Policy – Page 10

Trump’s likely FCC chair wrote Project 2025 chapter on how he’d run the agency

fcc brendan carr, Policy / Rejus Almole / November 7, 2024

Brendan Carr wants to preserve data caps, punish NBC, and give money to SpaceX.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland on Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020. Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

The Republican who is likely to lead the Federal Communications Commission under President-elect Donald Trump detailed how he would run the agency when he wrote a chapter for the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Carr, a longtime opponent of net neutrality rules and other broadband regulations, has also made his views clear numerous times when opposing rulemakings initiated by the current Democratic majority.

If Trump makes Carr the next FCC chairman after his inauguration, the FCC is likely to ditch consumer protection initiatives, like a recently announced inquiry into data caps, and attempt to regulate Big Tech companies while reducing regulation of Internet service providers. That could include forcing Big Tech companies to pay into a fund that subsidizes ISPs’ broadband network construction.

A Carr-led FCC could also try to punish news organizations that are perceived to be anti-Trump. Just before the election, Carr alleged that NBC putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” and that the FCC should consider issuing penalties. Despite Carr’s claim, NBC did provide equal time to the Trump campaign.

Carr might also try to steer money to Elon Musk’s Starlink system. Carr was a vocal opponent of the FCC decision to deny SpaceX’s application for $886 million in government funding and claimed that “President Biden gave federal agencies a greenlight” to punish Musk after he bought Twitter.

FCC chair’s power

Carr became an FCC commissioner in August 2017 after being nominated by then-President Trump. Carr was previously a legal adviser to Commissioner Ajit Pai and was briefly the FCC’s general counsel during Pai’s first year as chair in 2017.

Carr’s Project 2025 chapter, published in 2023, said “the FCC’s Chairperson serves as the agency’s CEO and is empowered with significant authority that is not shared with other Commissioners.” The chair “sets the FCC’s agenda, decides what matters the agency will vote on and when, and has authority to organize and coordinate the FCC’s work,” Carr wrote. Although the president’s nominations for each commissioner require Senate approval, the president can appoint any sitting commissioner to the chair spot without a Senate vote.

The chair does not have unlimited power, of course. Congress can expand or reduce the FCC’s authority by passing new laws or eliminating existing ones. FCC decisions are routinely challenged in court, and a recent Supreme Court ruling limited the regulatory authority of federal agencies.

Carr wants the FCC to regulate less, at least when it comes to Internet service providers. “The FCC is a New Deal–era agency. Its history of regulation tends to reflect the view that the federal government should impose heavy-handed regulation rather than relying on competition and market forces to produce optimal outcomes,” he wrote.

The FCC, he said, “should engage in a serious top-to-bottom review of its regulations and take steps to rescind any that are overly cumbersome or outdated,” and “focus its efforts on creating a market-friendly regulatory environment that fosters innovation and competition from a wide range of actors, including cable-based, broadband-based, and satellite-based Internet providers.”

Chris Lewis, president and CEO of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Ars that Carr appears to be a leading candidate for the chairmanship “because of his experience and active presence in trying to chart a course for Republicans on telecom policy,” with the Project 2025 chapter being a prime example.

Public Knowledge generally argues that the FCC should take a bigger role in regulating Internet providers. “The public expects that there is an agency protecting consumers over communications networks and I think it would be wise for the new majorities and new administration to be clearheaded about that,” Lewis said.

Carr targets Big Tech and online speech

The FCC should have four primary goals, Carr wrote. Those goals are “reining in Big Tech, promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance.”

On Big Tech, Carr wants to implement Trump’s 2020 plan to crack down on social media websites for alleged anti-conservative bias. At the time, Trump formally petitioned the FCC to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in a way that would limit social media platforms’ legal protections for hosting third-party content when the platforms take down content they consider objectionable.

Trump was so keen on getting this done in 2020 that he withdrew his re-nomination of then-Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, a Republican who took the party line on most issues but did not support Trump’s attempt to punish social networks. Trump and the Senate replaced O’Rielly with Nathan Simington, who was a member of the Trump administration before becoming an FCC commissioner just before Trump’s first term ended. Simington is another possible chairman and has similar views as Carr, but Carr has a longer tenure on the FCC and has sought the media spotlight more than Simington.

In the Project 2025 publication, Carr’s “reining in Big Tech” section said the FCC “should issue an order that interprets Section 230 in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute.”

“The FCC has an important role to play in addressing the threats to individual liberty posed by corporations that are abusing dominant positions in the market. Nowhere is that clearer than when it comes to Big Tech and its attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square,” Carr wrote.

First Amendment

Lewis said Public Knowledge is worried that changes to Section 230 would harm the ability of online platforms to moderate content or choose not to moderate content, because companies could face great legal liability for those choices if 230 is weakened or scrapped.

O’Rielly argued in a July 2020 speech that apparently angered Trump that the FCC shouldn’t regulate in this area. “The First Amendment protects us from limits on speech imposed by the government—not private actors—and we should all reject demands, in the name of the First Amendment, for private actors to curate or publish speech in a certain way,” O’Rielly said at the time. “Like it or not, the First Amendment’s protections apply to corporate entities, especially when they engage in editorial decision making.”

Carr claimed in his Project 2025 chapter that “the FCC has authority to take this action because Section 230 is codified in the Communications Act,” and he pointed to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ views on the law as evidence that the FCC can act.

Carr’s chapter also said the FCC should “address TikTok’s threat to US national security,” saying the Chinese-owned social network “provides Beijing with an opportunity to run a foreign influence campaign by determining the news and information that the app feeds to millions of Americans.”

Carr’s Kamala Harris complaint

On November 2, Carr claimed that NBC was trying to evade the Equal Time rule by putting Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live. “The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct—a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” Carr wrote.

Carr later told Fox News that “all remedies should be on the table,” including “license revocations.”

“One commissioner standing alone, there’s no real consequence that I can impose at this point,” he said. “You need the FCC chairperson or at least three commissioners on the FCC to agree to take action. We’ll see if we end up there with this commission or otherwise.”

Carr was wrong about the Equal Time rule, media advocacy group Free Press said on November 3. The group pointed to an FCC fact sheet that says the rule “does not require a station to provide opposing candidates with programs identical to the initiating candidate.”

