Now that subscriber growth has slowed, streaming TV giants have taken the predictable turn of making their services shittier and more expensive to deliver Wall Street (impossibly) unlimited quarterly revenue growth.
That means higher prices, annoying new surcharges, greater restrictions, more layoffs, more cut corners, worse customer service, and a lot of pointless mergers designed specifically to goose stock valuations and provide big fat tax breaks.
The king of said “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation was of course the AT&T–>Warner Brothers–>Discovery series of mergers, which resulted in no limit of brand degradation, layoffs, and absolute chaos in the empty pursuit of unlimited scale (aka “enshittification”). The dumb merger already killed Mad Magazine, HBO, and countless television shows, driving millions of subscribers to the exits.
But Max executives clearly aren’t done with ham-fisted efforts to make stocks go up. This week Max executives decided that they’d make John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight harder to watch by no longer making show clips available on YouTube the next day:
The goal was to apparently drive subscribers to the Max streaming service. But because they’re apparently too cheap to pay residuals and hosting costs, Max alsono longer lets users watch old seasons of the show, meaning that only the last two seasons of the show are available. In short: the quest for unrealistic quarterly growth sooner or later creates perverse incentives to cannibalize brand quality.
Again, this is all par for the course for an industry that learned absolutely nothing from the scale-chasing disaster that ultimately was traditional cable TV. They’re going to continue on this path until they see a dramatic subscriber exodus to cheap or free services (whether that’s TikTok and Twitch or, more obviously, piracy), at which point they’ll blame everything but themselves (VPNs! China!) for the self-inflicted wound.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman really seems to underestimate the kinds of people who sign up to be Reddit mods, and their willingness to go to extreme lengths if you start pushing them. We’ve discussed the nonsensical nature of Huffman’s new API efforts, as well as his stupid response to the subreddit blackout which caused many subreddits to remain on strike. We also discussed his incredibly entitled position about how third party apps that made his site more valuable owe him money.
But, incredibly, Huffman seems unable to stop digging.
After initially suggesting that he would create policies to allow Reddit users to “vote out” moderators who were striking (in the mistaken belief that “ordinary” Reddit users didn’t support the strike), Reddit sent out a not very subtle threat letter to moderators of the still striking communities.
The whole letter stinks of traditional union-busting practices, starting off with an attempt to divide the striking mods to see if the company can peel some away from the strikes:
We are also aware that some members of your mod team have expressed that they want to close your community indefinitely. We are reaching out to find out if this is the consensus reached by the mod team.
Subreddits exist for the benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Your users rely on your community for information, support, entertainment, and finding connection with others who have similar interests. Ensuring that communities are able to remain stable and actively moderated is incredibly important to the people seeking out these spaces to make and foster connections.
Then the threat, worded in a way such that Reddit could later pretend it wasn’t actually a threat:
If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately.
Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is made available for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community, please let us know.
And, of course, after this letter became public, Reddit pretended there was nothing at all threatening about it:
“We have not threatened anyone,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said in a statement to The Verge. “That’s not how we operate. Pressuring people is not our goal. We’re communicating expectations and how things work. Redditors want to reddit and mods want to mod. We want mods who want to mod to be able to do so.”
Come on, Tim. None of us were born yesterday. Everyone knows it was a threat to remove striking mods.
And, of course, all any of this does is continue to erode trust in the platform. As Scharon Harding over at Ars Technica rightly notes:
Reddit’s battle with devs, mods, and users is just the most recent version of the struggle. Reddit felt like something that the community built with the company, but while Reddit was happy to offload the responsibility for content creation, moderation, and (until recently) app development to third parties, it wasn’t willing to hand over real power.
Sudden, unaffordable API pricing (Reddit will charge $12,000 for 50 million API requests) and Reddit’s obstinacy are also harsh warnings to devs about the risks of building something totally reliant on a platform they don’t own. Many devs thought Reddit would always allow reasonable pricing for its API and have put in years of work based on that assumption. In the future, devs should think twice about building products based on properties they can’t control, assuming a company will always be supportive and reasonable (or even agreeing with them about what “supportive” and “reasonable” mean). That could mean a future where devs are far less incentivized to create innovations.
