WWDC predictions / Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Dieter and I talk about what's going to happen with all of Apple's OSs at WWDC next week, getting a little bit of the "hey, app" controversy. And then Addy Robertson joins us to talk about what's happening with Section 230. It's kind of on The Vergecast now.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18+.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, flagship podcast of competition policy. That's not cool, but I said it anyway. Anyway, I'm your friend, Neelai. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  I'm your subcommittee page.

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  You're helpful. That's what that is.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Helpful. I bring you coffee. I keep track of things for you.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  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 show's 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 if you listen to the show. 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 Hanamay Hansen. And Casey Newton joined us to talk about, hey, his email app, what's going on? And then we have to talk about Section 230 and Addie Robertson is going to join us for that. We went and booked David. That was great. And then I was talking to Congressman

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  David Cicilline's team about something else entirely. And I mentioned, David was coming on our show. Congressman Cicilline 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 them that this was happening. And they're like, oh, Congressman Cicilline can come on your show. So we ended up with both David Hanna Meyer Hansen from Basecamp and Congressman Cicilline on the show. And that went really long. So we broke it out. There was some news in there. So 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 Cicilline had to bail. And then Dieter and Casey and I hung out with DHH for a while. That was really fun. He's a firecracker. So that's in the feed. You can go listen to it. So now we're just

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  have a little shorter Friday show. We got to talk about WWDC. 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 that are 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'd be a testing framework where you'd go to a website and the website would tell you where to go to a parking lot of a major retailer, you'd 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, it's all well and good, but the national testing and contact tracing framework, one assumes you would need, week 14, not here. Dieter, did you hear the funny thing that happened in the UK? I did not.

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  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. Then they built it. They put out, I think they spent millions, like hundreds of millions of dollars on it. They put it out. They realized the Bluetooth, they couldn't get the access.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  So it didn't work very well. So today they announced that they're gonna, they're gonna go ahead and use the Apple and Google

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Just use the, yeah, great.

• 4:11Nilay Patel?

  Surreal. It's like very, like my Twitter, I woke up this morning, morning, east coast, sort of 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 this six weeks ago. So that's the news in that world. Some other pandemic stories and protest, Black Lives Matter related stories. Again, those are, that's the context for almost everything now. So it's happening aside. I want to make sure we call it out every week and then we can go into our stuff. The FDA ended emergency authorization for hydroxychloroquine. We wrote that up. And there is a lot of confusion about asymptomatic transmission.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  We wrote an explanation about that stuff. There is a cheap steroid that we, 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 Wetzman, 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 happened because of it. Vergecast producer Andrew Moreno wrote an entire story about the gadgets that like late night with Seth Meyers and ESPN are using to produce their shows from him.

• 5:32Nilay Patel?

  And we're going to talk, this is like, it's a good WWDC segue. You ready for this?

• 5:36Speaker 03

  I just, I have purchased and tried to use the exact setup that Seth Meyers has. And I was like, eh, and then specifically podcast producer Andrew Moreno told me, that's not good enough.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  I had to like adjust how I recorded audio.

• 5:53Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing. Seth Meyers records his entire show into the front facing camera of an iPad Pro. And then, this is the part that kills me, he airdrops it to his laptop so he can put it into Dropbox.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  And I know why he does that. It's because no one wanted to sit down with Seth Meyers and explain how file handling on the iPad worked. So it was easier to just be like, dude, airdrop 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.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  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 billion 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. An Instagram CEO said 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.

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  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, it's super interesting stuff if you're interested in it. It's, 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 WWDC. It's coming up next week.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  WWDC.

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  It's happening.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:55Nilay Patel?

  Walt Mossberg.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  He's coming back to the site.

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  Very excited. It's going to be so much fun.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  It's like a, like, 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 watch along, like a watch party, but it's not a party because we're journalists. So it's like a watch along. Like, I don't, I don't know what the right word is. If you know what I should call this thing.

• 8:12Nilay Patel?

  It's a live blog.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Tell me on Twitter. It's a live blog, but yeah, I don't know.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  A live watch?

• 8:17Speaker 03

  A live watch, a live, a live chat.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  We have to end this.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  So WWDC, the number of OSs that Apple has to grind through now include iOS, iPad OS, Watch OS, TV OS, Mac OS.

• 8:32Nilay Patel?

