Tag: in-the-news

Joe Biden Plans To Ban and Register ‘Assault Weapons’ but Won’t Say What They Are

Former Vice President Joe Biden claims the 1994 federal ban on “assault weapons,” which expired in 2004, “reduced the lethality of mass shootings.” Yet the Democratic presidential contender simultaneously concedes that the 1994 law, which was part of a broader crime bill that he sponsored, had no impact on the lethality of legal firearms, which remained “just as deadly.”

In a gun control plan he unveiled today, Biden promises to fix that problem with new legislation that will “prevent manufacturers from circumventing the law by making minor changes that don’t limit the weapon’s lethality.” Since such laws have always been based on arbitrary distinctions that have little or nothing to do with a gun’s capacity to kill people, it is hard to see how he can possibly keep that promise.

Under the 1994 ban, removing “military-style” features such as folding stocks, flash suppressors, or bayonet mounts transformed forbidden “assault weapons” into legal firearms, even though the compliant models fired the same ammunition at the same rate with the same muzzle velocity as the ones targeted by the law. That is also true of the new, supposedly improved “assault weapon” ban sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.), who wrote the 1994 law. Feinstein has fiddled with the list of military-style features (omitting bayonet mounts while adding barrel shrouds, for instance), and any one of them would now be sufficient to make a rifle illegal, whereas two were required under the 1994 ban. But the problem identified by Biden remains: Removing these forbidden features results in a gun that is “just as deadly.”

Biden’s plan does not specify how he would improve on Feinstein’s approach. “Federal law prevents hunters from hunting migratory game birds with more than three shells in their shotgun,” he says. “That means our federal law does more to protect ducks than children.”

Does Biden plan to ban all guns that are capable of firing more than three rounds without reloading? If so, his ban would extend far beyond the firearms covered by any existing or proposed “assault weapon” law. Such a ban also would be clearly unconstitutional, applying to all semi-automatic firearms and revolvers, including the handguns that the Supreme Court has said are covered by the Second Amendment.

Presumably that is not what Biden has in mind, and his duck hunting example is just a red herring. But by refusing to say what he means by “assault weapons,” a category that means whatever legislators say it means, he makes it impossible to take his proposal seriously.

In addition to banning “assault weapons” (whatever that means), Biden wants to give current owners of such undefined firearms a choice: They can either sell their guns to the federal government or register them under the National Firearms Act, as is currently required for machine guns, suppressors, and rifles and shotguns with barrels shorter than 18 inches. “Due to these requirements,” Biden says, “such weapons are rarely used in crimes.”

Yet that is also true of “assault weapons,” whether under the 1994 definition or the new one proposed by Feinstein. Last year, according to FBI numbers released this week, rifles in general—only a subset of which would qualify as “assault weapons”—accounted for 4 percent of guns used in firearm homicides where the type of weapon was specified. Handguns, by contrast, accounted for 93 percent of the guns used in those cases.

Unlike his rival Beto O’Rourke, Biden does not plan to confiscate “assault weapons.” But his registration scheme faces the same formidable obstacle: The federal government does not know who owns which guns. State attempts to register “assault weapons” have met with embarrassingly little success, and there is no reason to think a federal requirement would inspire broader compliance, especially now that talk of confiscation is in the air.

Biden, in short, claims the 1994 “assault weapon” ban made mass shootings less lethal even though the weapons that remained legal were “just as deadly”; that the legislation he has in mind will fix that problem, although he cannot say how; and that the federal government can succeed in registering “assault weapons,” however he chooses to define them, even though the track record of such efforts provides little reason to believe that’s true. And he implies that all of this will somehow have a noticeable impact on firearm homicides, which are almost never committed with the guns he wants to target. As a policy proposal, his plan does not pass the laugh test, but it beautifully illustrates the magical thinking of gun controllers.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2owe2zo
via IFTTT

Trump Is the Problem, With or Without Twitter

Kamala Harris has asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to suspend President Donald Trump’s account. In an October 1 letter, the California senator and 2020 presidential candidate told Dorsey that Trump had violated Twitter’s terms of service. Specifically, she suggested that Trump’s recent tweets about civil war, the Ukraine call whistleblower, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) violate Twitter’s prohibitions on engaging in “targeted harassment,” inciting violence, the “glorification of violence,” and attempts “to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.”