But hell hath no fury like a Redditor being jacked around by clueless pointy-haired bosses, and the mods struck back. Given the clear (yes, Tim Rathschmidt) threat of replacing of striking mods, possibly through a sketchy “voting” process to remove, as Huffman ridiculously called them, “the landed gentry, two of the biggest striking subreddits held a vote, just like Huffman wanted. Okay, well maybe not “just like” he wanted. Instead, r/GIFs and r/pics held a poll on whether they should “return to normal” or “only allow images featuring John Oliver.”
Let’s just say that Huffman’s belief that the average Redditor just wanted things to return to normal showed a profound misunderstanding of the average Redditor’s desire for funny chaos over helping a company make money. Here’s how the vote on r/GIFs went:
Yes, that shows “return to normal’“ receiving NEGATIVE 1,851 votes, while the John Oliver solution received 13,696 votes. Other subreddits joined in the fun and the results were even more extreme. r/pics voted for John Oliver pics with a vote of 37,331 against negative 2,329. Of course, r/pics went beyond the r/GIFs requirement of just being pics of John Oliver to them having to be sexy.
Then r/aww joined in as well, with its community voting in favor of only “adorable” pics of John Oliver (or his adorable Japanese mascot Chiijohn), with the Oliver pics winning by an even larger vote: 48,506 in favor and negative 2,691 voting to return to normal:
Oliver took to Twitter (unfortunately…) to support the Reddit protests, saying “have at it”:
He then included 10 photos of himself that would aid the cause. Here are a few:
And, of course, other subreddits are joining in as well, including r/Piracy, which has said that “only sexy pirate John Oliver artwork” may be posted.
Scrolling through the various subreddits, all you see are pics of John Oliver, including some that are arguably not entirely safe for work (depending on where you work, of course).
Meanwhile, Steve “this will pass” Huffman may have even more pressing matters at hand as a ransomware group has said that it will release a bunch of leaked Reddit data if the company doesn’t roll back its API policy changes (and pay the hackers $4.5 million).
Not to condone the hacking/ransom demands, but seems like the company might have been better off not pissing off its most active users?
Look, we all knew that there was going to be a lot of fuss about the upcoming public domaining (finally!) of Mickey Mouse nine months from now on January 1, 2024. I mean, we’ve already been talking about what next year’s public domain game jam is going to look like with Mickey as one of the options.
If you somehow have been living under a rock and never read anything on Techdirt before, let’s get you up to speed. Mickey Mouse debuted as Steamboat Willie in 1928. The character was a blatant animated copy of Steamboat Bill, a Buster Keaton silent film that came out… the same year. Disney, of course, also built up much of its success by taking public domain stories and animating them.
But, of course, once Disney became the Walt Disney Corporation, it chose to lock up everything it could. Disney has been absolutely famous for its aggressive copyright lawyering for years, which included what we’ve referred to as the Mickey Mouse curve: every time Mickey Mouse started to get near the public domain, a purely coincidental thing happened where Congress would (totally unrelatedly) extend copyrights:
The last extension, the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was quite frequently referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
Over the last few years there remained concerns that Disney would try to extend copyrights once again, but I think once the public rose up against SOPA in 2012, Disney and most of the rest of the copyright legacy players realized that there was no chance they were going to extend terms again. Hell, even Maria Pallante, one of the more extreme copyright maximalists (currently trying to kill libraries) while she was head of the Copyright Office, suggested that maybe it was time to cut back on copyright terms, rather than extend them.
And so, everyone has more or less accepted as fact that the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey becomes public domain next year. Even leaving aside the weird series of articles that showed up in the middle of last summer whining about how awful it is that Disney will “lose” Mickey, there are still some concerns about Disney lawyer fuckery on the way.
Again, many of you know this already, but just to be clear: the only thing that’s going into the public domain is the 1928 version of Mickey, which you can see here:
It’s not quite the iconic version of Mickey from today, though it’s not that far off. But, Disney will still hold the trademark on Mickey, which could limit how it’s used in commerce (in theory, it should only limit uses where someone is confusing people into believing their Mickey-related product is from or endorsed by Disney, but theory doesn’t always match reality when these things go to court).
