ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was interviewed by RFD-TV for a story item about the challenges involved in connecting rural areas to broadband internet.

One of the threats that could affect the efficacy of this program could be different state authorities not necessarily focusing on people who have traditionally been very difficult to connect to the internet but looking at lower hanging fruit that it’s easier to connect, like people who

might have slower than extremely fast but are faster than what we consider nonexistent broadband service. There are a number of hurdles that have just traditionally existed everywhere in the United States for broadband deployment. These include things like municipal permitting, getting rights of way, and then one of the largest drivers cost is access to utility poles across the United States. There are some more complicated problems that go into accessing these poles around whether they’re privately-owned or whether they’re owned by municipalities and co-ops, which can easily explode costs for a particular deployment and make it so that the money that the federal government is directing to reach these remote areas is not being fully-used to reach these people but is instead being wasted.

ICLE President Geoffrey Manne was cited by Matt Perault of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during Perault’s recent appearance on The Lawfare Podcast. His comments are quoted here and the full episode is embedded below.

I saw Geoff Manne give the Hayek lecture at Duke last week and he presented a case that was actually very critical of Section 230 along these lines, making the case that there’s meritorious litigation that because of 230 never gets its day in court and that there are a variety of social harms that tech platforms, at least in some cases, don’t bear any of the costs for.

Wildfire has hit Assemblymember Damon Connolly’s (D-San Rafael) Northern California district particularly hard in recent years, including the devastating Glass and LNU Lightning Complex fires in 2020, the Nuns and Tubbs fires in 2017, and the Valley fire in 2015.

Read the full piece here.

The U.S. Department of Justice and eight states recently sued Google, claiming it runs its digital ad business to unfairly advantage its own business, to the detriment of its customers and potential rivals. Some commentators have expressed concerns that the government would make its case using novel and untested legal models, but Salil Mehra writes that these concerns are misplaced and that the case will be primarily argued using traditional antitrust law.

Read the full piece here.

The 117^th Congress closed out without a floor vote on either of the major pieces of antitrust legislation introduced in both chambers: the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open Apps Market Act (OAMA). But it was evident at yesterday’s hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee that at least some advocates—both in academia and among the committee leadership—hope to raise those bills from the dead.

Read the full piece here.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law will host a hearing this afternoon on Gonzalez v. Google, one of two terrorism-related cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court that implicate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

We’ve written before about how the Court might and should rule in Gonzalez (see here and here), but less attention has been devoted to the other Section 230 case on the docket: Twitter v. Taamneh. That’s unfortunate, as a thoughtful reading of the dispute at issue in Taamneh could highlight some of the law’s underlying principles. At first blush, alas, it does not appear that the Court is primed to apply that reading.

Read the full piece here.

There is a line of thinking according to which, without merger-control rules, antitrust law is “incomplete.” Without such a regime, the argument goes, whenever a group of companies faces with the risk of being penalized for cartelizing, they could instead merge and thus “raise prices without any legal consequences.”

Read the full piece here.

How it is that Illinois, a jurisdiction not typically associated with a strong commitment to free-market principles, came to be the first state in the nation to allow its insurance rates to be regulated entirely by open competition is something of an accident of history.

Read the full piece here.

It seems that large language models (LLMs) are all the rage right now, from Bing’s announcement that it plans to integrate the ChatGPT technology into its search engine to Google’s announcement of its own LLM called “Bard” to Meta’s recent introduction of its Large Language Model Meta AI, or “LLaMA.” Each of these LLMs use artificial intelligence (AI) to create text-based answers to questions.

Read the full piece here.