  HomePod OS.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  HomePod OS.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  Which is, it's iOS.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  All of these things are iOS except for Mac OS.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  When that is real shaky.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  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 AirTags. We're overdue for an iMac. Oh my God, we're overdue for an iMac.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  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 AirTags. There's even a rumor that they're gonna try and bring back AirPower, which is amazing. There's like, 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. It'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?

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  I want to go in reverse interesting order.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  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 Verge casts now. I think we could just be like, you know, it's a possibility.

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  No, reverse interesting order. HomePod OS.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Will continue to exist.

• 9:57Nilay Patel?

  Okay, fair enough. The only thing interesting there in this kind of dovetails and other stuff, will they let Spotify run on the HomePod? It's like stuff like that.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Will Spotify run on the HomePod? Will they talk about Siri at all? Because Siri, like, I think we counted and they mentioned, 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 think, know which London you're referring to when you want to know what time it is in London.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  And Siri on the HomePod in particular is like, kind of not that great. And the HomePod is also, as with the iPad, the place where Apple refuses to admit that like more than one person lives in a home.

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  So.

• 10:37Nilay Patel?

  That was it. That's all that's there.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:39Nilay Patel?

  That's it. I guess that means TV OS is the least interesting.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  It's a real toss up over which of those two is the least interesting.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  With TV OS, what are they gonna, what's it gonna be? Maybe there'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.

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But like, what else are they gonna do?

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so TVOS is the least interesting. HomePod OS is the most like, are you still gonna make a homepod? So there's some drama in it.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay, uh, watch OS, I would say.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Okay, uh, sleep tracking is the big rumor. Uh, there's a possibility that they could do blood oxygen tracking, um, just with the sensors that are already there.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  Which is sort of useful in this moment, right? That's like a COVID metric that people are interested in.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, but also very dangerous in this moment because, um, 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. Um, 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. Um, so if they do launch blood ox- oxygen tracking, they're gonna be really careful about how they characterize it.

• 11:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm gonna just tell you a watch story.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Is it about how you wish there were third-party watch faces and Apple's never gonna give it to you?

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely not.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:03Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, I cannot think of something more boring than that. Um, I know some people really want it, but I'm like, this thing sends me notifications, like, and I have a calendar widget that tells me when my next meeting is. That is what I use my watch for. Now, 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 the night, wanted water, walked down the stairs, and I missed the last step and I just like, fell on my ass. It was like, I was like, 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.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  And that data is logged in iCloud now.

• 12:44Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. I will forever, that's how I feel about the COVID thing, it's like, gonna just embarrass you.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Man, imagine if Apple actually knew how to advertise, you'd be getting so many great ads right now.

• 12:55Nilay Patel?

  Kill me. Okay. So then it's iPad, iOS and Mac. I would say iPad is the next least interesting.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  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 coworkers or whatever. But we'll see.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  Or even just like a kiosk mode, like a proper kiosk mode.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that could work. I don't know. I just, I feel this very strongly because I just reviewed the, um, God, what's it called? The Fire HD eight plus. There it is.

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  The new one.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  The new one. Yeah. With a USB C and wireless charging, uh, which is great. By the way, this thing is great. And it's also terrible. Uh, cause it's super slow, but it has a really good kids mode and like, it does like, if, 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. Uh, that would be amazing. So I don't know. We'll see. There's no rumors.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  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. Uh, of nothing. It would be great if I could segment that in some way. We have talked a lot about Mac OS and ARM on previous episodes of the show. I think that is the most interesting thing that could happen in W W C by far. Apple announced a processor transition. That's a big deal.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. The least interesting thing that could happen with Mac OS is they will continue to insist that Catalyst is good.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  That's horrible. But Catalyst might be like a transition step for ARM, right?

• 14:41Speaker 03

  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 that. The arms, you don't need Catalyst to 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. Um, but they've 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, 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 developer land. Who knew? And if they had had that this year and they got on stage and like Catalyst is great,

• 15:24Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So I said the Mac is the most important because if they transition ARM, that is obviously the most interesting, biggest news that would happen at W W C. The second most interesting O S then is I O S, 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 I O S. There's some baby leaks here and there. The drama around I O S is really just about developers at this moment in time. And it's a developer conference. We just had D H H and Congressman Cicilline on the show talking about developer policies, like App Store rules, the 30% cut, whether Apple has too much power.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  Apple just rejected the Hay 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 is, this app just doesn't hit our, it 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?