But, as we discussed earlier this month, Disney has already been quietly making some moves that suggest it’s going to try to use trademark law as ridiculously as it can:
In 2007, Walt Disney Animation Studios redesigned its logo to incorporate the “Steamboat Willie” mouse. It has appeared before every movie the unit has released since, including “Frozen” and “Encanto,” deepening the old character’s association with the company. (The logo is also protected by a trademark.) In addition, Disney sells “Steamboat Willie” merchandise, including socks, backpacks, mugs, stickers, shirts and collectibles.
Either way, we expected that there’d be some legal shenanigans worth paying attention to next year. I also thought that maybe some people or small companies without good lawyers might accidentally jump the gun a bit and do something in December.
But… what I did not expect was that John Oliver and the folks at Last Week Tonight, an HBO show currently owned by cost-cutting Warner Bros. Discovery would say “fuck it” and start using Mickey Mouse… now.
I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised. Half the time I think Oliver’s show is basically Techdirt-but-if-funny,-entertaining,-and-clever, with the way he seems to cover the same topics we’re always covering, but, you know, better (mostly). And, Oliver has become somewhat famous for poking the eye of his own corporate masters (quite gleefully).
It absolutely would not have taken me by surprise if Oliver had done this nine months from now once Mickey is officially in the public domain. But… jumping the gun like this? That still surprised me.
The bit is, as you’d expect, hilarious. It starts with a discussion of the horror film, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, which, as you know, is building on a work that entered the public domain last year. But then moves on to Mickey. He talks about Mickey going into the public domain next year, highlights the litigiousness of Disney over Mickey (including legal crackdowns on a gravestone and a daycare center using images of Mickey) before noting he’s not going to wait to use it himself.
On top of which Disney has registered trademarks related to Disney, which don’t expire. In fact, some have speculated that might be why Disney redesigned its animation studios opening logo to incorporate the Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse.
And it does feel like a tactical legal move. Basically, they may argue that this early Mickey image is so closely associated with their company, that people will automatically assume that any image of him was produced or authorized by them, and still take legal action.
So the fact is, anyone wanting to use the Steamboat Willie Mickey Mouse, will probably still be taking a risk.
But… if you know anything about this show by now… you know, we do like to take a risk every now and then. And there’s a lot to be said for beating the rush to capitalize on Mickey that will be starting next year.
So, tonight, I’d like to preview for you, our brand new character on this show, Mickey Mouse
He introduces some new, um, catch phrases for Mickey including “where’s Shelly Miscavige?” (a running… sorta… joke on the show about the missing wife of Scientology leader David Miscavige), “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself,” and “I hope Henry Kissinger dies soon!”
As Oliver says:
You know, the nice thing about characters entering the public domain is that you can do new, interesting things with them.
This is true. It’s why we celebrate the public domain every chance we can (psst, have you checked out the entries in this year’s public domain game jam?)
Mickey then asks John about the fact that he’s not actually in the public domain yet, and John doesn’t seem too concerned:
Mickey Mouse: I thought I wasn’t public domain until next year!
John Oliver: That’s actually true, buddy, we are pushing the limit a bit here. Actually, come to think of it, is your voice public domain yet?
Mickey: I guess you’ll find out!
John: Yeah! I guess we will!
He then decides to provoke Disney even more.
And I know, Disney’s lawyers might take the trademark angle and argue that this Mickey is closely associated with their brand. Although they should know that he’s pretty closely associated with our brand now too. And not just because I have a general vibe that screams 95-year-old rat-faced idiot, but also, because the Steamboat Willie Mickey has actually been in our opening credits since the first show of this season…
And then… even more.
And I don’t doubt that Disney has some other legal arguments up their sleeve, but we’re only likely to find out what they are if, and when, then sue. So, you know what? Let’s take this up a notch. Come say ‘hi’ Mickey!
And… out comes a Steamboat Willie Mickey in a costume to say his catch phrases to Oliver:
And, from there, he promises that as of January 1st, this costume will be available for all sorts of events (“birthday parties, theme park openings, funerals, sex dungeons, whatever you want.”)