“Despite Carr’s claim, there is no evidence that the network was trying to avoid the rules,” Free Press said. “Broadcasters have no legal obligation to set aside broadcast time for opposing candidates, unless the candidates request it. Equal-opportunity requests are commonplace in the final days of a national election, and broadcasters typically honor them.”

NBC did honor a request for equal time from the Trump campaign, giving him two free 60-second messages during NASCAR and NFL coverage.

“Carr is desperate to become the FCC chair”

Free Press co-CEO Jessica González said, “It’s bizarre that a sitting FCC commissioner would engage in such a blatant and wrongheaded attempt to curry favor with a presidential candidate. But this is just the sort of reckless behavior we’ve come to expect from Brendan Carr. You’d expect an FCC commissioner to be familiar with his own agency’s regulations. Instead Carr seems willing to concoct falsehoods if it means he’ll get noticed by the former president.”

González added, “It’s no secret around Washington that Carr is desperate to become the FCC chair should Trump be elected president. First Carr wrote a chapter in the widely discredited policy platform for Project 2025, a far-right master plan to disassemble US democracy. Now he’s making grossly inaccurate claims about communications law to win points with the former president.”

Carr continued claiming that NBC violated the rule even after Trump was given free TV time. “NBC and SNL decided to bring just one candidate on less than 50 hours before Election Day,” he wrote on November 6. “The FCC has previously addressed these types of ‘last minute’ situations. I encourage any candidate that does not believe that their Equal Time rights were honored to bring the issue forward to the FCC for our adjudication.”

Making Big Tech pay

Carr wants to help Internet service providers achieve a long-held dream of making tech companies pay for broadband network upgrades. Carr’s Project 2025 chapter said the FCC should “require that Big Tech begin to contribute a fair share” into “the FCC’s roughly $9 billion Universal Service Fund.”

The fund has long been paid for by telecom companies, which generally pass the cost on to consumers on their telephone bills. “While Big Tech derives tremendous value from the federal government’s universal service investments—using those federally supported networks to deliver their products and realize significant profits—these large corporations have avoided paying a fair share into the program,” Carr wrote.

The Biden administration urged Europe to reject a similar idea last year, saying that payments from online platforms to ISPs would “distort competition” and undermine net neutrality. The European plan was also criticized by Meta, Google, Netflix, and the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC). The group of regulators from European countries said it found no evidence of “free-riding” by tech companies or evidence that ISPs’ costs weren’t fully covered.

If he becomes chair, Carr would have significant influence over which companies get money from the Universal Service Fund. Carr was angry about the FCC decision to reject Starlink’s application to receive $885.51 million in broadband funding.

The grant was tentatively awarded during Pai’s tenure but canceled in a 2022 ruling that called Starlink a “nascent LEO [low Earth orbit] satellite technology” with “recognized capacity constraints.” The Biden-era FCC had earlier pointed out that Pai’s system for choosing grant winners led to “complaints that the program was poised to fund broadband to parking lots and well-served urban areas.”

When the FCC rejected Starlink’s appeal in 2023, Carr said the FCC decision “certainly fits the Biden Administration’s pattern of regulatory harassment.” The FCC, Carr said, is one of a “growing list of administrative agencies that are taking action against Elon Musk’s businesses.” He alleged that “the Biden Administration is choosing to prioritize its political and ideological goals at the expense of connecting Americans.”

Killing broadband regulation

Carr also wants to help ISPs avoid regulation. A Carr-led FCC would likely drop the agency’s legal defense of its net neutrality rules, and that defense is off to a rocky start in court already.

California and other states have been regulating net neutrality themselves since the Pai FCC eliminated Obama-Era rules that prohibited paid prioritization and blocking or throttling of lawful traffic. The next FCC chair could try to revive Pai’s attempt to preempt state laws, which was rejected in court in 2019.

Carr would likely try to halt or unwind other initiatives that Democratic Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has undertaken to help broadband consumers. Carr dissented last year in the FCC’s 3-2 decision to impose rules that prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services. Carr described Rosenworcel’s discrimination proposal as “President Biden’s plan to give the administrative state effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US,” claiming it was “motivated by an ideology of government control that is not compatible with the fundamental precepts of free market capitalism.”

Rosenworcel last month announced a formal inquiry into data caps to consider their effect on consumers and whether the FCC has authority to regulate them. In dissent, Carr said, “I cannot support the Biden-Harris Administration’s inexorable march towards rate regulation,” and that “the FCC plainly does not have the legal authority” to regulate data caps.

He also said that data caps can be good for Internet users. “Prohibiting customers from choosing to purchase plans with data caps—which are more affordable than unlimited ones—necessarily regulates the service rates they are paying for,” Carr said.

Lewis told Ars that ditching the data cap inquiry means that “we will miss out on opportunities to look at when a broadband provider preferences its own streaming service or other service over a competitor’s. Ending the data caps probe will mean we will not be able to look at those sorts of specific cases and see if there is an anticompetitive practice.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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Man sick of crashes sues Intel for allegedly hiding CPU defects

CPU, desktop processors, fraud, intel, Policy, unfair trade / Mike M. / November 7, 2024

“Had Intel disclosed the defect, including through advertising, press releases, the Product packaging, or the initial setup process, Plaintiff and class members would not have purchased a Product, or would have paid substantially less for it,” Vanvalkenburgh’s complaint said.

According to Tom’s Hardware, “Intel’s 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors have a return rate four times higher than that of the previous generation,” and “14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh chips also have return rates thrice as high as the 12th Generation Alder Lake processors.” But instead of alerting the public to the defects, Vanvalkenburgh’s complaint alleged, Intel continued touting the processors as providing the ultimate desktop experience for serious gamers and people with “the most demanding of multitasking workloads” seeking speed, efficiency, and reliability.

Vanvalkenburgh alleged that Intel misled customers because Intel wanted to protect its brand and seek unjust enrichment. According to his complaint, Intel knows “consumers are willing to pay more for a reliable processor that runs stably, without failing or crashing frequently.” By failing to alert customers to known defects, Intel’s alleged deceptions increased demand for its CPUs, spiking sales into the millions, while its customers paid hundreds for processors and allegedly “sustained an economic injury.”

“Reasonable consumers do not expect that the Products will crash and fail at high rates, or that running the Products will damage the Products themselves,” Vanvalkenburgh’s complaint said, noting that a patch Intel later provided failed to fix the issue.

