Daily Tech News 29 June 2024

• Forget the debate, the Supreme Court just declared open season on regulators. (Tech Crunch)
  
  There has been plenty of coverage of what the reversal of the 1984 Chevron decision means - the emasculation of the administrative state - so I'll just examine the tech industry impact of this, via the same liberal fascist wailing that we see everywhere else.
  
  Net neutrality:

  The entire concept of net neutrality is perched atop the FCC's interpretation of whether broadband data is an "information service" or a "communications service," the terms written in the act empowering that agency.

  Wrong right out of the gate. Net neutrality is a universal concept. The FCC is trying to arrogate the power to enforce net neutrality by twisting the definitions in its charter until they squeak, but that is a different question.

  If the FCC is not empowered to settle this ambiguity in a very old law that was written well before today's broadband and mobile networks

  It is not so empowered and never has been.

  who is?

  Congress.

  Whatever court takes the case brought by the telecommunications industry, which hates net neutrality and would prefer an interpretation where the FCC doesn't regulate them at all.

  No, Congress.

  And if the industry doesn't like that court's interpretation, it gets a few more shots as the case rises towards - oh, the Supreme Court.

  And Congress.

  Why is this so consequential for tech? Because the tech industry has been facing down a wave of regulatory activity led by these agencies, operating in the vacuum of Congressional action. Due to a lack of effective federal laws in tech, agencies have had to step up and offer updated interpretations of the laws on the books.

  Which was never within their authority.
  
  I support net neutrality. ISPs and cable companies amply demonstrated themselves to be hideously untrustworthy.
  
  It's just that the FCC has no authority to make such a regulation.
  
  AI:

  Let us be optimistic for once and imagine that Congress passes a big law on AI, protecting certain information, requiring certain disclosures, and so on. It's impossible that such a law would contain no ambiguities or purposeful vagueness to allow for the law to apply to as-yet-unknown situations or applications. Thanks to the Supreme Court, those ambiguities will no longer be resolved by experts.

  The experts can resolve the issues when the laws are enforced. There is no problem with that.
  
  The only change here is that the courts are not required to defer to experts within the regulatory agencies on their interpretations of the laws.

  (As an example of how this will play out, in the very decision issued today, Justice Gorsuch repeatedly referred to nitrogen oxide, a pollutant at issue, as nitrous oxide, laughing gas. This is the level of expertise we may expect.)

  Face first on a rake.
  
  There are at least a dozen compounds under the generic label "nitrogen oxide", and it is not the proper name for any of them.
  

• The Verge also joins in with a long and detailed article lamenting the demise of regulatory fascism vis-à-vis the tech industry. (The Verge)

  This decision is arguably the largest single deregulatory action that could be taken, and as we have all observed, without regulation, tech - like any other big industry - will consolidate and exploit. The next few years, even under a pro-regulatory Democratic administration, will be a free-for-all. There is no barrier, and probably no downside, to industry lawyers challenging every single regulatory decision in court and arguing for a more favorable interpretation of the law.

  Write better laws.

  Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan has made no secret of her ambitions to use the agency's authority to take bold action to restore competition to digital markets and protect consumers. But with Chevron being overturned amid a broader movement undermining agency authority without clear direction from Congress, Schettenhelm said, "it's about the worst possible time for the FTC to be claiming novel rulemaking power to address unfair competition issues in a way that it never has before."

  As with the previous article, the writers of this piece freely admit that the regulatory agencies are engaged in an unbridled and unconstitutional power grab; they just believe this is a good thing.
  
  The article notes that the FTC's recent ruling against noncompete clauses is likely in trouble because - once again - the FTC never had the authority to make such a ruling in the first place.

  To be clear, none of these are necessarily bad outcomes - and as Lemley notes, most people "have bigger fish to fry." No one is going to think, Well, on the one hand climate change will kill us all, but on the other hand, I have my Apple Watch.

  I'm not sure where they were going there.

  Beyond that, the disempowering of federal agencies means the empowerment of another entity

  Congress.

  and in this case, it is the increasingly conservative judiciary.

  Sounds lovely, but no.
  
  
   
• A lawsuit claims that Microsoft tracked sex toy shoppers in real time. (404 Media)
  
  What a depressingly stupid article.
  
  The websites Good Vibrations and Babeland installed online tracking software called Microsoft Clarity on their websites.
  
  It's like complaining that someone wrote down your name - and then prominently mentioning the name of the ink manufacturer every time you discussed the case.
  
  
  
• NASA wants to stress that the two astronauts who travelled to the ISS on the Boeing Starliner, Butch and Sundance Suni, are not stranded. (Ars Technica)
  
  The agency just doesn't know when or if they will be able to return home.
  
  
  
• Mustafa Suleyman, a less-successful clone of OpenAI's Sam Altman, has confirmed that Microsoft is taking all your data to train its AI and they don't give a shit what you think about it. (The Register)

  That's the future Suleyman anticipates. "The economics of information are about to radically change because we can reduce the cost of production of knowledge to zero marginal cost," he said.

  Looks like it's take off and nuke the entire site from orbit o'clock.

• Watched the latest Ghostbusters movie - Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - last night. It's not bad. The 2021 film Ghostbusters: Afterlife was a loving return to the original, introducing a new generation of characters (two new generations in fact) nearly forty years later. Like Ghostbusters II, though, Frozen Empire runs into the problem that once you've gotten your group of misfits together and saved the world, what do you do next?
  
  Well, you save the world again, of course, but it's never the same the second time around.
  
  Still pretty good.
  
  We don't mention the 2016 abomination.
  
  
  
• A-chan is leaving Hololive after seven years. (Dexerto)
  
  She had taken a leave of absence due to an illness in the family, but was unable to return to work as originally planned.
  
  Hololive was originally a tech company selling a new face-tracking phone app for vtubers - originally this required much more complicated and expensive equipment - until two girls fresh out of high school approached them at a trade show and suggested that what the company needed was its own vtuber to show off the software's capabilities.
  
  One of the pair is now Tokino Sora, the first member of Hololive, with nearly 1.2 million YouTube subscribers. The other is known simply as A-chan, and is one of Hololive's most senior managers. And even as a manager she has 900,000 subscribers of her own.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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