So… now the question… does Disney actually do anything? Do they call up Warner Bros. Discovery and say WTF? Or do they send in the lawyers? I guess we’ll find out!
Oh, and John, if they do send in the lawyers, your own lawyers might want to look more deeply into reports that turned up 15 years ago that Disney’s lawyers, way back in the early days, fucked up the registration and don’t actually hold any copyright on Mickey Mouse at all. That’ll be fun.
If you recall, AT&T spent nearly $200 billion on megamergers thinking it was going to dominate the online video advertising space. But after spending a fortune on DirecTV and Time Warner, laying off 50,000 people, killing off popular properties like Mad Magazine and DC’s Vertigo imprint, it quickly became clear that AT&T executives had absolutely no idea what they were doing.
After stumbling around drunkenly for a while, AT&T returned to what it’s best at (running broadband networks and lobbying the government to crush broadband competition), and spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media immediately then turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.
If you’re a consumer or employee at any of these brands and companies, the last few years have proven to be a befuddling mess. Remember that the AT&T acquisition of HBO and Time Warner resulted in so many different brands it even confused employees at AT&T. Despite efforts to consolidate content, it’s somehow only gotten dumber since then.
Managers at the new company have taken a hatchet to HBO’s offerings in particular, culling a wide variety of popular content to cut costs. That includes roughly 200 episodes of popular shows like Sesame Street and dozens of films and shows overall. Why? In part because the new consolidated company doesn’t want to pay residuals in a bid to make deal financials make sense:
While HBO Max already paid for the production of these shows, it’s still on the hook for residuals, including so-called back-end payments to cast, crew and writers, based on long-term viewership metrics.
By removing these films and shows, especially the ones HBO Max created rather than licensed, executives can cut expenses immediately. Warner Bros. Discovery has promised at least $3 billion in synergies stemming from the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, announced in May.
Ah, megamerger synergies.
There’ve been several new additional casualties thanks to this latest series of mergers, including TBS’s Full Frontal With Samantha Bee (Turner and TBS merged with Warner Brothers way back in 1996). With the merger of HBO Max and Discovery+, they’re hoping to “declutter” what’s now just a discordant parade of content, much of which executives didn’t really even want. There’s also been just a steady parade of layoffs of employees they didn’t want either.
HBO employee John Oliver went so far as to call this final form version of HBO Max little more than a “series of tax write offs”:
Again, this is just another example of the U.S.’ harmful obsession with megamergers, consolidation, purposeless (outside of stock fluffing) deal making, and growth for growth’s sake. All of these deals make perfect sense to the executives, lawyers, and accounting magicians exploiting them for tax breaks and various financial benefits, but that doesn’t make this whole saga any less preposterously pointless.
Employees and consumers certainly didn’t benefit from this idiotic parade of events that began with AT&T wasting hundreds of billions of dollars to buy companies it was too incompetent to run. And somehow the saga has only gotten dumber since then.
Here on Techdirt, we’ve written about a bunch of John Oliver’sLast Week Tonight shows that are quite frequently directly in agreement with what we write about on Techdirt. We’re often impressed at the level of detail and nuance he’s able to approach complex issues with, while (of course) keeping things quite funny. I know that he has a large, very smart team, that often digs in deep with experts in order to get a complete picture. That’s why his reports on SLAPP suits, voting machines, grandstanding state AGs, police accountability, encryption and much much more have been featured here as worth watching on important topics we’ve covered for decades.
However, I’m quite disappointed in his most recent show about antitrust reform and tech monopolies. I do think it’s worth watching, but it’s missing some important context that I would have normally expected from him and his team.
I think that the video does do a good job addressing some of the actual problems of giant tech companies and their power. Though, I do wonder about using a quote from Jonathan Taplin as support for anything, considering he’s an extremist copyright maximalist, whose screeds against Google and the internet are so full of wrongness that they’ve inspired a whole genre of NY Times corrections.
