The U.S. Supreme Court has opened the door for lower courts to clarify when the government can regulate the tech industry’s content moderation practices, legal experts said Friday.
Karl Herchenroeder
Karl Herchenroeder, Associate Editor, is a technology policy journalist for publications including Communications Daily. Born in Rockville, Maryland, he joined the Warren Communications News staff in 2018. He began his journalism career in 2012 at the Aspen Times in Aspen, Colorado, where he covered city government. After that, he covered the nuclear industry for ExchangeMonitor in Washington. You can follow Herchenroeder on Twitter: @karlherk
The Senate Commerce Committee plans to mark up privacy legislation when it returns from recess the week of July 23, Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., told reporters Thursday.
The FTC should rely more heavily on statutory text when writing rules, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent reversal of Chevron, FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak told us Wednesday (see 2407090044 and 2406280043). Chevron could significantly affect the FTC, given its aggressive rulemaking approach under Chair Lina Khan, legal experts told us in interviews.
House Republicans’ proposal that reduces the FTC’s budget 9% would create an “extraordinarily dire” situation at the agency and result in furloughs, Chair Lina Khan told House Commerce Committee members during a budget hearing Tuesday.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency should narrow the scope of its proposed cyber incident reporting rules to ease the regulatory burden on industries already facing a multitude of state and federal mandates, USTelecom, NTCA and Microsoft said in comments that were due Wednesday in docket CISA-2022-0010 (see 2403270070).
The First Amendment protects social media platforms’ ability to moderate content, the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday, sending the tech industry’s lawsuits against Florida and Texas laws back to the lower courts (see 2402270072). All nine justices agreed on remanding, but Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch disagreed with First Amendment-related aspects of the majority opinion, which Justice Elena Kagan wrote (dockets 22-555 and 22-277).
The House Commerce Committee on Thursday canceled its scheduled privacy bill markup amid tensions with Republican leadership over the viability of a bipartisan bill from Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and ranking member Frank Pallone, D-N.J.
California’s Senate Judiciary Committee voted 9-2 Tuesday to advance a bill that would force tech platforms to pay news publishers for the news content they carry, similar to approaches seen in Australia, Canada and Europe.
It appears House Republican leadership isn’t willing to bring the House Commerce Committee’s bipartisan privacy bill to the floor because it lacks the necessary votes to pass, members and sources close to discussions told us Wednesday.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told us Thursday he supports allowing victims of deepfake porn to sue violators, as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., proposed.