Trump’s tweets are many things—irresponsible, divisive, and unbecoming of a president, to say the very least. His posts accusing Schiff of treason and suggesting he should be arrested (for comments Schiff made on the House floor recently) may even be unconstitutional. Other tweets may prove good fodder for the Trump impeachment case.

But the proper place for evaluating Trump’s tweets and holding him responsible for them is through governmental and legal institutions. This isn’t a call that Dorsey should have to unilaterally make.

Imagine if Dorsey did kick Trump off Twitter or suspend his account. The outrage—and the opportunity for Trump and conservatives to claim “Big Tech” bias and censorship—would, of course, be huge. The lawsuits would be long. And, because of Harris’ involvement, justified. Government officials can’t just go around demanding that private companies cancel their opponents’ accounts.

“Let’s stipulate that Donald Trump’s Twitter feed is a dumpster fire of outrage and that a case could easily be made that he routinely violates what Twitter quaintly calls its ‘community standards,'” writes Charles Sykes at The Bulwark. Twitter suspending his account is still “a terrible idea, not least for the gift it would be to Trump.”

Without a Twitter account, Trump would certainly find a way to get his garbled grievances out still. Twitter is not the problem, Trump is.

“Banning Trump from Twitter would only fuel his already unhealthy persecution complex and offer yet another victimization narrative for him to exploit,” becoming “an effective way to fundraise (via Facebook ads) for his reelection campaign,” writes Christine Rosen at Commentary.

Trump’s “penchant for policy-making (and policy bumbling) via Twitter has been a constant source of aggravation to his advisers since he took office,” Rosen points out. And yet it comes with the upside of transparency—a glimpse into “his id” and “a useful barometer of his mood.”

Some people suggest that Twitter giving Trump enough rope to hang himself, so to speak, is a good thing. But Ian Sams, Harris’ communications director, says “it isn’t about ‘helping Trump’ or not.”

“It’s about protecting our country,” Sams tweeted. “When Giuliani spreads conspiracies and when Trump attacks and threatens a whistleblower, we can’t just let it all happen. Truth and democracy are at stake here.”

Sams is right that how this helps or hurts Trump—or Harris, or the fortunes of anyone in office—is beside the point (even if it can be a happy byproduct). But the beyond-politics approach dictates that candidates, Congress, and other authorities stay entirely out of who gets to speak online (and where).

Neither Twitter nor any other private tech companies have to provide public officials with a platform to speak. What the First Amendment does require is for these officials, and anyone else speaking with the authority of the state behind them, to avoid even so much as the appearance of pressuring private actors to suppress certain speech, including—or perhaps especially—when that speech involves their political opponents.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2nHVGeU
via IFTTT

8 More Cases Everyone Should Know from the Rehnquist Court

Here is another preview of the 11-hour video library from our new book, An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know. This post will focus on the final batch of cases from the Rehnquist Court.

Gratz v. Bollinger (2003)

Grutter v. Bollinger (2003)

Lawrence v. Texas (2003)

McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003)

Gonzales v. Raich (2005)

Kelo v. City of New London (2005)

McCreary County, Kentucky v. ACLU of Kentucky (2005)

Van Orden v. Perry (2005)

 

You can also download the E-Book or stream the videos.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2nTqn0q
via IFTTT

Trump Wanted Snipers and Electrified Spikes to Defend Border Moat Full of Alligators and Snakes, Says New Report

Last week, President Donald Trump was accused of sounding like a mafia boss in his interactions with Ukraine’s leader. This week, we’ve crossed into mad medieval king territory. The president reportedly wanted to keep unauthorized refugees and migrants from crossing our southern border by building a goddamn moat full of alligators and fortifying it with electrified spikes.

That’s what White House advisors and Trump administration officials tell Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis in the upcoming book Border Wars, excerpted yesterday in The New York Times. The book details a week in March where Trump began giving orders to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border immediately and indiscriminately.

Every part of this paragraph from the excerpt is so chilling:

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.”

Fox News corroborated the shooting bit. “A source who was in the room at the time confirmed the conversation about shooting migrants in the legs to Fox News late Tuesday,” it reported.