But, the problem with Oliver’s segment is that while it spends most of the episode laying out legitimate concerns about tech power concentration, it then simply accepts that the two popular bills making their way through Congress will actually help and won’t cause problems. Oliver embraces and supports the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open App Markets bill. However, as we’ve explained, while both bills have some good parts, the only reason Republicans are supporting them is that they know that the bills will be massively abused to litigate content moderation decisions.
Oliver doesn’t mention this or explore the issues. He only mentions Republican support in noting that both Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley support the bills, suggesting that the only reason the bills have bipartisan support is because they’re “too narrow.” But that ignores that the actual reason they have Republican support is because Republicans see this as a tool to punish and intimidate “big tech” into leaving their lies and propaganda online. Ted Cruz has repeatedly noted he supports these bills because they will “unleash the trial lawyers” on these companies.
And, just after Oliver’s segment aired, Hawley again bragged about using them to attack “woke” corporations:
And, at the very least, I’d expect Oliver and his team, with their willingness to explore nuances, to at least maybe explore why support for these bills are coming from copyright maximalist extremists and populist propagandist politicians.
But… he doesn’t.
Instead, he implies falsely that the only criticism of these bills is coming from big tech “shills.” And while it is true that some of the pushback on these bills is coming from disingenuous sources, using disingenuous arguments, some of the concerns are legit. And to wipe them away and assume that just because he’s accurately laid out the problem, that these bills are automatically a solution is the type of facile, but wrong, exploration of complex solutions I’m used to it from much of the rest of the media, but had come to expect better of from Oliver.
I mean, just as one example, four years ago, Oliver himself did a wonderful piece about how state Attorneys General abuse their positions for political means, often doing the will of certain industries, to attack other industries. And, I should note clearly here that these bills enable state AGs to go after the tech companies. So, if Oliver and his team are well aware of that, why are they downplaying the possibility that these bills might be abused and dangerous, political ways?
As we’ve discussed at length over the last few months, there are fairly easy ways that these bills could be amended to limit the possibility of abuse. But the Democrats sponsoring the bills have refused to do so, because they know they’d lose that critical “bipartisan support.” But, really, that should be the story here. The only reason these bills have bipartisan support is because Republicans know they’ll be abused, and WANT them to be abused. The only amendments we’ve seen have simply been to carve out certain industries after lobbyists complained.
Again, that seems like the kind of story I’d expect to see from Oliver, rather than full throated support for these bills.
God help you if you lie to a cop. We’re not even talking about court, where everyone swears to tell the whole truth, etc. before being subjected to testilying by law enforcement officers.
We’re talking about the questioning that happens after law enforcement decides someone is a person of interest. Cops are terrible at solving violent crimes, so it behooves them to obtain a “confession” by any means necessary. “Any means” often means lying. But only cops can do it. If federal officers are lied to it’s a federal crime. Lying to people suspected of committing federal crimes is just considered good (government) business.
Reid hooked [murder suspect Darrel] Parker up to the polygraph and started asking questions. Parker couldn’t see the movement of the needles, but each time he answered a question about the murder Reid told him that he was lying. As the hours wore on, Reid began to introduce a story. Contrary to appearances, he said, the Parkers’ marriage was not a happy one. Nancy refused to give Parker the sex that he required, and she flirted with other men. One day, in a rage, Parker took what was rightfully his. After nine hours of interrogation, Parker broke down and confessed. He recanted the next day, but a jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to life in prison.
There may have been no more reason to believe the recantation than the coerced confession. But only the confession made it into evidence. This was the outcome:
[Parker] was later determined to be innocent, after another man confessed and was found to have been the perpetrator.
It was too late. By the time Parker was found innocent, Reid had already converted his “technique” — one that had only managed to secure a false conviction — into a business and was training cops how to railroad possibly innocent people into confessions.
Reid died in 1982 but his technique lives on. It remains popular, despite its sketchy track record, as Oliver points out as only he can:
The Reid Technique has become one of those things that just culturally comes with being a cop, like their fondness for donuts, or their complicity in the perpetuation of state-sponsored violence.
Cops are naturally results-oriented. And any result — no matter how obtained or how questionable — is still a result. In cops’ minds, a confession is a fact even if, years down the road, the confession is proven false.