Vanvalkenburgh is hoping a jury will agree that Intel deceived customers and order an injunction preventing any future misconduct like misleading advertising or failure to disclose defective products.

If the class action is certified, Intel could owe extensive damages, potentially paying hundreds of millions in a loss. Because Vanvalkenburgh alleged that “Intel’s fraudulent concealment was malicious, oppressive, deliberate, intended to defraud” him, he’s seeking “an assessment of punitive damages in an amount sufficient to deter such conduct.” That’s on top of requests for maximum statutory damages for allegedly unfair and deceptive practices and disgorgement for alleged unjust enrichment.

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Fate of Google’s search empire could rest in Trump’s hands

Antitrust law, Donald Trump, Google, google search monopoly, Policy, us department of justice / Mike M. / November 6, 2024

“Are you going to destroy the company?”

Trump may sway DOJ away from breaking up Google.

A few weeks before the US presidential election, Donald Trump suggested that a breakup of Google’s search business may not be an appropriate remedy to destroy the tech giant’s search monopoly.

“Right now, China is afraid of Google,” Trump said at a Chicago event. If that threat were dismantled, Trump suggested, China could become a greater threat to the US, because the US needs to have “great companies” to compete.

Trump’s comments came about a week after the US Department of Justice proposed remedies in the Google monopoly trial, including mulling a breakup.

“I’m not a fan of Google,” Trump insisted. “They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do, without breaking it up, is make sure it’s more fair.”

Now that Trump is presumed to soon be taking office before the remedies phase of the DOJ’s litigation ends next year, it seems possible that Trump may sway the DOJ away from breaking up Google.

Experts told Reuters that a final ruling isn’t expected until August, giving Trump plenty of time to possibly influence the DOJ’s case. But Trump’s stance on Google has seemed to shift throughout his campaign, so there’s no predicting his position once he takes power.

Business Insider noted that Trump was extremely critical of Google on the campaign trail, vowing to “do something” to curtail Google’s power after accusing the search giant of only highlighting negative stories about him in search results. (Google has repeatedly denied the accusation.) On Truth Social as recently as September, Trump vowed to prosecute Google “at the maximum levels,” seemingly less concerned then about how this could influence competition with China.

It would be unusual for Trump to meddle with the DOJ’s ongoing litigation, antitrust expert George Hay told Business Insider, but then again, “Trump is a bit more of a wild card.”

“It’s very rare that, at the presidential level, there’s any attempt to influence the course of cases which have already been filed. Those have a life of their own,” Hay said. “They depend on the judge, the courts, the lawyers who carry on a case. It’s extraordinarily unusual for the administration to become at all active.”

Trump may still feel some ownership over the DOJ’s investigation into Google’s core business since it began in 2019 under his administration, and tensions between Trump and Google have not diminished much since. The Verge noted that Trump warned Google to “be careful” in August because he “had a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down.” And earlier this year, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, called for Google’s breakup on X (formerly Twitter), proclaiming that a stop to Google’s “monopolistic control of information” was “long overdue.”

Trump’s on-and-off feud with Google

For Trump, disabling Google’s search monopoly might feel personal, as he has spent years accusing Google of manipulating results to disfavor him.

His feud with Google appear to have begun in 2016 when Trump falsely accused Google of manipulating votes, claiming Google wanted to make it appear that he didn’t have a “big victory” over Hillary Clinton, CNN reported.

The feud continued through the 2020 election, Politico reported, with Trump warning Google that his administration was “watching Google very closely” after a former Google employee went on Fox News to claim that Google search results were biased against Trump. Google disputed the employee’s report.

And yet throughout this feud, there have also been times where Trump seems to warm to Google. During his last administration, he backtracked a threat to investigate Google’s alleged work with China’s military, Politico noted, after meeting with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Most recently, he claimed Pichai reached out to praise Trump’s ability to trend on the search engine during Trump’s McDonald’s campaign stunt, SF Gate reported.

So far, Google is not commenting on Trump’s comments on the DOJ’s proposed breakup of its search business. But Pichai did send an internal memo to Google staff on the night before the election, The Verge reported, praising them for boosting accurate information during the US election and reminding them that “the outcome will be a major topic of conversation in living rooms and other places around the world.”

At a time when Trump might continue heavily criticizing Google from the Oval Office, Pichai told Googlers that maintaining trust in Google is a top priority.

“Whomever the voters entrust, let’s remember the role we play at work, through the products we build and as a business: to be a trusted source of information to people of every background and belief,” Pichai’s memo said. “We will and must maintain that.”

The DOJ may not even want to seek a breakup

When the DOJ finally proposed a framework for remedies last month, they emphasized that there’s still so much more to consider before landing on final remedies and that the DOJ reserves “the right to add or remove potential proposed remedies.”

That means that while the DOJ has said that requiring a divestment of Chrome or Android isn’t completely off the table, they currently aren’t committed to following through on ordering a breakup.

Through the remedies phase of litigation, the DOJ expects that discovery will reveal more about whether requiring a breakup is needed or if other remedies might resolve antitrust concerns while preserving Google’s search empire.

One reason it might be necessary to spin off Chrome or Android, however, would be to “prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features—including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence—over rivals or new entrants,” the DOJ said.

Google has warned that a breakup could hurt small businesses that depend on open source code Google develops for Android and Chrome. Costs of Android devices could also rise, Google warned.

Adam Epstein—the president and co-CEO of adMarketplace, which bills itself as “the largest consumer search technology company outside of Google and Bing”—told Ars last September that spinning out Android and Chrome may inflict “maximum pain” on Google. But it could also “cause pain to users and publishers and might not be the best way to create competition in search results and advertising.”

Buried in a story from The New York Times is perhaps the biggest clue that Trump may again be warming to Google as he likely heads back to Washington. The Times noted that at the Chicago event, Trump seemed to be echoing a Google talking point.

Google has argued that “a breakup could hurt America’s interests in a heated geopolitical competition with China over dominance in areas like artificial intelligence,” The Times reported. And Trump appeared to be running with that same logic when seemingly shifting his position on wanting to destroy Google in his final days on the campaign trail.