The White House had this to say:

Thomas D. Homan, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) acting director, described that period as the president being “frustrated” but taking “that moment to hit the reset button.” Ultimately, Trump’s “reset” included getting rid of then-Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whom Davis and Schear portray as trying to ground Trump in some reality:

When the president demanded “flat black” paint on his border wall, she said it would cost an additional $1 million per mile. When he ordered wall construction sped up, she said they needed permission from property owners. Take the land, Mr. Trump would say, and let them sue us.

Kevin McAleenan, now Nielsen’s temporary replacement at DHS and then head of Customs and Border Protection, reportedly had to tell agents to ignore Trump’s instructions about immediate border shutdown:

Start turning away migrants at the border, he told them. My message to you is, keep them all out, the president said. Every single one of them. The country is full. After the president left the room, Mr. McAleenan told the agents to ignore the president. You absolutely do not have the authority to stop processing migrants altogether, he warned.

At present, Trump has been suggesting that impeachment is a “coup”:

QUICK HITS

  • The House is launching a new investigation after a tip about a trade association and a foreign government booking a bunch of Trump Hotel rooms (but occupying few of them) surfaced.
  • The president’s lawyer, folks:

EVENTS

On Monday, October 7, Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum will argue in favor of abolishing all drug laws at the Soho Forum in New York City. You can get tickets here.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2peu01k
via IFTTT

Brickbat: When Seconds Count

When Louie Bradley fell in the shower of his senior living community in Irving, Texas, he pulled an emergency switch to call for help. Neighbors heard the alarm, but couldn’t get into his apartment because of the deadbolt on the door. So they called 911. And called. And called. And called. In total, they called six times before help arrived. The problem is that on the first call the dispatcher sent police to the wrong address. Cops got there, spoke to the resident, found nothing was wrong and left. And when neighbors kept calling they were told the police had already checked it out and everything was fine. 911 didn’t send anyone to the right place until a neighbor called it in as a fire, not a medical emergency. But by the time firefighters arrived, about an hour after the first call, Bradley was dead.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2mS1j9R
via IFTTT

All Speech Should Be Free

I now make my living by releasing short videos on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I assumed you who subscribed to my feed or became Facebook “friends” would receive that video every Tuesday.

Wrong! Turns out social media companies send our posts to only some of our friends. (That’s why I ask for your email address. Then they can’t cut us off.)

Why might they cut us off?

One reason is that we’d drown in a fire hose of information if they showed us everything. The companies’ algorithms cleverly just send us what the computer determines we’ll like.

Another reason may be that the companies are biased against conservative ideas.

They deny that. But look at their actions. Social media companies say they forbid posts that “promote violence,” including ones that encourage violence offline.

But antifa groups that promote violence still have accounts. The Twitter account of the group in Portland, Oregon, that recently beat up journalist Andy Ngo, leaving him with brain damage, is still up.

“In Austin, they were calling for a paramilitary operation!” says Glenn Beck. That antifa group’s Facebook account is also still up, even though it links to a manifesto calling for opponents to be “beaten bloody.”

In my newest video, Beck, who runs a big media operation called The Blaze, says social media companies push a leftist agenda.

“They manipulate algorithms to reshape our world.”

Beck himself hasn’t been banned, but he says Facebook limits his reach, putting him in a “digital ghetto.”

“They’re shaping you,” he warns.

Is it true?

Although I’m not a conservative, sometimes I do notice odd things happening with my posts.

On average, my videos get more than a million views. But when I did one that criticized Facebook, that video got half as many views.

Because Facebook didn’t show it to many people?

I can’t know. Facebook won’t say.

Today, social media companies are pressured to cut off anyone spreading hate. In response, YouTube and Facebook say they now even demote content that almost violates policies.

But those antifa accounts are still up.

By contrast, Beck says, conservative accounts are censored merely for making fun of Democrats.

“Remember the person who slowed down (a video of House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi?” he asked.

The video made Pelosi sound drunk. It went viral, but once Facebook got complaints, the company announced it “dramatically reduced its distribution.”

When Facebook did that, notes Beck, “The person in charge happened to be one of the leaders in Nancy Pelosi’s office who had just left to go to work for Facebook.”

I told Beck that Facebook hires some Republicans. “They do,” he replied, “but only about 20 percent, and not in top level positions.”

The site Spinquark did the research Beck cites, finding dozens of Democratic campaign workers who now work for social media companies.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once invited Beck and some others to come to his offices to talk about bias.

