Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
Supreme Court ruling kneecaps federal regulators
SCOTUS overrules Chevron deference, completely changing how environmental and consumer protections will be decided.
Apple cited “regulatory uncertainties” and “interoperability requirements” under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) as reasons for delaying its AI features on EU iPhones, but Margrethe Vestager suggested something more sinister is at play at a Forum Europa event on Thursday:
“I find that very interesting, that they say ‘we will now deploy AI where we’re not obliged to enable competition.’ I think that is the most stunning, open declaration that they know 100 percent that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already.”
Here’s a summary that includes tech policy issues and also some of the most unhinged stuff we heard tonight.
Things mentioned:
China, tariffs, semiconductor chips, Charlottesville, the border, “space age materials,” the Green New Deal, environment, election “fraud,” opioids, Twitter(???), having sex with porn stars, Hunter Biden laptop, golf handicaps(??????)
Things not mentioned:
TikTok, Facebook, FISA warrantless surveillance, EVs, intellectual property, broadband policy, artificial intelligence (thank god!!!)
Googled that for you because we’re all thinking the same thing. And yes it has now been slightly over 90 minutes since the start.
[The New York Times]
It was a yes or no question.
There were a lot of words said, none of which was exactly a yes. Instead, Trump reminded us he still hasn’t really accepted the results of the past election.
On account of, you know, Twitter permanently suspending his account for inciting violence.
“I convinced Samsung to invest billions of dollars in the United States,” Biden adds.
As Gaby noted earlier this year:
The overwhelming majority of fentanyl seized by Customs and Border Protection — more than 90 percent — is smuggled through official border crossings by US citizens, not by migrants making unauthorized border crossings.
Uh, China, tariffs, not exactly answering the question...
But a lot of them pay into both. Billions, even!
He says he had the best. He tried to roll back more than 100 environmental protections while in office. Is that what he’s bragging about in the debate?
They got back answers about immigration, HBCUs, insulin, and clean air and water (which is not the same as climate change).
They should’ve workshopped it, is all I’m saying. Green New Steal, maybe?
(In any case, Congress has not actually passed a Green New Deal.)
Does he mean, like... that it happened? I don’t know. What a time to cut to ads.
Just gonna throw out this old Verge feature about the Portland van snatchings.
“51 intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation,” Trump said. “It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter — it wasn’t Russia disinformation.”
Trump is extremely sore about The Atlantic’s reporting that he said a cemetery for soldiers was full of “suckers” and “losers,” calling it a lie that was printed in “a third-rate magazine.”
Was that a reference to tariffs on goods from China? Was that a commitment to drilling for oil? What on earth was that line about Medicare?
The Verge will not be doing a shot every time someone says “TikTok,” but we’ll be posting our live commentary here.
A draft opinion for Moyle v. US — a still-undecided abortion case — was briefly published to the Supreme Court website today. According to Bloomberg, the draft would allow emergency abortions in Idaho.
The court is behind schedule with ten decisions left to go, including the NetChoice cases.
That’s the ol’ internet axiom that ran through my head as I read this New York Times roundup of T&C changes that have quietly occurred over the last year, coinciding with the need to feed the hungry AI machines with more and more data. The piece does a good job of showing the before and after language using images like this one for Google:
The Department of Justice announced that, as expected, the WikiLeaks founder entered a guilty plea today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
At today’s proceeding, Assange admitted to his role in the conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act and received a court-imposed 62-month time-served sentence, reflecting the time he served in U.K. prison as a result of the U.S. charges. Following the imposition of sentence, he will depart the United States for his native Australia. Pursuant to the plea agreement, Assange is prohibited from returning to the United States without permission.
Some of the biggest players in the music industry are suing generative AI music startups Suno and Udio for copyright infringement. In the lawsuits, plaintiffs include examples of AI songs that sound a lot like human artists — and some are pretty blatant.