Google Makes a Face Turn on Privacy

The Justice Department (DOJ) is currently suing Google over the tech giant’s monopolization of the internet search market. To defend the company’s bottom line, Google executives have made a face turn, hypocritically attempting to position themselves as defenders of online user privacy. The Trump administration shouldn’t fall for it.

The DOJ is standing on strong precedent to impose remedies against Google for its monopolization of the general search market. Google, likely knowing that, is resorting to all the usual sleights of hand. But one really stuck out: the company claims that the DOJ wants to “force Google to share your most sensitive and private search queries with companies you may never have heard of, jeopardizing your privacy and security.” CEO Sundar Pichai doubled down, testifying that he has “a lot of concerns around privacy” with respect to DOJ’s proposed remedy for his company’s monopoly. The company is even bringing in its privacy expert to testify to that effect.

DPI Pushes for Spectrum Pipeline

In a letter to House leadership, DPI emphasized the importance of Congress quickly adopting a spectrum pipeline and reauthorizing FCC spectrum auction authority. Doing so is critical if the United States is to beat China in the war for wireless dominance and could raise just under $180 billion for the U.S. Treasury just from the sale of frequencies in the hands of federal users. Even more would be available through repurposing commercial frequencies, such as the C-band.

Spectrum auctions have long been a bipartisan priority. President Clinton signed the original legislation creating the FCC’s spectrum auction authority, and a bipartisan House passed the Spectrum Innovation Act of 2022. Now is the time for action.

DPI Urges FCC to Accelerate IP Transition

In the Delete, Delete, Delete proceeding, the FCC has asked the public to identify unnecessary regulations that deter investment, innovation, and efficiency in the communications space. In these comments, DPI explains to the Commission the five tasks it must tackle if it is to accelerate the IP Transition: ending TDM interconnection mandates, terminating the intercarrier compensation regime, detariffing legacy services, further streamlining copper retirement, and modernizing section 214 discontinuances.

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DPI Urges FCC to End Needless Paperwork

In the Delete, Delete, Delete proceeding, the FCC has asked the public to identify unnecessary regulations that deter investment, innovation, and efficiency in the communications space. In these comments, DPI identifies a host of needless certifications and reporting obligations for the Commission to terminate.

DPI Testifies before the Texas Senate on the App Store Accountability Act

Before the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs, DPI President Joel Thayer testified on behalf of SB 2420, the App Store Accountability Act. He explains:

Enlisting app store providers to perform age verification balances the State’s goal of providing parents the legal recourse to protect their children from harmful tech services, while not infringing on adults’ online speech. Why is this the case? Well, as Jonathan Haidt rightly put, “with device-based verification nobody else is inconvenienced.” A parent verifies their child’s device once with the app store and they’re done. “The Internet is unchanged for them,” and they are still able to control what their kids see and do on their devices.

China Has Gone From Poisoning Kids’ Minds to Their Lungs

China has surreptitiously invaded our markets in almost every conceivable way. With the promise of cheap labor, Beijing stole American intellectual property. With the promise of inexpensive equipment, it took control of multiple U.S. routers, backhauls, cell sites and mobile devices. With the promise of cheap laughs, it has captured and poisoned our children’s minds and siphoned data with its deceptively innocuous dancing app TikTok.

Now, it is flooding our markets with dangerous flavored e-cigarettes. And it is targeting kids. President Trump, during his first term, had the foresight to warn us against illegal Chinese-made e-cigarettes, which he described as outright “poison.” He said that it “could be horrible” for them to enter our markets, given China’s indifference to our safety standards.

Wireless Capacity Is Running Thin, but Spectrum Auctions Can Save 5G

With more online applications going mobile, more data will need to travel over our wireless networks. We are already seeing AI’s impact on 5G networks. The ubiquity of AI applications, such as AI-powered assistants and augmented reality platforms, “will soon drive mobile data traffic beyond the capacity of current 5G networks,” according to a report by Mobile Experts. We may start seeing capacity issues as soon as 2027, unless wireless broadband infrastructure gets a much-needed upgrade.

Wireless broadband is fueled by radio spectrum—the invisible real estate that makes your device mobile—and we don’t have any more fuel to give.

The federal government sits on nearly 60 percent of all useful spectrum for wireless internet networks. Unfortunately, government agencies have a penchant for hoarding spectrum unless Congress tells them to release it. Don’t count on them to help us out.

Where Will TikTok Refugees Seek Asylum?

Aunanimous Supreme Court last week upheld the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’s constitutionality as applied to TikTok and ByteDance. The Court found that the law targets TikTok’s corporate structure (not its speech) and that its intention is to prevent foreign adversaries, in this case China, from accessing very intimate data on TikTok’s 170 million users.

But, even before the Court could draft its opinion, droves of self-described “TikTok refugees” migrated over to other Chinese apps, specifically Lemon8 and RedNote.

Let’s start with the former. Lemon8 is a rough knockoff of the American lifestyle app Pinterest. Unfortunately for new Lemon8 adopters, the same law American users are attempting to evade covers Lemon8, too. Yep, the law defines a “foreign adversary controlled app” as any mobile app operated, directly or indirectly, by ByteDance or a subsidiary. Lemon8, like TikTok, is owned by ByteDance. Thus, ByteDance must divest out of Lemon8 or sustain a nationwide ban.

So it can’t be a refuge for displaced TikTok users.

TikTok’s First Amendment Ruse

There is a concerning contingent of libertarian legal theorists who believe that none of the traditional notions of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause should matter. Typically, we have always understood the First Amendment’s underlying interest to be, as Justice Samuel Alito explained it, “fostering democratic self-government and furthering the search for truth.” Libertarians maintain the radical, and thoroughly constitutionally incorrect, view that our First Amendment decrees that corporate speech must trump an individual’s. 

It’s why this Supreme Court term is so important to get right. The Court must decide two cases—one concerning TikTok and the other about kids’ access to pornography— to determine whether our constitutional right to free speech is a bulwark or a weapon used by ideologues and Big Tech firms to degrade traditional American values, like protecting children and ensuring our national security.