J.R.McHale

In April 2021, Justice Thomas wrote his concurring opinion in Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute (opinion at the link), concurring in the decision to vacate as moot the case in which the Second Circuit found a First Amendment violation in President Trump’s blocking some users from his Twitter account. The concurrence provides somewhat of a roadmap for future regulation of digital platforms that at least potentially could pass future court muster.

Law Professor Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy: “As I read it, Justice Thomas is not arguing that platforms are already generally common carriers or government actors under existing legal principles; that argument is quite a stretch, and his analysis seems to me to largely reject that argument, except perhaps when the platforms are restricting speech in response to government threats. Rather, he is anticipating what might be done through legislation, and whether new state laws that do treat platforms as common carriers (more or less) are going to be seen as blocked by the First Amendment or 47 U.S.C. § 230. (His analysis of the interests involved may also be relevant to whether such state laws violate the Dormant Commerce Clause.) That’s an issue the Court will likely have to deal with in coming years.”

Professor Volokh has now published a July 5, 2021 draft (pdf; 79 pages) of his law review article “Social Media Platforms as Common Carriers“. He also has written a series of interesting posts at Reason.com (collected here) discussing the topic.

Facebook Oversight Board’s Decision Regarding the Banning of Donald Trump (Case decision 2021-001-FB-FBR) – (pdf: 38 pages; May 5, 2021).

Facebook’s Oversight Board Has Upheld Trump’s Ban – What’s Next: Facebook Moderation Expert Kate Klonick Weighs In (May 11, 2021 – The Verge) – Law Professor Kate Klonick on the potential impact of the Facebook Oversight Board’s Decision.

Content Moderation Remedies (pdf; 76 pages: March 2021) – As internet services begin to consider moving past the binary “remove or not” remedy for content that violates their rules, Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman surveys the various remedies that online internet services have applied to content and accounts, and then he provides “a normative framework to help internet services and regulators navigate these remedial options to address the many difficult tradeoffs involved in content moderation.”

Facebook Will Now Ban Criticism of “Concepts, Institutions, Ideas, Practices, or Beliefs” When They Risk “Harm, Intimidation, or Discrimination” Against Religious, National, or Other Groups (July 6, 2021) – Law Professor Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Law, Tech and Policy

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Fair Use in Google-Oracle Software Battle (April 8, 2021) – Santa Clara law professor Tyler Ochoa with a lengthy blog post (8,000 words) explaining the decision.

Why It’s Easier to Move Country than Switch Social Media (April 12, 2021) – Activist and author, Cory Doctorow, on the importance of dealing with switching costs, in addition to a renewed emphasis on antitrust and interoperability.

Token Safe Harbor Proposal 2.0 (April 13, 2021) – SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce, with an update to her earlier proposal for a token safe harbor that would provide network developers with a three-year grace period within which, under certain conditions, they could facilitate participation in and development of a functional or decentralized network, exempted from federal securities registration requirements.

Final Report on Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) – (96-page pdf at the link: “New Surveillance Technologies in Public Spaces – Challenges and Perspectives for European Law at the Example of Facial Recognition” (April 2021)).

President Biden’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity – (May 12, 2021), along with accompanying White House Fact Sheet and Politico’s press coverage

The Coming AI Hackers (pdf; 54 pages: April 2021) – cybersecurity expert, Bruce Schneier.

European Union’s Proposal for a Regulation Laying Down Harmonised Rules on Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act) – (pdfs at the link: the 108-page proposal and a 17-page annex: April 21, 2021).

Andreessen Horowitz’s AI Playbook and AI, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning: A Primer (video: 45 minutes)

An AI Reading List — From Practical Primers to Sci-Fi Short Stories; the best reading on AI, as recommended by the experts – The Verge; part of The Verge’s The State of AI in 2019

Andrew Ng’s AI For Everyone – The Definitive Starting Block for AI Novices and AI for Everyone at DeepLearning.ai

A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning Part I and Part II (from r2d3.us)

Machine Learning for Humans (Vishal Maini: strategy & communications at DeepMindAI)

Artificial Intelligence Podcast (Lex Fridman)

Fifty AI Experts to Follow on Twitter (list by Cognilytica)

Google’s The Launchpad applied machine learning “best practices” website

The UC Berkeley Course for 2019 called Introduction to Deep Learning has released their official textbook as an online resource. In addition to the online notebooks, the course also offers a comprehensive playlist of lecture videos

Fairness and Machine Learning: Limitations and Opportunities – an online work-in-process textbook by Solon Barocas, Moritz Hardt, Arvind Narayanan

AI Now Institute and their annual reports and other publications

Global AI Policy Database from Charlotte Stix (Coordinator for the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence of the European Commission)

Artificial Intelligence: What Every Policymaker Needs to Know from the Center for a New American Security

Princeton’s Dialogues on AI and Ethics Case Studies

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People by Maciej Ceglowski (video: 45 minutes) – “A skeptical view on the seductive, apocalyptic beliefs that prevent people in tech from really working to make a difference”