A confession is considered unassailable, even though so many have been successfully assailed over the years. Why? Because the Reid technique (and cops’ own instincts) lead officers to believe no innocent person would even admit to committing a crime they didn’t commit. That assumption ignores what hours of intense pressure, deceptive questioning, outright lies, and vague threats of lengthy incarceration do to the average person.
Making all of this worse is the Reid technique’s supposed ability to suss out guilt by observing an arrestee’s behavior. It’s every bit as ridiculous as the things cops consider to be signs of guilt when performing traffic stops. Everything is an indicator of guilt, especially the behavioral things that contradict the other things. There’s simply no way to “look” innocent, as Oliver notes.
When it comes to eye contact, [the Reid Technique] advises that “when a person is being less than honest, he may not maintain direct eye contact.” But also others “may overcompensate by staring.” Meaning, if you have eyes, you’re basically fucked.
The Reid technique may not have been used in all of these cases, but it definitely contributed. As the Innocence Project reports, nearly a third of all convictions overturned by use of DNA evidence relied on false confessions.
Has that stopped cops from relying on this technique or encouraged courts to stop relying on confessions that have basically been coerced? Of course not. It’s cop business as usual.
What is unusual is that we let cops lies to suspects in this country. American exceptionalism ftw:
Allowing the police to lie to suspects is crazy. Most countries do not allow it, and for good reason: It is far too powerful a tool.
Here in the US the ends justify the means. And that’s sadly the case when the ends disintegrate under further investigation. If a cop can get a confession by applying pressure, detaining a person for hours, and straight-up lying to them, it’s a win for the LEOs. And they’ll take that win every time, even if it means imprisoning the wrong person and allowing violent people to roam free. Hopefully, a discussion of this bullshit on the national stage will prompt police oversight to take a closer look at interrogation tactics and the track records of agencies that utilize the Reid technique (and other coercive methods) have racked up. What’s already on the record makes it clear, cops would rather see one innocent person convicted than prevent ten guilty people from going free.
We’ve noted for years that the adtech sector is a convoluted, unregulated hellscape, where consumer data is bought and sold with nothing remotely close to competent oversight. The end result is just about what you’d expect: a percussive parade of massive scandals in which location, financial, and other sensitive data is bought, sold, leaked, abused, hacked, and spread far and wide with little real recourse.
Despite this, the U.S. still hasn’t passed even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. And while some folks will insist it’s because it’s too hard, the real reason is because there’s simply too much money being made; and wealth accumulation, if you hadn’t noticed in the United States, trumps all things.
Last week John Oliver did a fantastic bit explaining the (quite intentionally) complicated, ethics-optional mess that is adtech, with a specific focus on data brokers:
Oliver points out just some of the many scandals in the space (like that time Epsilon Data Management knowingly sold the data of 30 million elderly people to criminals who then scammed them repeatedly, or the time widely available cellular consumer location data was abused by stalkers).
But Oliver then does something entertaining: he reveals that his show directly approached data brokers and purchased the online behavior and location data of many people who are likely lawmakers working in or around the Capitol building. Oliver only makes a few vague nods to some of the questionable browsing activity he discovered, while hoping lawmakers are now motivated to do something about it:
“You might want to channel that worry into making sure that I can’t do anything,” he advised. “Sleep well!”
Again, I’d wager he may not have actually found much of anything about any specific lawmaker, but it’s an amusing feint all the same. And we desperately need something to motivate the entirety of DC, because what we’re doing now (inconsistent wrist slaps years after violations, fines that are a tiny fraction of the money made from the abuse — and, oh yeah, here’s some free credit reporting) isn’t working.
Again, if we actually cared about this stuff, it wouldn’t be that difficult to fix.
A fairly basic Internet privacy law, combined with actually funding and staffing regulators at the FTC, would go a long way toward addressing the issue. But we don’t do that. Again, not because it would be all that difficult or expensive (even though adtech is overly complicated by design to try and dodge oversight), but because the cash trough of consumer data monetization is just too lucrative.