“It’s a very dangerous thing, because we want to have great companies,” Trump said. “We don’t want China to have these companies.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Fate of Google’s search empire could rest in Trump’s hands Read More »

Trump plans to dismantle Biden AI safeguards after victory

AI, AI regulation, Biden, Biz & IT, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, large language models, machine learning, Policy, US government, White House / Rejus Almole / November 6, 2024

That’s not the only uncertainty at play. Just last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson—a staunch Trump supporter—said that Republicans “probably will” repeal the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which is a Biden initiative to spur domestic semiconductor chip production, among other aims. Trump has previously spoken out against the bill. After getting some pushback on his comments from Democrats, Johnson said he would like to “streamline” the CHIPS Act instead, according to The Associated Press.

Then there’s the Elon Musk factor. The tech billionaire spent tens of millions through a political action committee supporting Trump’s campaign and has been angling for regulatory influence in the new administration. His AI company, xAI, which makes the Grok-2 language model, stands alongside his other ventures—Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, and X (formerly Twitter)—as businesses that could see regulatory changes in his favor under a new administration.

What might take its place

If Trump strips away federal regulation of AI, state governments may step in to fill any federal regulatory gaps. For example, in March, Tennessee enacted protections against AI voice cloning, and in May, Colorado created a tiered system for AI deployment oversight. In September, California passed multiple AI safety bills, one requiring companies to publish details about their AI training methods and a contentious anti-deepfake bill aimed at protecting the likenesses of actors.

So far, it’s unclear what Trump’s policies on AI might represent besides “deregulate whenever possible.” During his campaign, Trump promised to support AI development centered on “free speech and human flourishing,” though he provided few specifics. He has called AI “very dangerous” and spoken about its high energy requirements.

Trump allies at the America First Policy Institute have previously stated they want to “Make America First in AI” with a new Trump executive order, which still only exists as a speculative draft, to reduce regulations on AI and promote a series of “Manhattan Projects” to advance military AI capabilities.

During his previous administration, Trump signed AI executive orders that focused on research institutes and directing federal agencies to prioritize AI development while mandating that federal agencies “protect civil liberties, privacy, and American values.”

But with a different AI environment these days in the wake of ChatGPT and media-reality-warping image synthesis models, those earlier orders don’t likely point the way to future positions on the topic. For more details, we’ll have to wait and see what unfolds.

Trump plans to dismantle Biden AI safeguards after victory Read More »

Trump’s 60% tariffs could push China to hobble tech industry growth

china tariffs, consumer technology, Donald Trump, Policy, us-china trade war / Tim Belzer / November 6, 2024

Retaliation likely, experts say

Tech industry urges more diplomacy as it faces Trump’s proposed sweeping tariffs.

Now that the US presidential election has been called for Donald Trump, the sweeping tariffs regime that Trump promised on the campaign trail seems imminent. For the tech industry, already burdened by the impact of tariffs on their supply chains, it has likely become a matter of “when” not “if” companies will start spiking prices on popular tech.

During Trump’s last administration, he sparked a trade war with China by imposing a wide range of tariffs on China imports, and President Joe Biden has upheld and expanded them during his term. These tariffs are taxes that Americans pay on restricted Chinese goods, imposed by both presidents as a tactic to punish China for unfair trade practices, including technology theft, by hobbling US business with China.

As the tariffs expanded, China has often retaliated, imposing tariffs on US goods and increasingly limiting US access to rare earth materials critical to manufacturing a wide range of popular products. And any such retaliation from China only seems to spark threats of more tariffs in the US—setting off a cycle that seems unlikely to end with Trump imposing a proposed 60 percent tax on all China imports. Experts told Ars that the tech industry expects to be stuck in the middle of the blow-by-blow trade war, taking punches left and right.

Currently, there are more than $300 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports, but notably, there are none yet on popular tech like smartphones, laptops, tablets, and game consoles. Back when Trump last held office, the tech industry successfully lobbied to get those exemptions, warning that the US economy would hugely suffer if tariffs were imposed on consumer tech. Prices on game consoles alone could spike by as much as 25 percent as tech companies coped with increasing costs from tariffs, the industry warned, since fully decoupling from China was then, and is still now, considered impossible.

Trump’s proposed 60 percent tariff would cost tech companies four times more than that previous round of tariffs that the industry dodged when Trump last held office. A recent Consumer Technology Association (CTA) study found that prices could jump even higher than previously feared if consumer tech is as heavily taxed as Trump intends. Laptop prices could nearly double, game console prices could rise by 40 percent, and smartphone prices by 26 percent.

Any drastic spike in pricing could radically reshape markets for popular tech products at a time when tariffs and political tensions increasingly block US business growth into China. Diverting resources to decouple from China could disrupt companies’ abilities to fund more US innovation, risking Americans’ access to the latest tech at affordable prices. Experts told Ars that it’s unclear exactly how China will respond if Trump’s proposed tariffs become a reality, but that retaliation seems likely given the severity and broad scope of the looming tariffs regime. While some experts speculate that China may currently have fewer options to retaliate, according to CTA VP of International Trade Ed Brzytwa, “in terms of economic tools, there’s a lot of things that China could still do.”

How would China respond to Trump’s tariffs?

Nearly everyone—tech companies, lawmakers, and even US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen—agrees that it would be impossible to fully decouple from China, where 30 percent of global manufacturing occurs. It will take substantial time and investment to shift supply chains that were built over decades of tech progress.

For tech companies, alienating China also comes with the additional risk of stifling growth into China markets, as China seemingly runs out of obvious ways to retaliate against the US without directly targeting US businesses.

After Trump’s early round of tariffs started a US-China trade war, China retaliated with more tariffs, and nothing the Biden administration has done has seemingly eased those tensions.

According to a November report from the nonpartisan nonprofit US-China Business Council, any “escalation of US tariffs would likely trigger retaliatory measures from China,” which could include increasing tariffs on US exports.

That could hurt tech companies even more than current tariffs already are, while spiking net job losses to more than 800,000 by 2025, the council warned, making “US businesses less competitive in the Chinese market” and “resulting in a permanent loss of revenue.” In another report from 2021, the council estimated that if the US intensifies the trade war while forcing a decoupling with China, it could ultimately decrease the US real gross domestic product by $1.6 trillion over the next five years.

The US-China Business Council declined to comment on how Trump’s proposed tariffs could impact the GDP.

