The Vergecast - WWDC predictions / Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn run through the most interesting rumors and predictions of announcements at Apple's WWDC next week. Adi Robertson joins to discuss the latest threat to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Stories discussed in this episode: Cheap steroid reportedly improves survival for severe COVID-19 cases FDA ends emergency authorization for hydroxychloroquine  Why there’s so much confusion around asymptomatic COVID-19 cases The gadgets Late Night with Seth Meyers uses to keep the show running from home  Google commits $175 million to racial equity with focus on black-owned businesses Instagram’s CEO says the platform is examining how its policies affect black users Apple faces another EU antitrust complaint as App Store pressure grows Apple says the App Store created $519 billion in commerce last year Justice Department asks Congress for a sharp cut to websites’ legal protections Senate Republicans want to make it easier to sue tech companies for bias Facebook removes Trump ads for using Nazi imagery Google Ads bans Zero Hedge for racist content, but reverses Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Deeter and I talk about what's going to happen with all of Apple's OSs at WWDC next week, getting a little bit of a hay app controversy. And then Eddie Robertson joins us to talk about what's happening with Section 230. It's kind of on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools

just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com

slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the first cast. Flagship podcast of competition policy. That's not cool, but I said it anyway. Anyway, I'm your friend, Eli. Deeter Bone is here. I'm your subcommittee page.

Wow. Yeah. You're helpful. That's what that is. Helpful. I bring you coffee. I keep track of things for you. Yeah, binders full of paper.

So we've got kind of an interesting show this week. Usually, as you know, if you're listening to this, Friday is our chat show. Our chat shows have been going really long lately. Not a lot to do in quarantine, really. But this week we were going to have three segments. We usually have three segments. We usually have three segments. We were going to talk about WWDC, what's happening next week at Apple's big developer conference.

State of the Mac. What's happening with Arm? There was a big controversy around. Apple's App Store policies this week. We were going to have David Hannah Meyer-Hanson and Casey Newton join us to talk about, hey, his email app, what's going on? And then we have to talk about Section 230, and Addie Robertson was going to join us for that. We went and booked David.

That was great. And then I was talking to Congressman David Cicillini's team about something else entirely. And I mentioned the David was coming on our show. Congressman Cicillini is the chairman of the House Antitrust Committee. He's got a big investigation into the big tech companies going. He's asked all the CEOs to appear for a hearing. So I told him that this was happening. They're like, oh, Congressman Cicillini can come on your show.

So we ended up with both David Hanemeyer Hansen from Base Camp and Congressman Cicillini on the show. And that went really long. So we broke it out. There was some news in there. So we broke it out. We broke it out. Put that in the feed. So that's 45 minutes.

That was originally going to be our second segment today. But that's in the feed. You can listen to it. Congressman Cicillini had to bail. And then Deeter and Casey and I hung out with DHS for a while. That was really fun. He's a firecracker. So that's if you can go listen to it.

So now we're just have a little shorter Friday show. We got to talk about WWC. We got to talk about all this stuff. Addie is going to join us to talk about 230. It's still going to happen. But before we begin, standard stuff, I want to point out to everyone. There are multiple gigantic stories happening in the world of the context for everything else, which is why we're talking about a flow chart.

Which is why we're always talking about a flow chart. Week 14, since Donald Trump told us there would be a testing framework where you'd go to a website, and the website would tell you would go to a parking lot of a major retailer. you get a test that test results would show up on it. It's not here. It just isn't here. Many states are doing more testing. It's all well and good. But the national testing and contact tracing framework, one assumes you would need. Week 14, not here. Teeter, do you hear the funny thing that happened in the UK? I did not. Apple and Google made their exposure notification system. Yeah. And so they roll it out. The British government said, we're not going to use it. We're

going to build our own because we want our epidemiologists to have more data. Sure. And they built it. They put out, I think they spent millions, like hundreds of many dollars on it. They put it out, they realized the Bluetooth, they couldn't get the access. So it didn't work very well. So today, they announced that they're going to, they're going to go ahead and use the app on Google Framble. Just use the, yeah, great. Surreal.

It's like very, like my Twitter, I woke up this morning, morning East Coast for like afternoon. So I woke up to like an already lit British policy Twitter being like, are you kidding me? Like, we could have told you the six weeks. ago. So that's the news in that world. Some other pandemic stories and protest Black Lives Matter related stories. Again, that's the context for almost everything now. So it's happening inside. I want to make sure we call it out every week and then we can go to the other stuff. The FDA ended emergency authorization for hydroxychloroquine. We wrote that up. There is a lot of confusion about asymptomatic transmission. We wrote an explainer about that stuff.

there is a cheap steroid that we think now based on some studies that improves survival rates for severe COVID-19. That's on the site. Our science team, particularly our health reporter, Nicole Westman, just doing amazing work. The pandemic is still the story. It's still there. I know that other things have happened and it has felt like we're reopening and New York is in phase three and all this stuff. Pandemic's still going on. And so we're still covering that really aggressively.

Check that out. I want to call it one. I keep calling them second order pandemic stories. It's like there's the pandemic and the stuff that out. happened because of it. Vergecast producer Andrew Marino wrote an entire story about the gadgets that like late night with Seth Myers and ESPN are using to produce their shows from home. And we're going to talk.

This is like, it's a good WWDC segue. You ready for this? I just, I have purchased and tried to use the exact setup that Seth Myers has. And I was like, eh. And then specifically, podcast producer Andrew Marino told me, that's not good enough. I had to like adjust how I recorded audio. That's amazing. Seth Myers records his entire show into the front facing camera of an iPad Pro.

And then this is the part that kills me. He air drops it to his laptop so he can put it into Dropbox. Yeah. And I know why he does that. It's because no one wanted to sit down with Seth Myers and explain how file handling on the iPad worked. So it was easier to just be like, dude, air, air, drop it to your desktop, go to dropbox.com and drag it to this folder. I know for a fact that that is what had to have happened there. Yeah, of course. No, no one was like, somehow get it from

your camera roll to file. Like, nope, open the share sheet and hit save to file. Like, makes no sense. Stunning indictment buried in the middle of this very sweet story that Andrew wrote. So go check that out. And then on the racial justice front, that is another big story. We're seeing every company react to it in different ways. We're paying a lot of attention to it. Just some headlines there. Google has committed $175 million to racial equity with a focus on investing in patronizing black-owned businesses. It's a bigger number than other companies. I think Apple's at $100 million. And Instagram CEOs of the platform is examining how its set of policies affect its black users. You should know photography has a long history of just being racist, like flat out.