Attempting to rein in just the telecom sector or just the airline sector is one thing (and you may have noticed we can’t even do that). But when you target the online consumer data space you’re going up against a massive coalition of industries with bottomless lobbying budgets, including “big tech,” telecom, software, health care, marketing, and more. All of which like things just the way they are: broken and hugely profitable.
What I still think will happen is eventually there will be a data scandal too massive and problematic to ignore, featuring a lot of very powerful and influential people. Likely a scandal that puts human lives at risk in some way. Only then will DC wake up to the perils of letting the adtech market run amok, and even then my faith in DC competently crafting helpful solutions in response remains shaky at best.
For not the first time, John Oliver is taking on topics we often cover at Techdirt, and doing a fantastic job of it. His latest show went deep on just how screwed up laws and law enforcement about sex work are, including a specific look at FOSTA.
The whole video is worth watching, and discusses how politicians, law enforcement, and sketchy “advocacy” groups repeatedly falsely try to conflate all sex work with sex trafficking. But, more importantly, it discusses how nearly all of the laws written about sex work and sex trafficking are done without talking to actual sex workers, and because of that it creates laws, such as FOSTA, that actually do a lot more harm than good, and often focus on punishing sex workers while pretending to “help” them.
The part on FOSTA doesn’t go that deep, but does make the key point (as we and others have been making for years) that (1) after insisting that FOSTA was “needed” the government basically never used it, and (2) that it actually has made it much, much, much more difficult for law enforcement to track down and arrest actual sex traffickers. In a clip I hadn’t seen before, Oliver shows a law enforcement official noting that Backpage used to work with law enforcement, but after it was shut down, overseas sites rushed in to fill the void, and none of them are willing to work with law enforcement at all.
Indeed, the episode provides even more support to leaked DOJ documents that showed that Backpage was actually a very helpful partner to law enforcement in helping to track down actual sex trafficking, but balked at… extending that to consensual sex work. In other words, the very point that Oliver tried to raise in this episode.
And, of course, as we see all of this, Congress still refuses to recognize how much harm that FOSTA has done and is, instead, still focused on passing a new law, the EARN IT Act, that is in many ways even worse than FOSTA.
After the idiotic and dangerous events of January 6, you might recall how corporations like AT&T and Comcast proclaimed they’d paused donations to any politicians behind the clumsy, violent attempt to, you know, dismantle functioning democracy. But, of course, this was mostly a show; the companies continued to donate money to those same politicians via their lobbying and policy umbrella orgs. Then, once the public was adequately distracted by the next big scandal du jour, quickly got back to work funding those same politicians again with zero meaningful penalty.
Now AT&T’s making headlines once again, this time for funding the politicians behind Texas’ terrible anti-abortion law. In addition to the way the law will harm women (particularly low income women and women of color), we’ve noted the law is an inherent mess that encourages vigilantism, likely opening the door to all kinds of additional problems in numerous other policy sectors. That’s before you get to the problems with the Supreme Court’s chickenshit middle of the night ruling that appears to ignore the very foundations of the law itself.
AT&T being AT&T, the company has been busy pushing all kinds of marketing missives about its breathless support for women, while simultaneously throwing giant wads of cash at politicians for whom that hasn’t been much of a priority. The press hasn’t been too bothered by this, leaving it to independent newsletter writers like Judd Legum to call AT&T out:
FACTS
1. @ATT donated 300K to the sponsors of Texas' abortion ban
2. @ATT refuses to comment on the ban or its donations
3. @ATT is running ads on Twitter casting itself as a champion of women
Whenever this sort of thing happens, AT&T attempts to turtle its way through it, usually by refusing to comment and hoping the scandal passes overhead. But to his credit, HBO’s John Oliver this week wasn’t having it, and managed to squeeze at least a comment out of his parent company (technically his soon to be ex-parent company thanks to the looming Discovery spinoff). After being prodded by Oliver, this is what AT&T came up with after weeks of total radio silence:
“AT&T has never taken a stance on abortion. Employee PAC contributions to Texas legislators went to both supporters and opponents of the Texas legislation.”