In May, following Biden’s latest round of tariffs—on imports like electric vehicles, semiconductors, battery components, and critical minerals used in tech manufacturing—China immediately threatened retaliation. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, confirmed that “China opposes the unilateral imposition of tariffs which violate World Trade Organization [WTO] rules and will take all necessary actions to protect its legitimate rights,” CNN reported.

Nobody is sure how China may retaliate if Trump’s sweeping tariff regime is implemented. Peterson Institute for International Economics senior fellow Mary Lovely said that China’s response to Biden’s 100 percent tariff on EVs was surprisingly “muted,” but if a 60 percent tariff were imposed on all China goods, the country “would likely retaliate.”

Tech industry strategist and founder of Tirias Research Jim McGregor told Ars that China has already “threatened to start cutting back on access to rare earth materials,” potentially limiting US access to critical components of semiconductors. Brzytwa told Ars that “the processed materials that result from those rare earths are important for manufacturing of a variety of products in the United States or elsewhere.”

China “might be running out of room to retaliate with tariffs,” Brzytwa suggested, but the country could also place more restrictions on US exports or heighten the scrutiny of US companies, possibly even limiting investments. McGregor pointed out that China could also block US access to Taiwan or stop shipments into and out of Taiwan.

“They’ve already encircled the island recently with military weaponry, so they didn’t even have to invade Taiwan,” McGregor said. “They can actually block aid to Taiwan, and with the vast majority of our semiconductors still produced there, that would have a huge impact on our industry and our economy.”

Brzytwa is worried that if China is pushed too far in a trade war, it may lash out in other ways.

“I think what we worry about as well is that whatever actions the United States undertakes become so provocative that China decides to act out outside the economic arena through other means,” Brzytwa told Ars.

What should the US be doing?

If the US wants to succeed in safeguarding US national security and tech innovation, Lovely told Congress the country must clarify “its strategic intent with respect to trade with China” and reform tariffs to align with that strategic intent.

She said that Trump’s “whole kitchen sink” approach has not worked, and rather than being strategic, Biden has been capricious in upholding and expanding on Trump’s tariffs.

“If you try to do everything, you end up doing nothing well,” Lovely told Ars. “Rather than just vilifying China (which, granted, China deserves a lot of vilification)” and “deluding” Americans into thinking tariffs are good for them, Lovely suggested, Trump should analyze “what’s the best thing for the United States?”

Instead, when Lovely shared a report in August with the Trump campaign—estimating that it would cost “a typical US household in the middle of the income distribution more than $2,600 a year” if Trump follows through on his tariff plans, which also include a 20 percent universal tariff on all imports from anywhere—Trump’s team rejected input “from so-called experts,” Lovely said.

Lovely thinks the US should commit to a long-term solution to reduce reliance on China that can be sustained through each presidential administration. That could mean working to support decarbonization efforts and raise labor standards in allied nations where manufacturing could potentially be diverted, essentially committing to build a new global value chain after the past 35 years of China’s manufacturing dominance.

“The vast majority of the world’s electronic assembly is done in China,” McGregor told Ars. And while “a lot of companies are trying to have slowly migrated some of their manufacturing out of China and trying to build new facilities, that takes decades to really shift.”

Even if the US managed to block all imports from China in a decade, Lovely suggested that “we would still have a lot of imports from China because Chinese value added is going to be embedded in things we import from Vietnam and Thailand and Indonesia and Mexico.”

“The tariff can be effective in changing these direct imports, as we’ve seen, yeah, but they’re not going to really push China out of the global economy,” Lovely told Ars.

Consequences of a lack of diplomacy

All experts agreed that more diplomacy is needed since decoupling is impossible, especially in the tech industry, where isolating China has threatened to diverge standards and restrict growth into China markets that could spur US innovation.

“We need somebody desperately that’s going to try to bridge barriers, not create them,” McGregor told Ars. “Unfortunately, we have nobody in Washington that appears to want to do that.”

Choosing diplomacy over tariffs could also mean striking trade agreements to curtail China’s unfair trade practices that the US opposes, such as a deal holding China accountable to WTO commitments, Brzytwa told Ars.

But even though China’s spokesperson cited the WTO commitments in his statement opposing US tariffs last May, Brzytwa said, the US has seemingly given up on the WTO dispute settlement process, feeling that it doesn’t work because “China doesn’t fit the WTO.”

“It’s a lot of defeatism, in my view,” Brzytwa said.

Consumers will pay the costs

Brzytwa warned that if Trump deepens US-China trade tensions, it would likely cause ripple effects across the US, potentially constricting access to the best tech available today, which would result in limited productivity across industry.

Any costs of new tariffs “would be passed on to consumers, and consumers would purchase less of those products,” Brzytwa said. “In our view, that is not supportive of innovation when people are not purchasing the latest technologies that might be more capable, more energy-efficient, and might have new features in them that allow us to be more productive.”

Brzytwa said that a CTA study showed that if tariffs are imposed across the economy, all companies would have to stop everything to move away from China and into the US. That would take at least a decade, 10 times the labor force the US has now, and cost $500 billion in direct business investments, the study estimated. “And that’s before you get to environmental costs or energy costs,” Brzytwa told Ars, while noting that an alternative strategy relying on treaty allies and trading partners could cut those costs to $127 billion but not eliminate them.

“It wouldn’t happen in a way where there’s no cost increase,” Brzytwa said. “Of course, there’s going to be a cost increase.”

The hardest-hit tech companies by China tariffs so far have likely been small businesses with little chance to grow since they’re “paying more in tariff costs or they’re paying more in administrative costs, and they’re not spending money on research and development, or they’re not hiring new people, because they’re just trying to stay alive,” Brzytwa said.

Lovely has testified three times to Congress and plans to continue stressing what the negative impacts “might be for American manufacturers for consumers” from what she thinks are “rather extreme moves” expanding tariffs without clear purpose under both Trump and Biden.

But while Congress controls the power to tax, it’s the executive branch that controls foreign policy, and in this highly politicized environment, even well-researched studies done by nonpartisan civil servants can’t be depended on to influence presidents who are determined to use tariffs to appear strong against China, Lovely suggested.

On the campaign trail, both candidates appeared to be misleading Americans into thinking that tariffs “are good for them,” Lovely said. If Trump’s tariffs get implemented once he’s sworn back in, that will only make it that much worse if the rug gets yanked from under them and Americans are suddenly hit with higher prices on their favorite devices.

