Tag Archives: markets

A Legislative Proposal

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Congresswoman and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R, WA) and Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone Jr (D, NJ) described a bill they’re proposing that would purport to reform Internet controls and Big Tech’s control over those controls.

Our measure…would require Big Tech and others to work with Congress over 18 months to evaluate and enact a new legal framework that will allow for free speech and innovation while also encouraging these companies to be good stewards of their platforms. Our bill gives Big Tech a choice: work with Congress to ensure the internet is a safe, healthy place for good, or lose Section 230 protections entirely.

18 months is far too long, with far too much time and opportunity for Big Tech to weasel-word saccharine pseudo-reform.

Better would be to give them 6 months, with a hard deadline written into this legislation: satisfactory reform of 230, or 230 is rescinded. A Critical Item that must be included in this proposed legislation is a concrete, publicly measurable definition of “satisfactory reform.”

Another, Highly Useful Item, that could be beneficially included in the bill’s Purpose paragraph, would be a clear and blunt statement that the bill is intended to supplement parental responsibility for their children’s time and activity on the Internet; it does not replace that responsibility.

Coddling Scofflaws

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Alysia Finley has another of her cogent opinion pieces, this one centered on the failure of Progressives in the several government levels and at our colleges and universities to punish miscreants and how widespread those Leftist protections of misbehaviors are. One set of consequences of the coddling jumped out at me.

If they forget to pay other bills, the government has their backs. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has effectively capped all credit-card late fees at $8. The CFPB also plans to cap bank overdraft fees at a nominal amount, meaning spendthrifts needn’t worry about getting penalized for overdrawing their checking accounts. And if they don’t want to pay rent, cities including New York and Los Angeles have imposed regulations that make it prohibitively difficult to evict tenants.

Finley was writing specifically about…misbehaving…students at Columbia, but the failures generalize, as do the consequences of excusing the failures.

“Forgetting” to pay bills will have consequences with the local merchants, including the major chains, all of whose establishments are locally run.

Being “late” paying off credit card debt will lead to difficulty getting a credit card renewed and in getting another credit card: getting access to credit will be harder and more expensive. The availability for scofflaws of cards other than prepaid, and at higher rates, will become emphasized. Credit difficulty goes beyond the card, too; it’ll expand to access to mortgages and access to rent (landlords run their own credit checks), among other credit needs.

Overdrawing checking accounts as a matter of routine will lead to closed checking accounts, difficulty opening any other checking accounts, and more trouble with local merchants who will start refusing to accept checks from folks who routinely bounce them. And this: banks and merchants heretofore would treat a bounced check as a mistake rather than the kiting felony that it is, charge the fee, and everyone moved on. No more. Those who frequently bounce checks will find themselves more likely to be charged with the felony.

Making tenant eviction over nonpayment of rent will make it more difficult for renters to rent in the first place, greatly increase the initial deposits required, and reduce the amount of houses and apartments available to rent at all.

All of that, too, will increase the cost of credit and of housing for the rest of us.

“We are obligated”

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Apple has once again kowtowed to the demands of an enemy nation government: the People’s Republic of China instructed Apple to remove some of the world’s most popular chat messaging apps from its app store in the country. The offending apps include Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads and Signal and Telegram.

Apple promptly and meekly complied.

An anonymous Apple spokesman rationalized the obedience:

We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree[.]

Certainly. But Apple is not obligated to operate in those countries where they disagree; especially is Apple not obligated to operate in an enemy that is engaged in genocide internally or that externally is actively occupying seas and islands that are either international or belong to other nations, openly threatening to invade and conquer a sovereign nation, and prosecuting an economic war against us. Indeed, moral imperative at the least would seem to urge ceasing business operations with and within such a nation.

But Apple thinks it has more important things to do.

Concerns Regarding “Unreasonable” Searches

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There are concerns that a bill under consideration in the House, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, goes too far in protecting us Americans from 4th Amendment violations by the government at the expense of our counterintelligence capabilities.

The bill…would ban the government from buying information on Americans from data brokers. This would include many things in the cloud of digital exhaust most Americans leave behind online, from information on the websites they visit to credit-card information, health information, and political opinions.

Worse, goes the argument, the bill

would prohibit the US government from buying digital information that would remain available to the likes of China and Russia.

That last is a non sequitur, though. The fact that the data are readily available to our enemies doesn’t legitimize its collection by our government, which has Constitutional bars against most kinds of searches. It’s further the case that if we can’t be secure against the unwarranted [sic] intrusions of our own government, how can we expect our own government to keep us secure from the intrusions of foreign governments, especially enemy foreign governments?