Like the earliest Kodak film was designed to highlight contrast differences in white people. and that has just carried through in the history of photography. So there's some stuff happening on the digital photography front. Go look that up, by the way. It's super interesting stuff if you're interested in it. It's a long legacy there. So those are the big stories kind of affecting the context of everything. Go check them out on the site.

I'm very proud of our team. It's front of mind, I promise you. But there's other stuff to talk about. We know that our audience wants to talk about other stuff. So let's talk about that. And that other stuff is WWC. It's coming up next week. WWDC.

It starts on Monday. there's going to be some kind of online event. Presumably there'll be some kind of keynote. We're going to live blog the keynote. We're going to live blog the keynote with Walter Mossberg. Walt Mossberg. He's coming back to the site. Very excited.

It's going to be so much fun. It's like a, I don't know what to call it. It's a live blog, but like we're not there in the room. So it's like a watchalong, like a watch party, but it's not a party because we're journalists. So it's like a watchalong. Like I don't know what the right word is. If you know what I should call this thing.

It's a live blog. Tell me on Twitter. It's a live blog. but yeah, I don't know. A live watch? A live watch. A live chat. We have to end this.

So WWDC, the number of OSs that Apple has to grind through now include iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, TVOS, MacOS, MacOSOS, HomePod OS. Which is, it's as iOS. All of these things are iOS except for MacOS. And that is real shaky. That's seven things. There's a possibility of hardware. We don't know.

Like, we're overdue for some rumored headphones. We're overdue for air tags. We're overdue for an IMA. Oh, my God, we're overdue for an IMac. Yeah. They could be announced there. They could be, like, left for later. They could not be announced at all, which is what has happened to air tags.

There's even a rumor that they're going to try and bring back air power, which is amazing. There's a lot of rumors, but not a lot of super, super firm stuff as we record this. right now. Right now, it's, there's actually, to my mind, there's a little bit less than usual that's like hard known. Often by this point, like, the full version of the next version of iOS has like completely leaked and been picked apart by like 9 to 5 Mac. So where do you want to start? Which of those seven OSs do you want to go into? I want to go in reverse interesting order. Okay. The most interesting is the possibility that Arm will come to the Mac. Mac will work on Arm.

We've talked about that for like four Vergecasts now. I think we can just be like, you know, it's a possibility. No, reverse interesting order. HomePod OS. Will continue to exist. Okay, fair enough. The only thing interesting there in this kind of dovetails the other stuff, will they let Spotify run on the HomePod?

It's like stuff like that. Will they let Spotify run on the HomePod? Will they talk about Siri at all? Because Siri, like, I think we counted and they like, mentioned Siri once last year. They've got a new head of AI. Siri needs a lot of work. It sometimes doesn't know which London you're referring to

when you want to know what time it is in London. And Siri on the HomePod in particular is kind of not that great. And the HomePod is also, as with the iPad, the place where Apple refuses to admit that more than one person lives in a home. Right. So. That was it. That's all that's there.

Yeah. That's it. I guess that means TVOS is the least interesting. Yeah. It's a real toss-up over which of those two is the least interesting. With TVOS, what's it going to be? Maybe they'll be a new Apple TV, and maybe they'll finally have the guts to make their Apple TV app the home screen instead of the icon grid. Yeah.

But like, what else are they going to do? Yeah. Okay, so TVOS is the least interesting. HomePod OS is the most like, are you still going to make a home pod? So there's some drama in it. Yeah. Oh, okay. Watch OS, I would say.

Okay, sleep tracking is the big rumor. There's a possibility that they could do blood oxygen tracking, just with the sensors that are already there. Which is sort of useful in this moment, right? That's like a COVID metric that people are interested in. Yeah, but also very dangerous in this moment because chances are it won't be the full FDA medical device approval. It'll just be like it's okay to, you know, for something, something. I forget the precise terminology. The last thing Apple wants is people using Apple watches for like full diagnostic testing for,

COVID and like thinking they're okay. It's good for, oh shit, we think something is wrong, you should check it out. It's not good for, hey, you're fine. So if they do launch blood oxygen tracking, they're going to be really careful about how they characterize it.

Yeah, I'm going to just tell you a watch story. Is it about how you wish there were third-party watch faces and Apple's never going to give it to you? Absolutely not. Okay. I cannot think of something more boring than that. I know some people really want it, but I'm like, this thing sends me,

me notifications. And I have a calendar widget that tells me what my next meeting is. That is what I used my watch for. No, it's just on the health side. Like last month, I was coming down our stairs, like very late at night. I woke up in the middle of night, wanted some water, walked on the stairs. And I missed the last step and I just like fell on my ass. It was like, I was like, oh, I'm a dummy. And then my watch starts beeping and asking me if I took a hard fall and if I'm okay. I'm like, are you, am I getting owned by my watch right now? Like, no one saw this. I don't, it's just you, it's just you making fun of me. And that data is logged in iCloud now. Exactly. It's like, I will forever, that's how I feel about the COVID thing. It's like,

gonna just embarrass you. Man, imagine if Apple actually knew how to advertise. You'd be getting so many great ads right now. It'll kill me. Okay. So then it's iPad, iOS, and Mac. I would say iPad is the next least interesting. Yeah, I don't know. Like, they've already brought mouse support. There's like, there's not a whole lot more. They could, like, they can't make windowing any. weirder than it currently is. Yeah. Maybe they'll try and screw out with cut, copy, paste again.

You know, like more handwriting, more pencil stuff. What I want very badly is proper multi-user support so that you can have a iPad in a house with a family and hand the iPad to your child and have that child not email your co-workers or whatever.