“It’s going to be like shock therapy, and it’s not going to be pleasant,” Lovely told Ars.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Trump’s 60% tariffs could push China to hobble tech industry growth Read More »

RTO mandate was attempt at thwarting Grindr workers unionizing: US labor board

grindr, nlrb, Policy, return-to-office, unions / Paul Patrick / November 5, 2024

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is accusing Grindr of using a return-to-office (RTO) mandate in an attempt to block employee efforts to form a union.

On July 20, 2023, employees at the LGBTQ+ dating app announced plans to unionize. On August 3, 2023, Grindr told employees that they had two weeks to decide if they would start working in an office location two days per week or exit Grindr with six months of severance, per The New York Times, which reported that it saw the memo. Grindr also reportedly offered up to $15,000 for relocation expenses to its offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington DC. Before the RTO mandate, Grindr allowed fully remote work.

Despite the announcement’s timing, Grindr said in August 2023 that it had been working on an RTO mandate for months and that employees were notified of this in early summer 2023, per the NYT. On August 4, 2023, the Communications Workers of America Union, which Grindr employees were working to join, filed a complaint with the NLRB.

Most workers attempting to unionize quit after RTO mandate

About 80 of the 120 workers who were trying to unionize left due to the RTO mandate, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Grindr was said to have 178 employees when it announced the mandate, meaning it lost about 45 percent of employees overall.

In August 2023, a Grindr spokesperson told The Times that Grindr’s RTO plans were unrelated to union efforts and claimed that Grindr executives “respect and support our team members’ rights to make their own decision about union representation.”

In a September 2023 statement, Eric Cortez, a member of the group organizing the Grindr union, said regarding the employee departures: “These decisions have left Grindr dangerously understaffed and raises questions about the safety, security, and stability of the app for users.”

NLRB files complaint against Grindr

The NLRB’s general counsel office followed up on Friday with a complaint against Grindr, saying that the RTO mandate was issued illegally in retaliation of workers unionizing, Bloomberg reported Monday. The NLRB’s also accusing Grindr of breaking the law by not recognizing or negotiating with the union.

RTO mandate was attempt at thwarting Grindr workers unionizing: US labor board Read More »

Google has no duty to refund gift card scam victims, judge finds

gift card scams, Google, google play, online scams, Policy / Tim Belzer / November 5, 2024

But Freeman ruled that “May suffered economic harm because of third-party scammers’ fraudulent inducement, not Google’s omission or misrepresentation.”

Additionally, May failed to show that Google had any duty to refund customers after Google cited Target and Walmart policies to show that it’s common to refuse refunds.

Scam victims did not use gift card “as designed”

Freeman mostly sided with Google, deciding that the company engaged in no unfair practices, while noting that May had not used the gift cards “in their designed way.” The judge also agreed with Google that May’s funds were not considered stolen at the time she purchased the gift cards, because May still controlled the funds at that point in time.

Additionally, May’s attempt to argue that Google has the technology to detect scams failed, Freeman wrote, because May couldn’t prove that Google deployed that technology when her particular scam purchases were made. Even after May argued that she reported the theft to Google, Freeman wrote, May’s complaint failed because “there is no allegation that Google had a duty to investigate her report.”

Ultimately, May’s complaint “identifies no public policy suggesting Google has a duty to refund the scammed victims or that the harm of Google’s conduct outweighs any benefits,” Freeman concluded.

In her order, Freeman provided leave to amend some claims in the next 45 days, but Ars could not immediately reach May’s lawyer to confirm if the complaint would likely be amended. However, the judge notably dismissed a claim seeking triple damages because May’s complaint “failed to show a likelihood that May will be a victim of gift card scams again given her awareness of such scams,” which may deflate May’s interests to amend.

That particular part of the ruling may be especially frustrating for May, whose complaint was sparked by a claim that she never would have been victimized if Google had provided adequate warnings of scams.

Google did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.

Google has no duty to refund gift card scam victims, judge finds Read More »

Ever heard of “Llady Gaga”? Universal files piracy suit over alleged knockoffs.

Universal Music Group yesterday sued a music firm that allegedly distributes pirated songs on popular streaming services under misspelled versions of popular artists’ names—such as “Kendrik Laamar,” “Arriana Gramde,” “Jutin Biber,” and “Llady Gaga.” The UMG Recordings lawsuit against the French company Believe and its US-based subsidiary, TuneCore, alleges that “Believe is fully aware that its business model is fueled by rampant piracy” and “turned a blind eye to the fact that its music catalog was rife with copyright infringing sound recordings.”

Believe is a publicly traded company with about 2,020 employees in over 50 countries and reported $518 million (474.1 million euros) in revenue in the first half of 2024. Believe says its “mission is to develop independent artists and labels in the digital world.”

UMG alleges that Believe achieved “dramatic growth and profitability in recent years by operating as a hub for the distribution of infringing copies of the world’s most popular copyrighted recordings.” Believe has licensing deals with online platforms “including TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram and hundreds of others,” the lawsuit said.

UMG alleged that Believe distributes songs on these services “with full knowledge that many of the clients of its distribution services are fraudsters regularly providing infringing copies of copyrighted recordings.” Believe enters into “distribution contracts with anyone willing to sign one of its basic form agreements,” and its “client list is overrun with fraudulent ‘artists’ and pirate record labels who rely on Believe and its distribution network to seed infringing copies of popular sound recordings throughout the digital music ecosystem,” the lawsuit said, continuing:

Believe makes little effort to hide its illegal actions. Indeed, the names of its “artists” and recordings are often minor variants on the names of Plaintiffs’ famous recording artists and the titles of their most successful works. For example, Believe has distributed infringing tracks from infringers who call themselves “Kendrik Laamar” (a reference to Kendrick Lamar); “Arriana Gramde” (a reference to Ariana Grande); “Jutin Biber” (a reference to Justin Bieber); and “Llady Gaga” (a reference to Lady Gaga). Often, Believe distributes overtly infringing versions of original tracks by famous artists with notations that they are “sped up” or “remixed.”

The Rihanna song “S&M” was distributed as a remix by Believe under the name “Rihamna,” the lawsuit said. In other cases, names associated with allegedly infringing tracks were very different from the real artists’ names. The lawsuit said Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” and Billie Eilish’s “TV” were both distributed in sped-up form under the name “INDRAGERSN.”