• 16:45Speaker 03

  You remember how I, in my newsletter last week, we also mentioned on the Vergecast, I, 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, 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 W W D C starts. That's probably why Schiller's out there saying, no, we're killing it. It doesn't meet our rules. But I don't know, because like, 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.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  I have no idea how that's going to go. You know, Cicilline 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 gonna write the legislative proposal. He's gonna 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 Ben Thompson. He's soliciting this stuff to you. Like, 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,

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  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, they put out a press release this week saying, half a trillion dollars of the commerce move to the App Store, and we don't touch 85% of it. Well, that's great, but that's like, you touched 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 Ballmer line, like developers, like, that's the thing that makes your platform. Yeah.

• 18:48Nilay Patel?

  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 gonna 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.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  It's this, the, 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, we spoke to Cicilline. You know, their position is very much like the rules are the rules. They've been the rules 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 you take one step back from it. It's like, the whole point of innovation is that you have no idea.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  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. Cause it is, it, it will color this entire event in an extraordinarily serious way.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Well, and there, there are so many overlapping issues that you can latch on to. You can say, well, is, is 30% the right percent? Should Apple be able to take a percent at all? Should you be allowed to install apps outside of the App Store? Should Apple be pushing people towards subscriptions? Cause 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 like 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, the question is like, what is going to be like the remedy that everyone's like, you know what?

• 21:06Speaker 03

  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's 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% the, you know, 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, they want to say. But like, I don't know, what if I just like one possible thing is like, look, I'll distribute to the App Store, you can, you can get my credit card processing fee and I will not allow

• 21:49Speaker 03

  you to market me in any way. Like I, I opt out of the App Store algorithm or something, right? I don't know. Like, that's like, that's a, that's a half-assed idea. But the, 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, they've got a unified voice and everybody else is just like mad and afraid. That's the other thing.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  The fear conversation is the one that's new to this debate. We, 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 then 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

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  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 regulations system as anything Facebook does. It's actually probably more opaque than anything Facebook.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  As long as you're bringing up Facebook, I should point out that my wife works for Oculus, which is a division 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, that exists. You've, you've heard me say this before.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  I, I'm saying Facebook, but I could just, 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 Apple's. And that fear of my business can go away is so much more actionable. For policymakers in the EU, in the United States, wherever, then some hard to understand harm that comes from putting fat check labels on the president's tweets.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  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? Like, that doesn't, that doesn't get polarized this fast.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  Really doesn't. So I think that we'll see what happens in iOS. There's actually just a report, nine to five Mac, you know, like the podcast app in iOS is going to get revamped to be more competitive with Spotify. But yeah, they're obviously going to make changes to iOS 14.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a tiny, tiny hope that maybe they're going to let you set third-party apps as default.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  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, this, they're standing their ground with, hey, that, that's fine. They're saying there's ways around it. Just put in the button,

• 25:32Nilay Patel?

  and maybe no one will click it, and you won't give us any money after all. Like, that's, that's basically their answer. But it doesn't seem like DHH 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 Hawley, the Department of Justice this week, and a very strange controversy around Google Ads and The Federalist. It's, we'll be right back with Addie Robertson.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18 plus.

• 27:03Nilay Patel?

  Addie Robertson, welcome back to the show.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the pace of crazy tech 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. So 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 talked about a lot. Two proposals this week. Tell us, tell us what they are, where they came from, what sort of the shape of, of the situation is.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  There are two proposals. They came out around the same time last week. One is a bill and the other is basically a 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 with a, 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,

• 28:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  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 that Holly is just like, what if we did, what if we did it this way? Anyone? Anyone? No? Oh, how about this way? Oh, this one? And then 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.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Am I wrong?

• 29:03Speaker 04

  No, that's, that's right. A lot of

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  The general internet regulation bills that Holly has thrown out are kind of non-starters and weird, like the one where he tried to ban infinite scrolling.

• 29:10Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  We should get more laws out of Tumblr fan communities.

• 29:30Nilay Patel?

  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, uh, the book is the 26 words that created the internet. It's a great book, you can go read it, but it's, it's a very short law that basically says whatever you post to a social, uh, 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.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  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 have talked about the Trump executive order that came out trying to modify 230. Now there's this Holly bill to modify it and there's the Justice Department trying to modify it. What strikes me with 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. He, I think he started, and Addie, 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, 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

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  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 Earn It Act, which sort of does the opposite thing that the bill he's talking about now does. Like one of the Earn It 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 sort of weird and convoluted. It's

• 31:47Speaker 04

  basically just throwing up a barrier for any section 230 protections.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then the, the Justice Department has been involved because Bill Barr, the Attorney General, who runs Justice Department, works with Donald Trump and Trump is very, very mad that Twitter put a label under one of his tweets. Is that the shape of that?