But we'll see. Or even just like a kiosk mode, like a proper kiosk mode. Yeah, that could work. I don't know. I feel this very strongly because I just reviewed the, God, what's it called? The Fire HD8 Plus. Oh, the new one.

They made a new one. Yeah, with USBC and wireless charging, which is great, by the way. This thing is great and it's also terrible because it's super slow. But it has a really good kid's mode and like it does like, if the iPad could do the things that this thing can do in terms of being good for a family, like Alexa support, good smart speaker, and you can hand it to your kid and like have good controls over that. That would be amazing. So, I don't know. We'll see.

There's no rumors. Yeah. I mean, I would, that would be great. As a person with a kid. My notes app is just iPad drawings. That's what it is of nothing. It would be great if I could segment that in some way. We have talked a lot about MacOS and ARM on previous episodes of the show.

I think that is the most interesting thing that could happen at WWC, by far. Apple announce a processor transition. That's a big deal. Yeah. The least interesting thing that could happen with Mac OS is they will continue to insist that Catalyst is good. But Catalyst might be like a transition step for Arm, right? Well, so I have speculated in this direction in the past and had lots of people be like,

no, you're wrong. It's not necessary to do the arms. You don't need Catalyst to do Arm, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's true, but I do think that for some people it might be simpler. And I think for Apple, they might like the messaging of that. But they really got to fix the messaging and like the developer sentiment in particular around Catalyst. Normally, what would happen is you'd be in a room full of thousands and thousands and thousands of developers, and they would cheer and applaud at something surprising, right?

I forget, like, every year it's like, oh, wow, everyone was really mad about that in Developerland. Who knew? And if they had had that this year and they got on stage and like, Catalyst is great, there would have been such loud silence after they said that that we would have noticed it. So I don't know. Nobody really seems to be super happy with Catalyst right now. So they got to either fix it, pretend like it never happened, or continue to insist it's good. And then we'll all just continue to agree that it's not.

Okay. So I said the Mac is the most important because if they transition to ARM, that is obviously the most interesting biggest news that would happen at WWC. The second most interesting OS then is iOS, which is the biggest one by far. It's where Apple makes all of its money. I don't really know what they're going to do in the next version of iOS. There's some baby leaks here and there. The drama around iOS is really just about developers at this moment in time. And it's a developer conference.

We just had DHH and Congress and Cicillian on the show talking about developer policies, like App Store rules, the 30% cut, whether Apple has too much power. Apple just rejected the Hey App again while we were talking on this podcast. Phil Schiller is on the record at TechCrunch with Matt Panzerino saying that, you know, this app just doesn't meet our rules. We're sticking to it. They're not breaking. How are they going to address this noise at their developer conference next week? You remember how I, in my newsletter last week, we also mentioned on the Vergecast.

I said that Apple's not great at admitting that things aren't perfect when it's on stage in regard to like, are they going to be able to talk through the arm transition? there is no way on God's Green Earth that they want to talk about this on stage, right? Whatever the stage means in an online world. I feel like they need to do something. They definitely want to try and kill the story before WWDC starts. That's probably why Schiller's out there saying, no, we're killing it. It doesn't mean a rules. But I don't know because there's not going to be a venue other than Twitter, right?

They'll just like, they'll be giving their keynote and Twitter is going to be lit up instead of the hallways of some San Jose Convention Center. And I have no idea how that's going to go for them. I have no idea how that's going to go. You know, Cicillini told us that he thinks 30% is unconscionable. He is the chairman of the House Antitrust Committee. Like, you can have whatever debate you want. That's what he thinks. He's going to write the legislative proposal.

He's going to suggest how to change the law. That's what he thinks. Like Apple walked into this moment. The other thing that is happening, and if you are one of these developers and you feel this way, by all means, reach out to us, talk to you. Ben Thompson, he's soliciting this stuff to you. There are lots of reporters on this case now. The other thing that's happening is the dam has broken.

Yeah. And developers are saying pretty loudly, yet not on the record yet, but pretty loudly, this has been unfair. We feel squeezed. We feel like Apple rejects our apps unless we find a way to give them a cut of our services revenue. Yeah. That's a narrative that Apple has to break. And they put out a press release this week saying half a trillion dollars with a commerce move for the app store. And we don't touch 85% of it. Well, that's great. But that's like,

you touch 15% of it. That's a huge number. And if those developers of all sizes are beginning to say, this isn't worth it. We don't feel like this is fair. I just, it's like that Steve Lamer line, like developers, like that's the thing that makes your platform. Yeah. And that, to me, it feels like a very tenuous moment when the animus towards big tech across. both parties is very high. And now it's not some hard to define tenuous harm about speech policies or Facebook moderating or YouTube radical. Like, yep, those are real problems. We talk about them a lot. Those are monopolies. We talk about that a lot. This is like a bunch of businesses are getting damaged. A bunch of businesses feel like they're, they have to pay a tax to participate in

the economy. That is a lot easier for politicians to latch on to and say, we're going to make this more fair. I think that's why Amazon gets so much attention. It is so much easier to talk about money than the other stuff. It's this, this exploded in Apple's face this week because they rejected this app. We have spoken to Apple. I've spoken to Apple about it since we spoke to Sicilini. You know, their position is very much like the rules are the rules. They've been the rule since 2010. If we change it for this app, what will we have to change it for next? Which is totally consistent, totally logical, makes perfect sense. And then take one step back from it. It's like the whole point of innovation is that you have no idea what comes next.

The whole point is you have no idea what people are going to invent and you shouldn't stand in their way. They should not have to ask you for permission. And I think that policy idea is just going to come up again and again for Apple. And I think that this is why I wanted to wait until the very end to talk about iOS. Because it will color this entire event in an extraordinarily serious way. Well, and there are so many overlapping issues. that you can latch on to. You can say, well, is 30% the right percent should Apple be able

take a percent at all? Should you be allowed to install apps outside of the App Store? Should Apple be pushing people towards subscriptions because that's what they seem to do? Do large companies get special backroom deals out of Apple that smaller developers can't? Remember how you can go and buy a rent a movie from Amazon on the Apple TV without Apple taking a cut? Like, that happened. That was like April. And however you want to, like, everybody feels a little bit burned. And they feel burned by like a little piece of all of those things. But the question is, like, what is going to be like the remedy that everyone's like, you know what, Apple, do this thing?