The Power of Self-Learning Systems (video: YouTube, 64 minutes) presentation by Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder & CEO, Google DeepMind

Mr. Robot – a profile of AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton (Toronto Life)

Former Head of Google China Foresees an AI Crisis—and Proposes a Solution (IEEE Spectrum) and Who Needs Democracy When You Have Data – Here’s How China Rules Using Data, AI, and Internet Surveillance (MIT Technology Review)

Artificial Intelligence Policy: A Primer and Roadmap (28 page pdf; updated October 19, 2017) – Ryan Calo (University of Washington School of Law)

AI Now 2017 Report (36 page pdf; October 18, 2017) – Alex Campolo, New York University; Madelyn Sanfilippo (New York University); Meredith Whittaker (Google Open Research and New York University); and Kate Crawford (Microsoft Research and New York University)

Using Targeted Advertising for Personal Surveillance and related paper (12 page pdf; October 18, 2017) – Paul Vines, Franziska Roesner, and Tadayoshi Kohno (University of Washington)

I Never Signed Up For This! Privacy Implications of Email Tracking and related paper (18 page pdf; September 28, 2017) – Steven Englehardt, Jeffrey Han, and Arvind Narayanan (Princeton University)

Is the First Amendment Obsolete? (29 page pdf; September 2017) – Tim Wu (Columbia Law School)

The Pluralist Model of Speech Regulation: Free Speech in the Algorithmic Society – Big Data, Private Governance, and New School Speech Regulation and related paper (65 page pdf; October 13, 2017) – Jack Balkin (Yale Law School)

Law, Tech and Policy

How to Protect the Future Web From Its Founders’ Own Frailty (June 24, 2016) – Cory Doctorow. See also: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It (June 7, 2016) – New York Times, and The Fathers of the Internet Revolution Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web (June 13, 2016) – IEEE Spectrum

Open Access: All Human Knowledge is There—So Why Can’t Everybody Access It? (July 6, 2016) – Glyn Moody at ArsTechnica

Researchers Sue the Government Over Computer Hacking Law (CFAA) (June 29, 2016) – Kim Zetter in Wired; See the ACLU’s complaint (pdf available at the link; 47 pages) and the ACLU release

Section 1201 of the DMCA Cannot Pass Constitutional Scrutiny and Research and Remixes the Law Won’t Allow (July 21, 2016) – EFF; See also Statement on DMCA lawsuit by cryptographer and Johns Hopkins professor Matthew Green, who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, and the complaint (pdf; 32 pages) in the lawsuit. Related: A Dozen Bad Ideas That Were Raised At The Copyright Office’s DMCA Roundtables (May 18, 2016) – TechDirt

Tech Companies Fight Back After Years of Being Deluged With Secret FBI Requests (June 21, 2016) – Jenna McLaughlin at The Intercept

Why Notice-and-Takedown is a Bit of Copyright Law Worth Saving (June 21, 2016) – Los Angeles Times Op-Ed by law professors Chris Sprigman and Mark Lemley

At JustSecurity, a series of July posts on “secret law”: It’s Time to Come to Terms With Secret Law: Part I and Part II by Dakota S. Rudesill, and Secret Law, Targeting, and the Problem of Standards: A Response to Dakota Rudesill – Jonathan Hafetz

The Intriguing Legal Ramifications of Pokémon GO (July 25, 2016) – Bretterpstra.com; Also see The University of Washington Tech Policy Lab’s white paper – Augmented Reality, a Technology and Policy Primer (pdf at the link; 12 pages)

Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report

Reweaving the Web; A Slew of Startups is Trying to Decentralize the Online World (June 18, 2016) – The Economist

EU-related developments (other than Privacy Shield): Apple Joins Wide Array of Tech Companies in Fight to Kill EU’s ‘Cookie Law’ (July 6, 2016) – AppleInsider; European Union’s First Cybersecurity Law Gets Green Light (July 6, 2016) – Bloomberg; and The European Union is Updating its Electronic Signature Laws (June 30, 2016) – The Verge. See also the EU release on the new electronic signature laws.

MIT Researchers Unveil New Anonymity Scheme That Could Rival Tor – David Bisson at GrahamCluley.com

General Interest

Groundbreaking ‘Atomic Memory’ Could Cram Unimaginable Amounts of Data Into Your iPhone (July 19, 2016) – AppleInsider, and Atom Wranglers Create Rewritable Memory (July 18, 2016) – Nature; See the related academic paper: A Kilobyte Rewritable Atomic Memory (pay $ download at the link)

Quantum Computing: A Primer – Andreessen Horowitz video (28 minutes) at the link, plus a good list of further reading on quantum computing

Why Computer Vision Has Become a Major Investment Theme for Me (June 16, 2016) – VC Mark Suster, and The Voice UI has Gone Mainstream (June 6, 2016) – Ben Bajarin

My Time with Richard Feynman (July 11, 2016) – Stephen Wolfram

The Millions’ 2nd Half of 2016 Book Preview (fiction)