Ever heard of “Llady Gaga”? Universal files piracy suit over alleged knockoffs. Read More »

Facebook, Nvidia push SCOTUS to limit “nuisance” investor suits after scandals

facebook, NVIDIA, Policy, Securities and Exchange Commission, Supreme Court / Mike M. / November 4, 2024

Facebook, Nvidia ask SCOTUS to narrow legal paths to retrieve investor losses.

The Supreme Court will soon weigh two cases that could potentially make it harder for misled investors to sue Big Tech companies after major scandals.

One case involves one of the largest tech scandals of all time, the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach. In 2019, Facebook agreed to pay “more than $5 billion in civil penalties to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it had misled its users and investors over the privacy and security of user data on its platform,” a Supreme Court filing said.

The other case involves an allegation that Nvidia intentionally hid how much of its 2017–2018 GPU demand was due to a volatile cryptocurrency boom and not Nvidia’s core gaming business—allegedly misleading investors ahead of a crypto crash. After the bust, Nvidia suddenly had to slash half a billion dollars from its earnings projection, and market experts later estimated that the firm had understated its crypto-related revenue by more than a billion. In 2022, Nvidia paid a $5.5 million SEC penalty over the inadequate disclosures that one SEC chief said “deprived investors of critical information to evaluate the company’s business in a key market.”

Investors, however, have not yet settled their own legal challenges. In both cases, investors suing convinced the 9th Circuit that the companies were guilty of misleading investors. But now, the tech companies have appealed to the Supreme Court, hoping to reverse those rulings.

In case documents, each claimed that their investors have not satisfied high legal bars, which Nvidia argued Congress designed to prevent “frivolous” or “nuisance” lawsuits from going on “fishing expeditions” to claim securities “fraud by hindsight.” Both warned that SCOTUS upholding the 9th Circuit rulings risked flooding courts with frivolous suits, with Nvidia cautioning that such lawsuits can be “used to injure the entire US economy.”

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the Facebook case on Wednesday, November 6, then the Nvidia case on November 13.

SCOTUS may be persuaded by tech companies still stuck coping with the aftermath of scandals. A former SEC lawyer, Andrew Feller, told Reuters that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority may continue its “recent track record of handing down business-friendly decisions that narrowed the authority of federal regulators” in these cases. Both cases give justices opportunities to “rein in the power of private plaintiffs to enforce federal rules aimed at punishing corporate misconduct,” Reuters reported.

Facebook defends describing risk as hypothetical

The Facebook case centers on an SEC disclosure where Facebook said that its business may be harmed by a data breach, posing that as a hypothetical, without mentioning the ongoing Cambridge Analytica data breach. Specifically, Facebook wrote, “[a]ny failure to prevent or mitigate . . . improper access to or disclosure of our data or user data . . . could result in the loss or misuse of such data, which could harm our business and reputation and diminish our competitive position.”

Investors felt misled, accusing Facebook of hiding the breach by only presenting the risk as a hypothetical that implied no breach had ever occurred in the past and certainly did not disclose the present risk.

However, in a SCOTUS filing, Facebook insisted that “no reasonable investor would interpret a risk disclosure using probabilistic, forward-looking language as impliedly representing that the specified triggering event had never occurred in the past.”

Facebook is now arguing that SCOTUS agreeing that the company should have disclosed the major data breach “would result in a regime under which companies would be required to disclose every previous material incident they have experienced—effectively creating a sweeping regime of omissions liability.”

According to Facebook, news broke about the Cambridge Analytica data breach in 2015, and its business wasn’t immediately harmed. Following that logic, the social media company hopes that SCOTUS will agree that Facebook was only required to disclose the data breach in its SEC filing if Facebook knew its business would likely be harmed from the ongoing breach.

By affirming the 9th Circuit ruling, Facebook alleged, SCOTUS would be “vastly expanding the circumstances in which risk disclosures are deemed false or misleading,” exposing to legal challenges “a wide range of previously immune forward-looking statements—revenue projections, future business plans or objectives, and the like.”

But investors suing argue that Facebook is still being misleading about the data scandal in its court filings.

“The only reason Facebook has ever given to explain why the misappropriation risked no harm was that the event was allegedly disclosed to the public in 2015 and no one cared,” investors’ SCOTUS brief said. But in 2015, a report exposing a data breach tied to a Ted Cruz campaign was denied by Cambridge Analytica and prompted a Facebook investigation that concluded no damage had been done.

“Facebook actively misled the public about its investigation, ‘represent[ing] that no misconduct had been discovered,'” investors alleged, and “Facebook’s deception extended to its public filings with the SEC.”

According to investors, the real damage was done when the true extent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was exposed in 2018. That caused substantial revenue losses that Facebook likely understood it was risking while allegedly leaving investors blind to those risks for years.

Investors argue that disclosure should not be required of every data breach that hits Facebook, whether it harms its business or not, but that the Cambridge Analytica data breach was significant and should have been disclosed as a material risk. The 9th Circuit agreed, holding that “publicly treating such a material adverse event as a merely hypothetical prospect can be misleading even if the event has not yet produced follow-on business harm because the company has kept the truth from the public.”

They further argued that requiring so-called overdisclosure wouldn’t trigger unwarranted litigation, as Facebook suggests, because Congress has always “given considerable attention to concerns over abusive private litigation.”

If Facebook wins, investors alleged, SCOTUS risks giving any tech company “a license to intentionally mislead investors about the occurrence of hugely material events by describing those events as purely hypothetical prospects.” Siding with Facebook would allegedly give “companies an incentive to stuff their annual reports with boilerplate, generic warnings that reveal little about the company’s actual business and to cover up events that could give rise to corporate scandals, as Facebook did here.”

Facebook argued that if the SEC is concerned about specific disclosures connected to the data breach, “the SEC can invoke the rulemaking process to impose” a requirement that companies must disclose all “past material adverse events.”

Nvidia disputes expert’s crypto data

While the Facebook case involved a bigger scandal, the Nvidia case could have bigger legal implications if Nvidia wins.

In the Nvidia case, investors argued that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made public statements allegedly misleading investors by downplaying the high demand for GPUs tied to volatile crypto markets. To plead their case, investors relied on statements from Nvidia employees, internal documents like meeting slides, industry research, as well as an expert opinion crunching general market numbers and estimating that Nvidia “underreported its crypto revenues by $1.126 billion.”