Unless there's a really clear sort of, you know, I don't know, set of demands, my sense is Apple is just going to be like, look, the rules are the rules. Before we came along, software brick and mortar stores, like Babbage's were charging 50% any way to distribute. And like, what's a, we do more than just, like, process credit cards. We also, like, have the app store. We keep users safe. We, you know, keep malware out. We promote your apps in the app store. We've got a magazine, you know, in the app store, whatever, you know, they want to say.

But, like, I don't know. What if I just, like, one possible thing is, like, look, I'll distribute it through the app store. You can get my credit card processing fee. And I will not allow you to market me in any way. I opt out of the App Store algorithm or something, right? I don't know. Like, that's like, that's a half-assed idea. But the problem here is there's so many possible, like, things that you could, so many ways you could attack this problem that until there's like a unified sense of do this one or two or three things.

I think Apple can just be like, they can just keep on repeating the things that, like, have merit in defense of their 30% cut. And they've got a unified voice. and everybody else is just, like, mad. And afraid, that's the other thing. The fear conversation is the one that's new to this debate. Look, we have talked about App Store policies on the show since probably the day the app store came out. Like, we talk a lot about Facebook moderation policies and whether it's fair, unfair, and who the Raiders are. And, you know, Casey goes and does features on the lives of the moderators who are underpaid and get PT.

We know a lot about that. It happens in public. Like it happens out there. Same with YouTube, same with Twitter. Well, Apple has the same thing for the app store, right? It wrote a bunch of rules. People encounter those rules. There's an opaque process with reviewers who we don't know.

We don't know what their lives are like. We don't know who they are. You can appeal and that Apple's word is final. There's no precedent. They don't want you to talk about in public. So there's no precedent to say, well, you did it for this app. Why didn't you do it for me? That's not allowed.

It's just as opaque of a moderation system. It's just an opaque of a platform rules and regulation system is anything Facebook. Does it actually probably more opaque than anything Facebook? As long as you're bringing up Facebook, I should point out that my wife works for Oculus, which is a divin of Facebook, and she specifically works on Oculus's App Store. Since I recuse myself from all Oculus stuff, I actually have no idea how they might fit into this conversation. But I should be clear that that exists. You've heard me say this before.

I'm saying Facebook, but I could say YouTube or Twitter. It's the same. We know a lot about YouTube moderators. We know a lot about Twitter's for better or worse. We all know a lot about Twitter's moderation policies, right? We just don't really know a lot about apples. And that fear of my business can go away is so much more actionable for policymakers in the EU, in the United States, wherever than some hard-to-understand harm that comes from putting

fact-check labels on the president's tweets. Yeah. Well, so much of the debate around that kind of moderation is, oh, you're being unfair to conservatives or you're not banning enough Nazis or whatever. and it just immediately gets thrown into a polarized conversation just instantly. But you're hurting small businesses. That doesn't get polarized as fast. Really doesn't.

So I think that we'll see what happens at iOS. There's actually just a report 9 to 5 Mac. You know, like the podcast app in iOS is going to get revamped to be more competitive with Spotify. They're obviously going to make changes to iOS 14. There's a tiny, tiny hope that maybe they're going to let you set third-party apps as default. But why would they do that? because they're under increasing scrutiny from the EU about the control of the platform. Like, that is the context towards some of the changes.

That is the context for some of the changes that we see is this increasing scrutiny of Apple's power. And you can agree with it or disagree with it. I'm just letting you know flatly, the people in charge are now saying things like highway robbery around Apple's business practices. And like, you can say that's hyperbolic or he doesn't understand it or whatever. At the end of the day, that dude's going to write the law. And that's like, that's where Apple has arrived.

And it feels like they stumbled into it, knowing full well that this is what people thought the whole time. And they just let it pile up until they got there. So we'll see, you know, they're standing their ground with, hey, that's fine. They're saying there's ways around to just put in the button and maybe no one will click it and you won't give us any money after all. Like that's basically their answer. But it doesn't seem like DHS wants to do that.

All right. I said we weren't going to go long. So we got to take a break. We're going to come back with Addie Robertson. We're going to talk about the various section. It's all tech policies. We're going to talk about the various Section 230 proposals from Josh Holly, the Department of Justice this week, and a very strange controversy around Google ads in the Federalist. It's, we'll be right back with Addie Robertson.

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policy proposals is so high that you're going to be here a lot. It's like it's it's it's like a punishment. I don't want to like say it too loudly, but I think we're going to be hearing from you a lot because there is a lot going on particularly around 230, which is something we talk about a lot. Two proposals this week. Tell us, tell us what they are, where they came from, what sort of the shape of the situation is. There are two proposals. They came out around the same time last week.

One is a bill and the other is basically a suggestion. suggestion for a bill from the Justice Department. So the bill is Senator Josh Hawley, who has previously brought Section 230 bills. And it is basically a modification to 230 that adds a new category called an edge provider. And that's sort of his way of separating out, hey, here's Google and Facebook and companies that meet a certain threshold for size. And then those companies will need to meet a series of good faith requirements in order to keep Section 230 protections. And those largely involve making sure that they follow their terms of service, which is sort of a recurring thing in all these plans now. But it also includes a section where you can get $5,000 if they're breaking

their terms of service. It's weird. So before we get into it, especially with Holly, but just in general, is a strategy here to just like keep making up new proposals until one of them sticks? You know, my understanding of the legislative process is like a senator or congressperson comes up with like the bill that they want, and then they push for the bill, and maybe they make some changes to the bill, but they try and get everybody behind the bill. But instead, Holly's just like, what if we did it this way? Anyone? Anyone? No. Oh, how about this way? Oh, what about this one? And they're just like throwing stuff out there willy-nilly instead of having like one grand plan that they want to do to change 230. Yeah. Am I wrong? No, that's, that's right. A lot of

the general internet regulation bills that Holly is thrown out are kind of non-starter. and weird, like the one where he tried to ban infinite scrolling. I love that one. I actually, I really like that. That was one of those where it was like, if you read enough, like, humane design blogs, it was like all of design Tumblr came together and wrote a law. You know, it was just like so earnest. We should get more laws out of Tumblr fan communities.