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Well, I believe it may have been two tweets.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  I mean, once you go to two tweets, all bets are off. But right, it seems like that was a real precipitating moment here.

• 32:18Speaker 04

  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 cyber stalking and a bunch of other law enforcement issues.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  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. Right. That's like, that's been there and people have been talking about that in a serious way for a long time.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  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.

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  So one of the ways I've been trying to think about all the proposals to change 230 is very reductive, and it will be frustrating, and I apologize, but I think it is useful. The Hawley bill, does he want Facebook to moderate more or less?

• 33:48Speaker 04

  On Face wants Facebook to moderate less.

• 33:51Nilay Patel?

  Okay, the Justice Department proposal, does it incentivize Facebook to moderate more or less?

• 33:57Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  The reason I ask it that way is because it feels like the government's interest in this government, this conservative government in particular, is 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

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  at it sideways. 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.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Does that appear to be having any impact on the Twitters and Facebooks of the world? This pressure campaign?

• 35:36Speaker 04

  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?

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Snapchat said, we're not going to put Donald Trump's content in the Discover paint, we're not going to surface it. Yeah, they're going to promote it. But they're not banning it or labeling it, 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?

• 36:48Speaker 04

  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 a 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.

• 37:07Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Is there anything in any of these bills that lock those terms in place?

• 37:30Speaker 04

  I mean, the Justice Department thing is sort of vague and just gestures at telling Congress to do something, so it's hard to say 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 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.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  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 fine 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.

• 38:27Nilay Patel?

  It's not, we will fine you. It's someone can sue you and they can get $5,000.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Sure. Right, right.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  And I don't think it says that the Terms of Service can't be discriminatory. I don't even think it says that. Let me double check.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  It's literally just, if you don't follow your own Terms of Service, then somebody can sue you. That's literally it.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  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. 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. 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.

• 39:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think I saw one tweet, I think it was from Blake Reed, who's 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.

• 40:24Nilay Patel?

  We know what their rules are, but we don't actually know how they moderate, how they affect those rules. So you could 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?

• 40:45Speaker 04

  I think it is 30 million US users or 300 million worldwide. And you need a revenue of $1.5 billion.

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  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, it feels like that's the Google and Facebook size.

• 41:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 41:27Nilay Patel?

  Right, I could start ranting about net neutrality anytime now, but, but edge providers are the, the consumer services that you use in a common definition. Is there a legal definition here that is different than that?

• 41:40Speaker 04

  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.

• 42:02Nilay Patel?

  How did these bills land? In, in my estimation, they both came out and everyone looked at them and said, 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?

• 42:15Speaker 04

  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 Earnest Act.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  So that he can sue Facebook for printing lies about him.

• 42:58Nilay Patel?

  So that he can sue Facebook. And he has, he, he, he put out, I mean, like I said, Addie, 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.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  Has Biden clarified what he might replace 230 with if he repeals it?

• 43:24Speaker 04

  I, I mean this in the most polite possible way. I'm not totally sure if Joe Biden knows what Section 230 is.

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  So, no, he doesn't have a coherent replacement for it that I have seen.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  Are there other coherent Democratic proposals to replace it?

• 43:45Speaker 04

  The main proposal to at least change it is the Earnest 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 FOSTA or Sesta Fosta, which passed a couple of years ago before 230 was such an incredibly hot issue and just banned, like, removed protections for prostitution-related material.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  Right, this was classically, it was Backpage.com.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, which was taken down without that before it passed. So, yeah.

• 44:23Nilay Patel?

  But the, the sort of paradigm case here is Backpage.com existed, there was a lot of, literally, there are ads for prostitution on Backpage.com. I mean, it was called Backpage, it was supposed to feel like the Backpage of an alt 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 has, seems to have fallen out of favor.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  The Justice Department section includes a lot of carve outs, just, they're actually very, very large carve outs. 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 Internet 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 cyber stalking, which would be interesting for, honestly, a lot of cases, because that's a huge issue.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  But they, they try and define what egregious means in those ways. They don't just like, have a, a catchall 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, so.

• 45:53Speaker 04

  I mean, I think, I'm neutral on whether that should be counted.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  But.

