Future of the Web

"In some of its advertising paperwork to attract new clients, a marketing team at Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it listens to customers through the embedded microphones in their smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data about those customers and serve them targeted ads, 404 Media reports."

"The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an order on Sept. 4 that grants X Corp.'s request for a preliminary injunction and reverses a district court's ruling against the Elon Musk-owned social media company in a legal challenge to California's Assembly Bill (AB) 587. The court said the bill's content-moderation provisions are not narrowly tailored to serve California's purported goal of requiring social media companies to be transparent about their content-related practices, and may amount to unconstitutionally compelled speech. "The panel held that X Corp. was likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that the Content Category Report provisions facially violate the First Amendment," the appeals court judges wrote in their opinion. AB 587 requires large social media companies to post their terms of service and to submit periodic reports to the California Attorney General's office about their content-moderation practices and policies. A key provision of the bill requires a semiannual report detailing how the platforms define six categories of content: hate speech or racism; extremism or radicalization; disinformation and misinformation; harassment; foreign political interference; and controlled substance distribution."

"Next Monday, the third major antitrust trial against Google starts, this one on the software plumbing underlying online display advertising. Because of your willingness to subscribe to BIG, I have the money to hire someone to cover the trial, as we did with the search trial. Our new writer is a lawyer named Tom Blakely, and he'll be writing updates at our special site, BigTechOnTrial.com. You can sign up there for updates, and if you'd like to support this work, please consider joining as a paid subscriber. But the context for this trial is very different than the first search trial. The reason is simple. Twice now Google has been ruled to be an unlawful monopoly. The first case involved its control of the Android app store in its fight with Epic Games, and the second was over its search monopoly in its tussle with the government. Moreover, in both trials, the judges have found Google to act in bad faith with its treatment of documents."