I don't know about that at all. That would be like, the law is there must be a Snyder cut. Like, that's where you would, that's where you're going. So I just want to step back out of it before we go deeply into the weeds of these bills. I think most listeners know this, but 230 is the bill famously the title of the book is the 26 words that created the internet. It's a great book. You can go read it. But it's a very short law that basically says whatever you post to a social network like Google or Facebook or YouTube or whatever, that network is not responsible for the thing you post.

That is the thing that allows social media platforms to exist because otherwise, if I was to tweet that Dieter was a big old dummy, in addition to tweeting, it's suing me. Dieter could sue Twitter. And if you could sue Twitter for everything that people on Twitter did, Twitter couldn't exist. That's just something to keep in mind. We've talked about the Trump executive order

that came out trying to modify 230. Now there's this Hawley bill to modify it and there's the Justice Department trying to modify it. What strikes me about the Holly bill, which is the one we're talking about, is Josh Hawley is the junior senator from Missouri. He has a lot of ideas. I think he started, and Eddie, correct me if I'm wrong, but when he started firing out all these

bills and all these proposals for regulating tech, the attitude was very much, wow, like, here's a junior Republican senator with like reasonable ideas about what the criticisms of the tech industry are. He talks a lot about competition, and we should pay attention. And now it's kind of like Holly just has had so many weird, bad ideas. It's hard to know if he's even arguing in good faith. It's really strange, especially because he is also one of the big boosters of the more likely to pass Section 230 bill, which is the Earned Act, which sort of does the opposite thing that the bill he's talking about now does. The Earned Act is basically sites need to be way more careful about taking down content in case it's illegal because otherwise they could lose protection for content about child abuse. this bill is aimed at making sure they don't take down content by making sure that they I guess their terms of service are going to say that they shouldn't take down content in certain

cases and then you can sue them if they do it's it's sort of weird and convoluted it's basically just throwing up a barrier for any section 230 protections right and then the the justice department has been involved because bill bar the attorney general who runs Justice Department works to Donald Trump, and Trump is very, very mad that Twitter put a label under one of his tweets. Is that the shape of that? Well, I believe it may have been two tweets. Otherwise.

I mean, once you go to two tweets, all bets are off. But right, it seems like that was a real precipitating moment here. Yeah. Well, the Justice Department is interesting because his proposal, which I guess we'll get into soon, is kind of a synthesis of the anti-bias stuff and also a bunch of concerns that people make in good faith, like raising good faith about Section 230, which is sort of stuff around child abuse and cyberstocking and a bunch of other law enforcement issues. Right. And so there is a long history of debate around if people are posting a bunch of

revenge porn to Reddit, Reddit should be responsible for that because they will be incentivized to moderate it. That's been there and people have been talking about that in a serious way for a long time. Yeah. There are kind of like two emblematic cases, I think. The first is revenge porn sites where the idea is that everybody knows what they're for. They are very clear about what they're for, but technically they're protected because they're not uploading the content unless they go and find some. And then the other one is this Grindr harassment lawsuit that was lost, I think last year, where the allegation is that Grindr knew about this thing that was absolutely horrible and criminal and happening and they didn't respond. And the Section 230 protects that. So those are the two sort of hard cases that people are emblematic of the things people are trying to make laws about in good faith. So one of the ways I've been trying to think about all of the proposals to change 230 is very reductive and it will be frustrating and I apologize. But I think it is useful. The Holly Bill, does he want Facebook to moderate more or less? On its face wants Facebook to moderate less. Okay. The Justice Department proposal, does it incentivize Facebook to moderate more or less?

It incentivizes them to moderate more and less, but probably more, more than less. It's weird and contradictory. It includes both, but the incentives to moderate more are greater than the incentives to moderate less if all of it actually makes it into a bill. The reason I ask it that way is because it feels like the government's interest in this government, this conservative government in particular's interest in moderation is really about what gets moderated. right there's this notion which is unsupported by the actual data but there's this notion that conservatives are moderated more by Twitter and Facebook and other platforms and so the government's interest or the political interest is to somehow wage a fight against that notion and to say we're doing something about conservatives being unfairly targeted but it feels like saying you have to moderate conservatives less is absolutely a violation of the First Amendment so they're coming at it sideways that's When I ask more or less, it feels like saying we want you to moderate less is a way to get to solving this problem. We change the moderation policy. Saying we want you to moderate more because of these other problems is a way of saying we will increase your liability if you don't do the thing that we want, which is to moderate conservatives less.

Yeah, no, there's definitely a kind of hostage situation class of bills where the goal is not even really to open up venues where you can sue them for the very specific instances where they've screwed something up with moderation. it's just to say, here's a really horrible thing that's going to happen to you if you do this. And it's largely unrelated, but we're going to do it to you anyway. Does that appear to be having any impact on the Twitters and Facebooks of the world, this pressure campaign? I mean, it's really difficult to say because so much of it is just moderation decisions or behind-the-scenes stuff. It seems arguably like Facebook has made a bunch of decisions that people describe as kind of capitulating and not labeling things and saying, okay, oh, well, this is too serious to actually do anything about because we take this so seriously. Whereas Twitter has, it seems like, at least sort of taken a stand saying in these extreme circumstances,

we will, in fact, label tweets. We will not completely give in to this. And I guess Snapchat has been the one who took the actual stand here. Yeah, Snapchat said we're not going to put Donald Trump's content into the Discover pane. We're not going to surface it. Yeah, they're kind of promote it. But they're not like banning it or labeling. And they're just saying, we will not promote it, which, you know, that's where the kids are.

So I guess the kids will see less of, I mean, that's what they said. I don't know. I don't use Snapchat very much. I certainly don't use Snapchat Discover. So I don't know what the outcome of that will be, but that's the thing they said. I just keep coming at this. And the reason I'm asking these questions this way is, are all of these just backdoor speech regulations, right? We're going to monkey around with 230 because we can't monkey around with the First Amendment.

