The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies.
On February 11, 2019, the President of the United States signed an Executive Order (EO) directing the federal government to promote artificial intelligence (AI). President Trump’s EO aims to stimulate basic research in AI, reduce barriers to innovation, train AI technologists, and protect America’s advantage in AI such as it is.
The European Commission has just fined Google nearly $1.7 billion for abusing its dominance of search ads to make life difficult for its competitors. This is the third massive fine in the past two years. In June 2017, the commission fined Google about $2.7 billion.
Details are still emerging about the attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which at least 49 people were killed at two mosques. However, it appears that one person with advance knowledge of the planned attack is an active participant in a radicalized online right-wing media culture. Before the massacre, a man posted a long manifesto, police said, which was full of inside references to online memes and ideas that are commonly circulated among the radical right.
The following was excerpted from an article that will appear in a future issue of NWLawyer. The author was also recently interviewed for the “What’s Next” newsletter on LAW.COM, which you can read here.
In a post on Facebook’s website, Mark Zuckerberg has announced profound changes to Facebook’s approach to privacy and, by implication, its business model. Facebook is going to change so that it becomes much more like WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned entity that allows people to communicate privately with one another.
At the beginning of this year, President Trump signed into law the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary Government Data Act, requiring that nonsensitive government data be made available in machine-readable, open formats by default.
When Patent Office Director Michelle Lee gave that speech, Theranos appeared to be one of the most impressive companies in Silicon Valley. But later that year, the public learned that Holmes hadn’t “proven” anything. Whistleblowers told The Wall Street Journal that Theranos wasn’t even using its own devices for most of its blood testing. Holmes had apparently spent more than a decade building a company based on unrealistic or outright false claims about its revolutionary technology.
In Michael Cohen’s testimony Wednesday, he said President Trump “doesn’t give orders. He speaks in code. And I understand that code.” James Gagliano, a former member of the FBI’s organized crime squad, has said on Twitter that he couldn’t “begin to number” the amount of cooperating witnesses who described the orders that they got from mob bosses using similar language. This way of operating descends from the Mafia, which has its roots in Sicily.
When Facebook started 15 years ago, it didn’t set out to adjudicate the speech rights of 2.2 billion people. Twitter never asked to decide which of the 500 million tweets posted each day are jokes and which are hate speech. YouTube’s early mission wasn’t to determine if a video shot on someone’s phone is harmless speculation, dangerous conspiracy theory, or information warfare by a foreign government. Content platforms set out to get rid of expression’s gatekeepers, not become them.
Last Friday, the editorial board of Bloomberg Opinion condemned Europe’s new INSTEX arrangement, a so-called Special Purpose Vehicle set up to allow European companies to engage in humanitarian trade with Iran, despite the renewal of U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Republic. This arrangement — which was set up by Germany, France and the United Kingdom — has made the United States very unhappy.