“I sat with him and he said, ‘Why would we do that?’ And I said, ‘I want to believe you, but your actions don’t match.'”

Beck was also unhappy with conservatives at that meeting. “Some said, ‘Mark, solve this by having affirmative action…. For every liberal you hire, hire a conservative.'”

“I don’t want that!” Beck said. “We don’t need more regulation!”

We don’t.

But it’s human nature, when people see a problem, to demand government do something.

Beck himself fell prey to that when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed she saw border guards telling migrants to drink water from toilets. On his radio show, Beck said government should “prosecute anyone making outrageous charges like this!”

I gave him a hard time about that. “You want prosecution of members of Congress who say nonsense?!”

Beck laughed and quickly walked his statement back. “John, I speak five hours off script every day…. There’s a lot that I vomit out.”

The solution?

“No censorship,” says Beck.

“Publish everything?” I asked.

“Yes!” answered Beck. “We can handle it. Stop treating us like children.”

I agree. On at least some platforms, all speech should be free. The more that is blocked, the less we learn.

COPYRIGHT 2019 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2onjbtt
via IFTTT

Everyone Dares Call It Treason

Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, who is notionally challenging Donald Trump for the Republican Party’s 2020 presidential nomination, last week claimed Trump is guilty of “treason, pure and simple.” He added that “the penalty for treason under the U.S. Code is death.”

Weld thus joined a long list of commentators and politicians in both major parties, including Trump himself, who casually tar their political opponents as traitors. Often, like Weld, they mean this literally, in which case they are demonstrably wrong. Sometimes they are just suggesting that the other side is disloyal and unpatriotic, in which case they are merely contributing to a poisonous political atmosphere that is incapable of supporting rational debate.

The basis for Weld’s claim is the allegation that Trump, for crass political reasons, pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender to oppose Trump as the Democratic nominee in next year’s election, by delaying military aid that Congress had approved. Such conduct would be an abuse of presidential power as well as an illegal usurpation of the legislative branch’s spending authority.

Contrary to Weld, however, Trump’s alleged machinations do not qualify as treason. The legal definition requires waging war against the United States or “adher[ing]” to its enemies—defined as nations or organizations that are at war with the U.S.—by giving them “aid and comfort.” Ukraine is not at war with the United States, and in any event Trump’s alleged aim was not to help Ukraine but to help himself by getting its government to dig up dirt on a man who wants to take his job.

Weld, who as a former U.S. attorney certainly should know better, also erroneously claimed that death is “the only penalty” for treason. The possible penalties include prison and fines as well as execution.

Former White House adviser Stephen Bannon was likewise wrong when he said that meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent, constituted treason. The president also has been falsely accused of treason by counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance, political consultant Rick Wilson, former CIA Director John Brennan, former State Department official John Shattuck, historian Jon Meacham, and New York Times columnist Charles Blow, to name a few.

Trump himself, of course, is not shy about deploying the T-word. In his view, the administration officials who communicated their concerns about his July 25 telephone conversation with Zelenskiy thereby committed treason.

The argument that Trump obstructed justice when he tried to stop or limit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, Trump said, was an “illegal and treasonous attack on our Country.” The Mueller investigation itself was a “Phony & Treasonous Hoax” involving “treasonous acts,” according to the president.

When The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed piece by an administration official who was critical of the president, that was also “treason” in Trump’s mind. So was Democratic opposition to his immigration policies.

Even failing to applaud Trump during his State of the Union address might qualify as treason, he suggested last year. “Somebody said ‘treasonous,'” he said during a visit to Cincinnati. “I mean, yeah, I guess, why not?…They certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”

Needless to say (I hope), a lack of enthusiasm for the president is not the same as a lack of love for “our country.” Nor is criticizing U.S. policies the same as hating the United States, notwithstanding the president’s love-it-or-leave-it attitude.

Frederick Douglass, the classical liberal abolitionist whom Trump claims to admire, argued that “the best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy, who, under the specious and popular garb of patriotism, seeks to excuse, palliate, and defend them.” Nowadays both the president and his opponents routinely cloak their diametrically opposed agendas in that specious garb.

© Copyright 2019 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2okGSTg
via IFTTT

Did the Lochner Court Have a Green Thumb?