It certainly seems possible, but it seems almost more probable that they are, like a lot of free speech violating things, ways to rile up at base, that you get to say, hey, I'm taking a really firm stand on this thing. I'm fighting discrimination. I'm making a thing that actually just says Twitter has to follow its terms of service, which say that we can ban you at any time. Right. You said that at the very beginning, and I haven't yet begun to process how hard I want to laugh at it. I think it's very hard. These companies change their terms of service all the time. like constantly, capriciously, without warning, to unilaterally do it, it's not like you get to negotiate when Instagram changes its terms of service. Is there anything in any of these bills that lock those terms in place? I mean, the Justice Department thing is sort of vague and just gestures at telling Congress to do something, so it's hard to save with that. The Holly bill, I don't believe it does. It really defines some things that have to be in it, like the weird $5,000 if we break our terms of service clause. And it's

has to say that they will lay out the conditions where they will ban content. It does not say what those conditions are and it doesn't have some kind of approval process that they need to go through to change them or really a lot of things, which is a huge gap between that and the claim in the summary, which is that they will have to not discriminate the way that police can't discriminate. Wow. But the core of the bill is basically you have to do what your terms of service say and those terms of service can't be discriminatory. Otherwise, we can find you $5,000 per person that was harmed by you not following your own terms of service. It's like your terms of service are now law.

It's not we will find you. It's someone can sue you and they can get $5,000. Sure, right, right. And I don't think that says that the terms of service can't be discriminatory. I don't even think it says that. Let me double check. It's literally just we, if you don't follow your own terms of service, then somebody can sue you. That's literally it.

Which, again, what colors all of this is like some of these ideas are in a different universe, in a sort of a different timeline with a different set of actors, a totally reasonable thing to say. Yeah, there are a lot of rules about let's try to make terms of service less ridiculously arcane. And let's try to make sure that users have some kind of power over what happens on the network. It just the gap between the rhetoric of what is supposed to be happening and the thing that's actually happening, just feels so much like it's talking points that this, if you were bought into the idea that Twitter super selectively enforces its terms of service in order to punish Trump, then I guess this bill makes sense because that's the reality that you have bought into. If you don't believe

that, then it's just a weird, like, non-issue. I mean, it's not a non-issue. It's still bad, but it doesn't really solve the problem that they are talking about if that problem exists. Yeah, I think I saw one tweet, I think it was from Blake Reed as a professor at the University of Colorado, who said that the takeaway from this is this bill replaces 26 words with six pages of nonsense. And it's like at the same time, what you want is like that Section 230 was written a long time ago. It is true that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and whatever have written and rewritten their terms of service. They've written and rewritten their moderation policies. they're very opaque, right? We don't really know what Facebook moderators, like, get in their meetings every day.

Like, we just don't know. We have a good sense of it because Casey has done a lot of reporting. Other people have done a lot of reporting. But we don't really know what Facebook's moderation policies are today. We know what their rules are. We don't actually know how they moderate, how they affect those rules. So you can say there's some transparency there. We need those rules to be obvious.

We need people to know what they're getting into. You could say we need to treat the biggest companies in the world differently than the smaller companies. I think that's in the Holly bill. Like, you have to be X big. How big is it, Addie? I think it is 30 million U.S. users or 300 million worldwide. And you need a revenue of $1.5 billion. So, I mean, that feel, I think I heard you saying yesterday you were looking for the smallest company that that would affect.

And it feels like that's the Google and Facebook size. Yeah, it depends on, it was trying to come up with some weird loophole where maybe if you counted, users as anyone who's clicked on a New York Times page and the Times makes more than that in revenue, than this counts the New York Times. But it does genuinely much more than some bills seem to actually draw out a category. It's interesting that now I have a name, which is edge providers, which is mostly a thing that just came up in net neutrality debates. Right. I could start rants me about net neutrality at any time now. But edge providers are the consumer services that you use in a common definition. Is there a legal definition here that is

different than that? The legal definition is like it doesn't include things like Netflix, which was kind of the quintessential edge provider. It is largely based around having the size that we were talking about. And it has some very vague like, this is an interactive computer service, which arguably something like Netflix is less of. How did these bills land? In my estimation, they both came out and everyone looked at them and said, well, Well, Congress doesn't even work, and this makes no sense. We're paying very little attention to this. Was there a bigger impact to either one of them? That's the impact that in the actual policy circles that I read has happened. It's difficult for me to say how this was received, say, within the

group of people who are very, very worried about social media bias. But it doesn't seem to have landed with a bigger splash than earlier Holly proposals or even really than things that the Justice Department has said about Section 230 before. It certainly hasn't freaked people out as much as the Earned Act. Next to this, and I just have to point this out, the official policy proposal from the Biden for president campaign is that Joe Biden is going to, quote, repeal 230. So that he can sue Facebook for printing lies about him. So that he can sue Facebook. And he has, he put out, I mean, like I said, Addy, you're just the amount of exhausting things that we're going to have to talk about while this election continues. And he put out some proposal of like what Facebook needs to do around political ads.

Yeah, which I don't think was necessarily a 230 related law. But yeah, he has a lot of things he wants Facebook to do. Has Biden clarified what he might replace 230 with if he repeals it? I mean this in the most polite possible way. I'm not totally sure if Joe Biden knows what Section 230 is. No, you don't have to be polite. The man's running for president. I don't think Joe Biden knows what Section 230 is. So, no, he doesn't have a coherent replacement for it that I have seen. Are there other coherent democratic proposals to replace it? The main proposal to at least change it is the Urnit Act, which is basically we're going to target this at one specific issue that we're worried about, which is child sexual abuse.