“Not taking a stance on this issue right now is taking a stance,? Oliver said. ?And both-siding abortion isn?t really the PR slam dunk that that they seem to think it is. Although it is certainly on brand for them. AT&T clearly likes their public statements the same way that they like their cell signal ? hilariously f-cking weak.”
You can find the full segment here:
?JOHN OLIVER to @ATT: ?NOT taking a stance on this issue right now? IS taking a stance.?
On one hand it’s a great thing that an independent newsletter and a satirist are holding a corporation to account for funding terrible people pushing terrible, harmful legislation. On the flip side it’s a testament to the timidity of the mainstream press that this sort of stuff routinely has to fall to independent newsletters and a satirist in the first place. Corporations routinely get to talk out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to supporting terrible politicians and terrible policies, and the fact AT&T was able to remain totally quiet for a month without much media scrutiny makes it abundantly clear why.
John Oliver has demolished many institutions in his time (not literally, unfortunately, in most cases) as the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight. It’s rare when a mainstream program chooses to address more esoteric matters often discussed at this website. But Oliver does it more than most and, for that, we truly appreciate him.
When it comes to drugs and drug warrants, it’s all hands on deck. Sometimes, law enforcement agencies are able to obtain no-knock warrants, which allow them to enter a residence without announcing their presence in order to “preserve evidence” and limit the possibility of a violent response.
Let’s handle the second thing first. There’s a lot of evidence that suggests no-knock raids increase the possibility of a violent response because the first assumption a drug dealer might make is that a rival drug dealer/gang is raiding their house to end their lives, take their drugs, and grab a bit more profitable turf. Cops get killed. People get killed.
Now, let’s talk about the possibility of evidence being destroyed. We’re talking about large amounts of drugs, paraphernalia, and weapons. As John Oliver points out, this is bullshit. Cops are raiding homes without announcing themselves to secure extremely minute amounts of evidence. And that’s according to their own justifications:
Yeah, the ruling there was giving you 20 seconds to answer your door is reasonable because you might flush evidence down the toilet, which raises the obvious question here: why the f*ck are we raiding people’s homes for an amount of evidence that can be flushed down a toilet?
As someone who has had to unclog toilets multiple times over my 46 years of living (but mostly over my 30 years of being a parent) (I had my first child at 30), the amount of anything it takes to clog a toilet is far less than any amount of anything that would seem to justify a guns-out raid of a premises. And considering the catch-all charge for most raids — especially when no one can find the drugs officers thought they’d find — is illegal possession of a weapon by a felon, there’s absolutely zero chance anyone’s going to be able to flush a gun down a toilet. That’s just impossible.
Surrounding a house and providing residents a chance to answer — rather than destroying doors, windows, nearby toddlers… — is going to keep most evidence intact. A toilet can only do so much. A surrounded residence will prevent suspects and evidence from being ejected into neighboring yards. Everything else will still remain in place, especially when suspects realize Hollywood has been lying to them about the flushability of large quantities of drugs.
In any event, treating every standard drug warrant service as paramilitary assault on a violent enemy results in — you guessed it — violence. People are killed and wounded. Officers are killed and wounded. And this happens whether or not cops hit the right address. In far too many cases, they don’t. That’s something we won’t put up with from the USPS, Amazon, or anyone else we entrust to get our address correct. When cops don’t, officials just respond with ¯_(?)_/¯. This should be a tragedy and result in a few firings. Instead, it’s just the cost of the Drug War — paid by people who weren’t even combatants.
The police hitting the wrong address is completely unacceptable when the stakes are so high. Even Edible Arrangements manages to deliver to the correct address!
When the stakes are life and death, mere competence shouldn’t be considered an unreasonable bar for officers to reach. It should be the minimum we expect of them. But it isn’t. And cops continue to get more violent despite the Drug War being a multi-decade failure and their escalating efforts having resulted in little more than a long, uninterrupted string of rights violations and deaths. This is unacceptable. And yet, it is not only considered acceptable, but valorous. Hopefully, John Oliver’s reach will make more people aware of the injustices carried out with their implicit blessing and prompt further meaningful change in drug policies and law enforcement agencies.