Over at Legal Planet, Daniel Farber observes that the infamous “Lochner Court” issued several notable decisions upholding early environmental protection efforts. Professor Farber finds this surprising because “this was a Court that was famous, if not infamous, for its conservative activism.”

Yet if one looks at the cases Farber cites—and considers the whole of the Lochner Court’s jurisprudence (or consults the more nuanced account of the era in my co-blogger David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner—there is not much here that should surprise. The Court of that period was certainly more skeptical of government regulation than in later times, but its overall judicial philosophy was anything but pure laissez faire.

Although the Lochner Court struck down a New York law imposing maximum hour limits for bakery workers, the Court upheld other laws that were indisputably about the protection of public health or worker safety, such as a Massachusetts mandatory vaccination law (in Massachusetts v. Jacobson) or a Utah law setting maximum hours for miners and smelters (in Holden v. Hardy). And the same jurisprudential vision that led the Court to care about property rights naturally led the justices to understand the need to control nuisances, whether through local ordinances (Hadacheck v. Sebastian) or common law actions (Georgia v. Tennessee Copper).

It’s also worth noting that the sorts of environmental measures the Lochner Court considered fail to raise the significant and difficult constitutional issues we sometimes see in environmental law today. There was no effort by the federal government to regulate local land use or local, non-economic activity, nor was there was any effort to leverage federal largesse to coerce state cooperation in federal programs. There was no ambitious or innovative effort to expand the scope of Article III jurisdiction, nor were there administrative processes that raised significant due process concerns. In short, with a few exceptions (such as, perhaps, Missouri v. Holland), the Court was not confronted with cases in which one would have anticipated significant constitutional questions.  Were that only still true today.

More broadly, I think it’s also worth pushing back on the implicit assumption in Professor Farber’s post that limiting governmental regulation necessarily undermines environmental protection. There are many areas in which greater protection of property rights actually encourages conservation, and in which loosening constraints on government expropriation can actually facilitate environmental harm. Thus we should not assume that a Supreme Court skeptical of muscular assertions of government power is a Court skeptical of—let alone hostile to—environmental conservation.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ooMPic
via IFTTT

Joker Director Todd Phillips Says Woke Scolds and Twitter Mobs Killed Comedy

The new Joker movie doesn’t hit theaters until Thursday, but it’s already proving controversial. Joaquin Phoenix’s version of the legendary Batman arch-nemesis is a frustrated, psychologically disturbed white man, akin to an incel or a mass shooter. Vanity Fair wondered if the film will be treated as “propaganda for the very men it pathologizes.” A mother of a victim of the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting called the movie a “slap in the face” that could encourage the next James Holmes. The U.S. military circulated a memo warning servicemen about Joker-inspired violence.

Now the director of that film, Todd Phillips, is getting dragged on social media for pointing out something that rings true to me: Cancel culture has made it more difficult for comedians to engage in thoughtful provocation, especially if it offends progressive sensibilities.

“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” Phillips told Vanity Fair. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the fucking funny guys are like, ‘Fuck this shit, because I don’t want to offend you.’ It’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can’t do it, right? So you just go, ‘I’m out.’ I’m out, and you know what? With all my comedies—I think that what comedies in general all have in common—is they’re irreverent. So I go, ‘How do I do something irreverent, but fuck comedy? Oh I know, let’s take the comic book movie universe and turn it on its head with this.’ And so that’s really where that came from.”

Phillips is essentially raising the same issue as Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, Louis C.K., and a host of other comedians. They all worry that the social media shame mobs are a negative trend, and give power to those who believe it’s never okay to make light of subjects that are sacred to the political left—and that offenders should be shunned, silenced, and fired.

It’s true that invectives against cancel culture are often too broad. Sometimes, people who complain about being canceled are actually just complaining about being criticized. Sometimes, the supposedly canceled actually profit from the controversy. On this basis, The New Republic‘s Osita Nwanevu has declared cancel culture a “con.” (For a good rebuttal, read Jesse Singal here.)

Cancel culture is sometimes a con. Other times, it’s very real. Ask Nimesh Patel, whose perfectly benign comedy routine was ended mid-act at Columbia because of absurd student complaints. Ask Aziz Ansari, who had to spend a year hiding from the spotlight after being lazily smeared by a now-defunct gossip site. Ask Kyle Kashuv, who managed to make enemies on both the far-left and the far-right, and was jointly canceled by both.