And it may be a Trojan horse for banning encryption, but we're not going to talk about it at this time. And the last one was probably just Fasta, or Sesta Fasta, which passed a couple years ago, before 230 was such an incredibly hot issue and just banned, like removed protections for prostitution related material. Right. This is classically, it was backpage.com. Yeah, which was taken down without that before it passed. So, yeah. But the, the sort of paradigm case here was backpage. com existed. There was a lot of literally, there were ads for prostitution on backpage.com. I mean, it was called Backpage. It was supposed to feel like the back page of an all weekly. Made sense. And many, many cops.

were mad that they couldn't sue backpage for the content of those ads. And yet, it was taken down without any change to 230, but then a carve-out was made for sex trafficking and prostitution. And it feels like that is a much more iterative approach, not to use a tech word, but I guess it's tech policy, but an iterative approach is to identify places where you need carve-outs in the law, as opposed to a wholesale change. But that sort of carve-out approach seems to have fallen out of favor? The Justice Department section includes a lot of carveouts, just they're actually very, very large carveouts. I believe it would add them for, let me look up the exact term they used, egregious content. So it would completely abolish protections for child exploitation,

unlike the Ernit Act, which would make them conditional. It would abolish protection for terrorism, which seems potentially like it would revive a ton of failed lawsuits about Facebook hosting content for ISIS or for like the Pulse Nightclub shooting, which would be weird, and for cyberstalking, which would be interesting for honestly a lot of cases because that's a huge issue. But they try and define what egregious means in those ways. They don't just like have a catch-all thing for egregious for anything they don't like, because, you know, my concern is if you're banning egregious content, then I won't be able to tweet puns anymore.

I mean, I think I'm neutral on whether that should be counted. Yes. All right. This is the second time Addie's been polite. to an elderly man on the show? No, the thing with the Justice Department rules is that they aren't legal language. They're sort of intent things that they want Congress to write the legal language for. So you can't parse them quite as specifically as you could, something like the Holly bill.

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orgast.com. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. So next to this, and we've now said,

or I have said several times, like there's these proposals and sort of in a bubble without the outside context. You'd say, okay, we can evaluate that proposal. it's reasonable, here's what's good, here's what's bad. They want them to moderate more or less.

But they don't exist in a context tree vacuum. They exist in the horrifying 2020 rhetoric vacuum of today. That vacuum just includes a lot of Josh Hawley insisting that Google is biased. A lot of Brendan Carr, my new favorite FCC commissioner, by the way. Pye is in second place. He's out. His term is going to be up. You got to look to the new.

A lot of FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr is yelling at Google. and, you know, the Trump executive order basically implied that the FCC would somehow regulate speech policy at Google. And he seems more excited about that than the other FCC commissioners, including Pai. But in the context of this, there's something happened with the Federalist this week, which is a conservative site around Google saying we're not going to put ads on your site. And that was just seized upon as evidence of Google's hypocrisy. What happened there? To the best of my understanding, a lot of really, really bad communication by Google. So the basic timeline of this was that NBC had pointed out some content that was posted by a sort of group that calls out sites that it sees as posting hateful misinformation.

And it said, hey, are you going to do anything about this? And Google took a look at the sites, which included Zero Hedge, which is another conservative blog and the Federalist. And it said, okay, there are some bad comments here that are horrible and racist. violate our policies. So we're going to warn the sites. They need to take action on this, or we're going to demonetize them. It then sent NBC a statement that said, yeah, we have removed these sites' ability to monetize with Google ads, which sounds pretty unambiguous. This was not actually the case, though. So it turned out that Zero Hedge had been banned, it seems like. They had been warned and banned. The Federalist, they had given them a warning, said, hey, fix this. And then they had been planning to ban them.

But in the time in maybe like a couple hours after NBC published its article, the federalist just turned off comments. And Google said, okay, great, no harm, no foul. And then they didn't really acknowledge that they had reversed that decision. They just said, we haven't demonetized the federalist, which ended up leading to from a bunch of criticism of Google to a bunch of criticism of NBC. So a lot of really dumb confusion happened. Again, the 2020 nightmare rhetoric bubble. Yeah. Right. So the criticism, and I want to just take it head on and say it out loud so we can think about it. The criticism is from Josh Hawley, these are like his tweets, from Brendan Carr, these are his tweets. Google is a hypocrite because they take advantage of 230, which means they are not responsible for what's on their sites, but then they punish the Federalist for comments on its site. I have a very clear response to this, but Adam, I will set that aside. What do you think of that criticism?

I mean, for one thing, Google's not saying it's going to sue the federalist. It's not taking money away from the federalist. It is not doing business with the federalist, which is fundamentally a pretty different thing than becoming entangled with the United States legal system. It is also, honestly, that's just a lot of it. That is it. All right, here's mine. Ready? Google's not the fucking government.

Like, you're a senator. You should know the difference between things that are the government and aren't the government. and it is insane to think that the government should be in the position of forcing Google to do business with anyone, especially because on the other side of Google's ad stack are the advertisers that pay Google. Yeah, which is a lot of what this is about is that advertisers don't want their ads in a huge cesspool. Right. Every YouTube demonetization controversy and like how many times have we had Julia on the show to walk us through another tiresome, YouTube demonetization controversy.

It's all about Proctor and Gamble doesn't want to be near Logan Paul doing something stupid. So the videos are demonetized because of a filter. It's not because Google doesn't want people to make money. I think honestly, the evidence is that Google doesn't care, right, on the whole. They would rather just monetize the whole web. The evidence is the advertisers put a lot of pressure on Google

to make sure that their ads aren't near bad things. And that list is ever changing. The government forces companies to do business, with people they prefer not to all of the time, right? You know, a wedding cake for a gay marriage. Like, you have to, like, the government steps in all of the time. And then the second devil's advocate argument here, and I see you, to see your finger, I see you talking, when I talk, the second devil's advocate argument is, I know,

okay, the second devil's advocate argument is we just got finished talking about how Apple should be constrained in how it chooses to run the app store. I think the real answer is if you are really mad at Google and you are mad at Google's bad and capricious policies, which I think listeners of this show know, we are often mad at Google for their bad and capricious policies. The answer is there should be a competitor to Google, right? The policy of the United States should be like, there should be a vibrant market for monetizing your website that doesn't come down to you're doomed if Google turns off your

ads. And that doesn't seem to be a part of this conversation. And when we talk to folks about it, I'm like, that seems like a true part of this conversation. And everyone, high-powered lawyers, high-powered politicians that we talked to are like, yeah, those are different things. And it drives me crazy. It nominally is in that a bunch of people bring up antitrust in the same breath that they do section 230. Like, I think the Justice Department proposal includes a couple lines on antitrust. but when it does, it seems like it is basically always just in the service of we want to do something bad to Google because we don't like them, rather than we want to actually solve the problems that Google's size creates.