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  All right. This is the second time Addie's been polite to an elderly man.

• 46:01Speaker 04

  No, it's, 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.

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  So you can't parse them quite as specifically as you could something like the Holly bill.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  So next to this, and we've now said, or I have said several times, like, there's these proposals in 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-free 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. Pi is in second place. He's out. His term is going to be up. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta look to the new. A lot of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr yelling at Google and, you know,

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  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 Pi. 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?

• 48:24Speaker 04

  To the best of my understanding, a lot of really, really bad communication by Google. So.

• 48:30Nilay Patel?

  Shocking.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  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 and 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.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  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'd 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.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  Again, the 2020 nightmare rhetoric bubble. 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?

• 50:28Speaker 04

  I mean, for one thing, Google's not saying it's going to sue The Federalist. It's not...

• 50:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's taking money away from The Federalist.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's mine. Ready? Google's not the fucking government. Like, you're a senator.

• 50:54Nilay Patel?

  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 a 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.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, which is a lot of what this is about, is that advertisers don't want their ads in a huge cesspool.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  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 Procter 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.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  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, I see your fingernail, I see you talking, want to talk. The second devil's advocate argument is...

• 52:15Nilay Patel?

  I know.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  Okay. The second devil's advocate argument is, we just got finished talking about how Apple should be constrained and how it chooses to run the App Store.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  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 talk to are like, yeah, those are different things. And it drives me crazy.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  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 of 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.

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that, 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 re-bubble where we're like, is this the right choice? It's like, what revenge is this extracting on a big company? And what are the mechanisms of revenge? I'd like, maybe that is a good way to make policy. It has certainly been a way that the 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

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  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.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  I mean, I want to go back to Dieter's other, the argument about, I'm not going to talk about Masterpiece Cake Shop, but about like, 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 arguing that YouTube selectively, because its algorithm screwed up somehow. Demonitizes 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 objections 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.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  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 this, 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 they're like, yeah. What if you ban location tracking and then you can't get sued for someone hosting revenge porn? Like, so I just, I don't know why this all goes through. I mean, I kind of know why it all goes through 230, but it doesn't seem like it should go through 230.

• 55:57Nilay Patel?

  One thing that I think is interesting, and to Holly's credit, he has mentioned this before, and he knows it's a reasonably good avenue of attack. We just had Congressman Cicilline on the, on the show yesterday, by the time you're listening to this, but it's something Cicilline has said too. You can actually draw distinctions if you want between 230 applies to the things users post and things like ad targeting, recommend, 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 won.

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  As Addie has written, the social media companies usually win their 230 cases. 230 is very simple. It's, it's only 26 words. It's, it's very simple what that law says, but there's this dissent in that case where the example is if I gave you Dieter 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.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  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, to Ali's credit, he's 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 users post, but it doesn't seem like anyone's having that conversation yet, really.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  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, 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 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.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna end on this because we don't know what's gonna happen in these bills next. And I usually say, what happens next? But really, the answer is our policy team waits on pins and needles for the next dumb thing to happen. So that's what's gonna 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, they're going at the existential threat of 230 to incentivize the speech regulations they want. That just feels like the thing

• 59:13Nilay Patel?

  that's happening. Is that just bonkers? I'm a conspiracy theorist, or is that the sense that you're getting?

• 59:18Speaker 04

  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, it's very frustrating if you actually care about policy.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, not a great time to care about policy, but we do it anyway. And Addy, you do a great job with it. Thank you for coming on the show. Like I said, I think what will happen next is another series of disconcerting proposals and we'll have you back.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  Great.

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  Talk to you soon. All right. Thanks to Addy for joining us. That was great. Our policy team has really been cranking over time. They're all great. Addy, Russell, and the kind of just A plus work all over, all over the place there. All right. We're cutting a little bit short this week. We've got the other episode about, hey, with David Hanna Meyer Hansen and Representative Cicilline. That's in the feed. Go listen to that. It is fiery episode. Next week is W W C. We'll be all over that. Walt Mossberg joining the live blog on the verge.com. Check that out. I'm very excited to have him back for a live blog. It's going to be a good time. You can tweet at us. I'm at reckless. Dieter's at backlon. Dieter's got a newsletter. It's called processor. If you're into this policy stuff, Casey's writing about it almost every day on the interface. That's the verge.com slash interface. All kinds of stuff. Things are happening. We're covering them. We'll see you on the verge.com. That's it. Rock and roll.