These are examples that come to mind because they involve famous people, but plenty of average folks can land themselves in circumstances where they are viciously attacked (and often do not stand to profit from those attacks in the same way that Chappelle can). The Carson King debacle—in which the canceler quickly becomes the canceled—should at the very least be counted as proof that this phenomenon is in some sense real.

For more on this subject, read The Stranger‘s Katie Herzog.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2nrArhh
via IFTTT

Federal Court Upholds FCC Decision to Roll Back Obama-Era Net Neutrality Rules

Four years ago, in the waning days of the Obama administration, the Federal Communications Commission finally achieved one the president’s long-held political goals: a formal reclassification of the internet’s regulatory status, from a lightly regulated Title I “information service” to a more heavily regulated Title “telecommunications service”—essentially, a public utility.

It was a profound shift in internet regulation, which from the beginning had survived, and arguably thrived, under a regulatory approach that was largely hands-off. Now the federal government would effectively be the arbiter of which network practices would be acceptable and which would be forbidden. 

The move came as a result of the Obama administration’s push for “net neutrality” rules that would have governed how internet service providers managed their networks. Net neutrality rules had been repeatedly struck down in the courts, which said the agency lacked statutory authority to make the change. Forcing the internet into a public utility model would give net neutrality rules a stronger legal foundation. 

It would also place a substantial burden on internet service providers (ISPs), which warned of decreased investment under the new regulatory scheme, and for little obvious consumer benefit. Although net neutrality supporters frequently invoked dire hypotheticals about the end of a free and open internet, they produced few significant examples of net neutrality violations in the real world. Net neutrality was a prophylactic, not a solution to an existing problem. 

Two years later, after President Donald Trump’s election, newly installed FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai began a process that led to the rollback of the Obama administration’s regulatory overhaul. Critics issued increasingly apocalyptic warnings about ISPs charging more for certain services and blocking websites for expressing certain political opinions—conjuring up a “dystopian” future internet in which “the basics are barely tolerable, and everything else costs extra.” The Trump FCC’s move was a “threat to free speech.” 

“As a result of today’s misguided action, our broadband providers will get extraordinary new powers. They will have the power to block websites, the power to throttle services, and the power to censor online content,” Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel warned at the time. 

But the main result of Pai’s move was to take the internet back to a regulatory model similar to the one it had operated under from its inception through 2014. Internet service would be lightly regulated, as it had been since the 1990s. ISPs would be required to be transparent about network management processes, and the Federal Trade Commission would enforce violations. 

More than 20 state attorneys general, along with several internet companies that favored net neutrality, took the FCC to court, arguing that the agency had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner that would allow ISPs to “abuse their gatekeeper roles in ways that harm consumers and threaten public safety.” 

Today, by a 2-1 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided largely with the FCC, upholding the primary regulatory rollback as a valid exercise of its authority. In the nearly 200 page opinion, which is heavy on technical detail, the court wrote that while the challengers raised “numerous objections” aiming to show that the FCC’s reclassification is “unreasonable,” the judges found them “unconvincing.”

The court raised several smaller issues related to public safety and “the regulation of pole attachments,” and allowed for the possibility that states might implement their own net neutrality regulations. California has already enacted such a law, but had suspended enforcement pending the outcome of this case. And the court cautioned that its judgment was not an endorsement of the policy decision on the merits, but a judgment about its legality. 

The evidence for the Trump FCC’s decision to roll back the Obama administration’s regulatory expansion, however, is in the state of the internet itself: Broadband speeds are up, and the United States leads the world in overall data traffic. The internet, while imperfect, has not become the sluggish, apocalyptic, dysfunctional mess that net neutrality backers warned. 

And while it is true that large tech companies have, in some cases, suppressed the expression of certain political ideas on their online platforms, that suppression—which is not, strictly speaking, censorship in the First Amendment sense, and is legal—has tended to come from social media companies who supported some form of net neutrality.

Even in the absence of net neutrality rules, the internet, in other words, remains as it has always been: fascinating, frustrating, infuriating, invigorating—or, at the very least, just fine. 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ohKhSK
via IFTTT