There also is a misunderstanding buried in the claim regarding that digital exhaust [that] most Americans leave behind online. A significant fraction of that “digital exhaust” is not voluntary; it’s left behind as a condition of doing business with those enterprises that require collection of the data. Some of those data are legitimately needed by businesses: credit card account numbers if payment is being offered via credit card, shipping addresses so the seller can deliver the product, personal names so the seller can be sure of the credit card numbers and shipping addresses, and the like. Other data are demanded by the business as a condition of doing business with the customer for reasons unique to the specific enterprise.

Better would be to bar the sale, rather than bar the purchase, of such data.

That sale, too, should be barred universally, not just with respect to our government, within the following boundaries. All data that an enterprise demands be collected in order to do business needs to be barred from sale or any other transfer, to any other entity, whether government or not. There should be no default position or opt in or out; the sale or transfer of these data should be prohibited. Government legitimately can still access those data on presentation in court of a probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the [data] to be searched, and the [data] to be seized. Voluntarily left data should require affirmative opt-in before those data can be sold or transferred. Failure to choose should be taken as not opting in—the enterprise cannot sell of transfer the data.

Some DoD Acquisition Problems

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Our DoD’s failure with battlefield drones (as opposed to large surveillance and targeted raid drones) is shamefully demonstrated by a small US drone builder and Ukraine’s position on and need for actual, small, battle-capable drones.

Most small drones from US startups have failed to perform in combat, dashing companies’ hopes that a badge of being battle-tested would bring the startups sales and attention. It is also bad news for the Pentagon, which needs a reliable supply of thousands of small, unmanned aircraft.

One aspect of the American problem stems from too much dependence on DoD specifications.

American drone company executives say they didn’t anticipate the electronic warfare in Ukraine. In Skydio‘s [a Silicon Valley company] case, its drone was designed in 2019 to meet communications standards set by the US military.

How is it possible that our own military establishment, with its battlefield experience, has so badly misunderstood battlefield communications threats, counters, and needs? One reason—not the only one, since military officers are capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future—is that our military establishment hasn’t any current battlefield experience, only experience at fighting terrorist organizations. Even as recently as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military didn’t face a qualified army, for all its formal army-like structure.

There’s this, too, particularly related to acquisition, although here applied specifically to drone acquisition:

Several startup executives said US restrictions on drone parts and testing limit what they can build and how fast they can build it.
Those restrictions have proven a problem in the drone battles that sometimes require daily updates and upgrades, said Georgii Dubynskyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, the agency that oversees the country’s drone program.
“What is flying today won’t be able to fly tomorrow,” he said. “We have to adapt to the emerging technologies quickly. The innovation cycle in this war is very short.”

But the bureaucrats don’t care. They only care about their personal imperatives. One result of this bureaucratic interference and failure:

Ukrainian officials have found US-made drones fragile and unable to overcome Russian jamming and GPS blackout technology. … American drones often fail to fly at the distances advertised or carry substantial payloads.

There’s that communications failure again, along with a general failure to perform.

Skydio is showing the way [emphasis added]:

Skydio employees went back to Ukraine 17 times to get feedback, Bry said. Its new drone is built around Ukraine’s military needs and feedback from public-safety agencies and other customers, he said, rather than US Defense Department requirements that are sometimes divorced from battlefield realities.

None of our DoD acquisitors have done that. That’s as much on SecDef Lloyd Austin and CJCS General Charles Brown, Jr (and General Mark Milley before him) as it is on the acquisitors, though.

Skydio‘s growing success from its more independent development process is illustrated here:

Ukraine has requested thousands of the new Skydio X10, which has a radio that can switch frequencies on its own as soon as its signal is jammed by electronic interference. It also has better navigation capabilities so it can fly at high altitudes without GPS, Skydio said.
“It is critical for Skydio, and I think the US drone industry at large, that we make X10 succeed at scale on the battlefield in Ukraine,” Bry said. “There’s no alternative. As a country, we can’t miss on this.”

These problems—and they aren’t the only ones, they’re just a few exposed by DoD drone incompetence—will prove fatal in American battles, and so damaging if not fatal to American national security—independence.

We badly need to clean house in the DoD, following that with a removal of the civilian bureaucrat contingent in DoD acquisition (returning them to the private economy, rather than reassignment withing the Federal government), and we badly need to elect a President and Congress with the national security awareness and political courage to do so.