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ICLE Associate Director of Legal Research Ben Sperry joined Chetachi Egwu’s MediaScope podcast to talk about online speech, the First Amendment, and federal and state efforts to regulate speech on platforms. The full episode can be played below.

Critiques of big tech are ten a penny, but it’s not often that you hear a politician, let alone a Conservative one, saying we should shut down tech companies altogether. So it was a surprise to see Tory MP Tobias Ellwood arguing in the Mail on Sunday that we would be better off if the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter did not exist at all.

Read the full piece here.

ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz joined Steptoe & Johnson’s The Cyberlaw Podcast on an episode titled “Well, Have You Ever Seen Dr. Octopus and Sen. Klobuchar Together?” The full episode can be played below.

https://www.steptoe.com/podcasts/TheCyberlawPodcast-348.mp3

For many, the chairmanship of Ajit Pai is notable for its many headline-grabbing substantive achievements, including the Restoring Internet Freedom order, 5G deployment, and rural buildout—many of which have been or will be discussed in this symposium. But that conversation is incomplete without also acknowledging Pai’s careful attention to the basic blocking and tackling of running a telecom agency. The last four years at the Federal Communications Commission were marked by small but significant improvements in how the commission functions, and few are more important than the chairman’s commitment to transparency.

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Ajit Pai came into the Federal Communications Commission chairmanship with a single priority: to improve the coverage, cost, and competitiveness of U.S. broadband for the benefit of consumers. The 5G Fast Plan, the formation of the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, the large spectrum auctions, and other broadband infrastructure initiatives over the past four years have resulted in accelerated buildouts and higher-quality services. Millions more Americans have gotten connected because of agency action and industry investment.

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It has been a brutal few days for Parler, the now-infamous Twitter alternative favored by President Donald Trump’s most die-hard supporters. Both Google and Apple removed the app from their online stores, and the site went offline altogether after Amazon Web Services (AWS) suspended its webhosting account with little notice.

Parler responded to this deplatforming by filing an antitrust suit against Amazon, which is certain to fail and may not even survive a motion to dismiss. The crux of Parler’s antitrust case is that Amazon conspired with Twitter to eliminate its service. But the company’s filing contains not a single allegation of reduced competition relevant to antitrust law, let alone evidence to back up such claims.

Read the full piece here.

It would not be reasonable for service providers to be held culpable for every possible misuse of copyright material in the vast amount of user-generated content they carry. That would create massive risk of lawsuits, with ill effects for internet users and even for copyright holders who benefit from the legal distribution of their content.

But proper safe harbors should encourage online companies to help prevent copyright content from being improperly disseminated in the first place. For example, such rules could encourage online companies to license content upfront, which they can do more easily than copyright holders can with each of the service providers’ many users.

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It is my endeavor to scrutinize the questionable assessment articulated against default settings in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google. Default, I will argue, is no antitrust fault. Default in the Google case drastically differs from default referred to in the Microsoft case. In Part I, I argue the comparison is odious. Furthermore, in Part II, it will be argued that the implicit prohibition of default settings echoes, as per listings, the explicit prohibition of self-preferencing in search results. Both aspects – default’s implicit prohibition and self-preferencing’s explicit prohibition – are the two legs of a novel and integrated theory of sanctioning corporate favoritism. The coming to the fore of such theory goes against the very essence of the capitalist grain. In Part III, I note the attempt to instill some corporate selflessness is at odds with competition on the merits and the spirit of fundamental economic freedoms.

Read the full piece here.