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify sets up a nice underinclusiveness argument: the law goes after YouTube’s autoplay while leaving those services’ identical feature alone.

A few other highlights from the various complaints. I keep pointing out how anti-science the legislators behind this law are, and Google suggests that as well, pointing to an earlier lawsuit on a different law, showing that California was unable to produce literally any expert evidence to support its claims of harm:

Further, under strict scrutiny, the State must “show a direct causal link” between personalized feeds and “harm to minors.” Id. at 799. And intermediate scrutiny requires the State to “demonstrate that the recited harms are real … and that the regulation will in fact alleviate [those] harms in a direct and material way.” Doe v. Harris, 772 F.3d 563, 577 (9th Cir. 2014) (citation omitted). The State fails either standard because it cannot show any link between personalization and harm to minors. In defending SB 976, the State produced over 500 pages of expert materials and yet was unable to identify a single peer-reviewed or published study establishing that personalization causes or is correlated with negative health outcomes in minors. Indeed, the State’s only study that specifically considered YouTube found no link between personalization on YouTube and harm to minors. The State instead relied on studies purporting to show that social-media use in general, not personalization in particular, is associated with harm to minors. AB 1709’s legislative findings likewise refer vaguely to evidence relating to harms associated with social media generally, not personalized feeds specifically. But AB 1709 bans personalization, not access to social media. So the State must establish that personalization in particular harms minors. It cannot do so.

They also note that in the SB 976 litigation, the state’s own expert admitted if social media addiction actually exists, it affects a very small percentage of users:

The law also bans access to personalized recommendations for all under-16 users— even though the State’s experts have admitted that only a small number suffer from purported “[s]ocial media addiction.” Declaration of Dr. Jenny S. Radesky

That admission does double duty: it shows how much of this is just a moral panic, and it shows how massively overinclusive the law is, which matters a lot for the strict scrutiny analysis.

TikTok points out that the law gives really broad powers to the AG to just decide for themselves what is a bad feature:

The Attorney General also has “complete discretion,” Kolender, 461 U.S. at 358, to “defin[e] in regulations” the meaning of the term “addictive feature,” Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 22682(a)(3). The only potential limit on the Attorney General’s discretion to decide what counts as an “addictive feature” is the Act’s open-ended description of “psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement that foreseeably lead to compulsive use.” Id. § 22682(a). The same official who decides what features might fall within that capacious description is also charged to enforce the Act with penalties of up to $50,000 per affected minor….

That arrangement presents the very danger the vagueness doctrine exists to prevent. The “more important aspect of the vagueness doctrine” is perhaps “ ‘not actual notice, but the other principal element of the doctrine—the requirement that a legislature establish minimal guidelines to govern law enforcement.’ ” Kolender, 461 U.S. at 358 (quoting Smith v. Goguen, 415 U.S. 566, 574 (1974)). Such discretion is even more likely to violate the Constitution when a government official may wield their authority to suppress or chill speech

Finally, I’ll close this post out where TikTok opens its brief: highlighting how history is chock full of governments completely losing their shit over some new form of tech or media.

The State doubtless “possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm.” Brown, 564 U.S. at 794. But the interests the State invokes to justify its Act are insufficient to survive the heightened First Amendment scrutiny applicable to the Act’s speech-restrictive provisions. Beginning with “dime novels,” “[r]adio dramas,” “movies,” “comic books,” “television,” “music lyrics,” or “video games,” states—and California in particular—have tried time and again to regulate new forms of expression based on concerns about harm to minors, and courts have time and again struck those regulations down because they conflict with the First Amendment.

Moral panics all around. Eventually we will look back at California’s obsession with stifling the internet the same way we now mock moral panics over comic books and dime novels.

Despite already enjoying a voting majority, the GOP has simply flat out refused to appoint any new Democratic Commissioners to the nation’s top media and telecom regulator, the FCC.

They’ve also refused to begin the process of appointing Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez to another term despite her term technically ending on June 30 (in part because she’s aggressively criticized Brendan Carr for trampling the First Amendment).

Historically, the FCC is supposed to see a 3-2 partisan split depending on which party controls the White House. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, is now rushing to appoint Brendan Carr’s long-time personal legal aide Danielle Thumann Severs as a new FCC Commissioner, securing a 3-0 voting majority over the agency:

“Confirming Thumann Severs would give Republicans an unusual 3-1 advantage on the FCC. That could become a 3-0 advantage at the end of 2027 because FCC Democrat Anna Gomez would have to leave the commission at that time if Trump does not agree to renominate her.”

Senator Ron Wyden recently warned the Trump administration that securing a 3-0 partisan domination over the FCC is technically illegal under the Communications Act:

“The U.S. communications sector represents hundreds of billions of dollars in economic valuation, and relies on the legal validity of these FCC actions. Under an all-Republican commission, every single license renewal, equipment certification, spectrum transfer, or other delegated action would be legally defective, casting a cloud of crippling legal uncertainty over the entire communications industry.”

Twenty-one Democratic lawmakers on the House Commerce Committee also wrote a letter last week to Cruz and Senate Majority Leader John Thune pointing out that any new appointment to the FCC must be accompanied with the appointment of a corresponding Commissioner from the opposing party.

With the dramatic wins by Democrats in the midterms, these warnings suddenly carry real weight, so Cruz wants to accelerate Severs’ appointment before the end of the year.

Trump authoritarians aren’t just keen to dominate (and disembowel) federal consumer protection regulators, they’re so threatened by the mere thought of open debate that they’ve illegally fired commissioners at agencies like the FTC.

Carr’s “leadership” at the FCC has, of course, centered on an endless array of illegal attacks on the First Amendment, journalism, and free speech. But Carr’s assault on journalism and free speech has often obscured his equally illegal attacks on stuff like broadband consumer protection or media consolidation limits (the latter of which has even angered traditional Republican allies like giant cable monopolies).

Carr’s eager to have a full 3 commissioner majority to take full advantage of Trump’s remaining two years and accelerate “deregulation” (read: the brutal elimination of all corporate oversight across everything from your broadband bill to annoying robocalls). There’s definitely still a lot of harm Carr can do whether or not Severs survives the congressional appointment process.

Severs is likely to see her rushed appointment succeed. Contrast that to what happened to popular telecom and media consumer rights reformer Gigi Sohn, whose appointment to the FCC you might recall was ratfucked by a bipartisan array of bad faith captured lawmakers. Captured lackeys get rushed appointments. Actual reformers get ratfucked. That’s been the name of the game for decades.

That said, on the free speech front, Carr has very clearly enjoyed being portrayed by the press as an important person doing important things, but as Trump’s health and power wanes you’ll increasingly see companies standing up and fighting back (see: ABC’s lawsuit against the FCC for trampling the First Amendment), exposing Carr as the weak, yipping, and performative culture warrior he always was.