Yeah, and the animus of this administration, and I will just say it fully, I don't think this is controversial. There's not a lot of coherent policy that comes out of the Trump administration. There is a lot of revenge. And so it's hard to look at these bills in that sort of delightful context rebuttal where we're like, is this third? right choice. It's like what revenge is this extracting on a big company and what are the mechanisms of revenge? Maybe that is a good way to make policy. It has certainly been a way that United States government has made policy in the past, but it doesn't seem like it's actually effective in this moment when there's an election coming and when these companies are spending tons of money to lobby.

And at the same time, one of the more important pieces of context is we are living through a racial justice moment that is driven by social media, driven by the fact that Google and Twitter and whoever are not pre-moderating videos of brutality. That's just a lot to manage if you were the best policymaker in the world. But if you're reactive and vengeful, you're certainly not going to get it right. I mean, I want to go back to Deeter's other, the argument about, I'm not going to talk about masterpiece cake shop, but about companies shouldn't be able to discriminate. Because there are actually, there is a case currently filed against, I think it is YouTube, that is that is, arguing that YouTube selectively, because its algorithm screwed up somehow, demonetizes LGBT creators.

And this has been a running thing that people have criticized Google for is basically saying that it's treating anything that's LGBT related as adult content, which means that it gets as a side effect demonetized. And if you throw out like any of the objection to this and just assume, okay, this should be illegal, the thing is, I don't think 230 would be the way you do that. It's weird that all of these proposals seem to try to modify a completely separate section of the law to enforce some kind of anti-discrimination rule. Like, there was this rumor that Holly was going to introduce a bill that was like you only get 230 protection if you don't do location tracking, which is like one of those science fair experiments where you just throw a random cause and effect together and are like, yeah. What if you ban location tracking?

and then you can't get sued for someone hosting revenge porn. So I just, I don't know why this I'll go through. I mean, I kind of know why it all goes through 230, but it doesn't seem like it should go through 230. One thing that I think is interesting, and to Holly's credit, he has mentioned this before. I think he knows it's a reasonably good avenue of attack. We just had Congressman Cicillini on the show yesterday by the time you're listening to this,

but it's something Cicillini has said too. You can actually draw distinctions. if you want, between 2.30 applies to the things users post and things like ad targeting, like content recommendations, other features that remix the content, because those are business decisions. Those are something else. So I think in there's a case called force versus Facebook. Facebook one, as Adi has written, the social media companies usually win their 230 cases. It's 230 is very simple.

It's only 26 words. It's very simple what that law says. But there's this dissent in that case where the example is, if I gave you Deeter all of Facebook's data and you looked at it and came back to me and said, here's a list of people I think you should know. You would at no time say you are not the publisher of that, right? You have made a decision. You have looked at some data. You've generated an idea and come back to me with it. Facebook does that all the time, but because it's Facebook, it gets this blanket exception because of 230.

It's not responsible for that list of people you may know. YouTube is not responsible for its recommendation algorithm. But if I had all of YouTube's data and I published a list of YouTube videos you should watch and they radicalized you, you would hold me responsible for that list. That to me is, again, Talley's credit, he said stuff like that before. I've heard that now on the Democratic side. That seems more interesting to me to carve out what the algorithms do from the content the user's post. But it doesn't seem like anyone's having that conversation yet, really. It seems like that would relate to.

So there's one case where 230 really famously didn't apply, which was a case about roommates.com, where it was found to be violating discrimination rules because it would create these forms. And it would encourage the ruling was that it had encouraged people to fill out these forms by labeling them and placing them there in ways that were discriminatory. So it would tell people that they could, it would encourage people to say like they don't want to live with people of a certain race. And so the idea was.

was that it had provided this enough content that it was in some ways the publisher or speaker of it. It is a pretty interesting 230 case, and I am always curious how it might get applied in the future. I'm going to end on this because we don't know what's going to happen to these bills next. And I usually say, what happens next? But really the answer is our policy team waits, unpins the needles for the next dumb thing to happen. So that's what's going to happen next. But I've just come to the conclusion and push back on this as hard as you want. But I've come to the conclusion that what really, really the problem is, is that the government would like to write Facebook's moderation policy for it.

The government would, Democrat or Republican, the government would like to write YouTube's moderation policy for YouTube. It cannot, because those would just inherently be unconstitutional speech regulations. So instead, they're going at the existential threat of 230 to incentivize the speech regulations they want. That just feels like the thing that's happening. Is that just bonkers, not a conspiracy theorist? Or is that the sense that you're getting? Yeah. I think that's that in a really blunt way, that in Trump's case, it's just, he doesn't even

really have specific regulations in mind. He's just like, don't do anything with my stuff and my friend's stuff. And we're going to propose a bunch of laws that just make things terrible for you. I don't know. It's very frustrating if you actually care about policy. Yeah. not a great time to care about policy but we do it anyway and adi you do a great job with it thank you for coming on the show um like i said i think what will happen next is another series of disconcerting

proposals and we'll have you back great sounds good talk to you soon all right thanks to adi for joining us that was great our policy team has really been cranking over time they're all great adi russell mckenna just a plus work all over the place there we're cutting a little bit short this week we got the other episode about hey uh with david hannah mire hanson and rep presentative Sislini that's in the feed go listen to that it is a fiery episode next week is w w cc will be all over that walton mossberg joining the live blog on the verge dot com check that out i'm very excited to have him back for a live vlog it's going to be a good time you can tweet at us i'm at reckless deeter's at backlon deeter's got a newsletter it's called processor if you're

into this policy stuff case he's writing about it almost every day on the interface that's theverge dot com slash interface all kinds of stuff it things are happening we're covering them we'll see you on the verge.com that's it rock and roll paula