Nvidia claimed it’s far more plausible that the company simply made an “honest miscalculation” while navigating a complex emerging market.

To defend against the suit, Nvidia is arguing that the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) imposes “special burdens on plaintiffs seeking to bring federal securities fraud class actions” through “heightened pleading requirements” to deter frivolous lawsuits arguing fraud by hindsight.

According to Nvidia, the PSLRA requires investors to allege particular facts based on particular contents of internal Nvidia documents, which goes beyond relying on an expert opinion. The tech company has urged SCOTUS that the 9th Circuit “‘significantly erode[d]” the PSLRA requirements by allowing Plaintiffs to “simply” hire “an expert who manufactured data to fit their allegations.”

“They hired an expert to create data and then filed a class action alleging that Nvidia and its CEO committed securities fraud by failing to disclose the data invented by Plaintiffs’ expert,” Nvidia argued.

This allegedly “eviscerates the guardrails that Congress erected to protect the public from abusive securities litigation” and creates a “dangerous” and “easy-to-replicate ‘roadmap’ for plaintiffs to sidestep the PSLRA in this recurring context.”

“Far from serving Congress’s goal of guarding against fishing expeditions by vexatious litigants, the Ninth Circuit’s opinion declares it open season so long as a plaintiff has funding to hire an expert,” Nvidia alleged.

Investors are hoping SCOTUS will uphold the 9th Circuit’s judgment. Instead of seeing their suit as frivolous, they argued that the SEC fine over the same misconduct “undermines any suggestion that this is the type of frivolous suit that the PSLRA was meant to screen out.”

They’ve disputed Nvidia’s arguments that they’ve relied solely on a hired expert to support their claims, arguing that each fact was corroborated by employee witnesses and third-party reports.

If Nvidia wins, investors warned, the SCOTUS decision would risk harming a wide range of private securities litigation that Congress has found “‘is an indispensable tool’ for ‘defrauded investors’ to ‘recover their losses without having to rely upon government action.'”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Facebook, Nvidia push SCOTUS to limit “nuisance” investor suits after scandals Read More »

Elon Musk turns X’s block button into a “glorified mute button”

elon musk x, Policy, x blocking / Tim Belzer / November 4, 2024

X, formerly Twitter, is now letting blocked users see posts made by the people who blocked them.

“We’re starting to launch the block function update,” X’s engineering team wrote yesterday. X previously said that after the change, “If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.).”

To justify the change, X said the block functionality could previously be “used by users to share and hide harmful or private information about those they’ve blocked.” The change will allow people who are blocked “to see if such behavior occurs… allowing for greater transparency,” X said.

X owner Elon Musk argued last year that “blocking public posts makes no sense. It needs to be deprecated in favor of a stronger form of mute.”

There were many angry responses to the change, both yesterday and previously, when X said it would be coming soon. While some users may only use blocking to avoid seeing accounts that are annoying, some X users said the policy could be harmful for people who use blocking as a safety measure.

The new policy could help stalkers and other bad actors, some said. Blocked accounts could view, screenshot, and share content posted by the person who blocked them, some people pointed out. The block button is now “a glorified mute button,” one user said.

Blocked users can view and search for posts

Before the change, X’s support page on blocking accounts said blocked accounts cannot “view your posts when logged in on X (unless they report you, and your posts mention them,” “find your posts in search when logged in on X,” or “view a Moment you’ve created when logged in on X.”

Elon Musk turns X’s block button into a “glorified mute button” Read More »

Starlink enters National Radio Quiet Zone—but reportedly cut off access for some

national radio quiet zone, Policy, starlink / Tim Belzer / November 1, 2024

Starlink offered to 99.5% of zone, but locals say Roam product was disabled.

Starlink satellite dish. Credit: Starlink

Starlink’s home Internet service has come to the National Radio Quiet Zone after a multi-year engineering project that had the goal of minimizing interference with radio telescopes. Starlink operator SpaceX began “a one-year assessment period to offer residential satellite Internet service to 99.5% of residents within the NRQZ starting October 25,” the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Green Bank Observatory announced last week.

“The vast majority of people within the areas of Virginia and West Virginia collectively known as the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) can now receive high speed satellite Internet service,” the announcement said. “The newly available service is the result of a nearly three-year collaborative engineering effort between the US National Science Foundation (NSF), SpaceX, and the NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO), which operates the NSF Green Bank Observatory (NSF GBO) in West Virginia within the NRQZ.”

There’s a controversy over the 0.5 percent of residents who aren’t included and are said to be newly blocked from using the Starlink Roam service. Starlink markets Roam as a service for people to use while traveling, not as a fixed home Internet service.

The Pendleton County Office of Emergency Management last week issued a press release saying that “customers with the RV/Roam packages had been using Starlink for approximately two years throughout 100% of the NRQZ. Now, the 0.5% have lost coverage after having it for two years. This means that a large section of southeastern Pendleton County and an even larger section of northern Pocahontas will NOT be able to utilize Starlink.”

PCMag wrote that “Starlink is now live in 42 of the 46 cell areas around the Green Bank Observatory’s telescopes.” Pendleton County Emergency Services Coordinator Rick Gillespie told Ars today that Roam coverage was cut off in the remaining four cell areas.

“After the agreement, we all lost effective use within the four cells,” Gillespie told Ars in an email. Gillespie’s press release said that, “in many cases, Starlink was the only Internet provider option residents and emergency responders had. This is unacceptable.”

“The dark ages of communications systems”

Gillespie was quoted as saying in a WBOY article that the restrictions are “keeping a portion of Pendleton and Pocahontas counties in the dark ages of communications systems.”

We contacted SpaceX and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory about any limits imposed on Roam today and will update this article if we get any response.

Residents of the 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone have limited Internet access due to restrictions on radio transmissions first put in place in 1958. In addition to scientific research at Green Bank in Pocahontas County, the National Radio Quiet Zone includes a National Security Agency facility at Sugar Grove Station in Pendleton County.

SpaceX and the NRAO collaborated on testing over the past few years and presumably concluded that the service could only be provided without interference in 99.5 percent of the zone. Chris De Pree, the NRAO deputy spectrum manager, said in the organization’s announcement that “working closely with SpaceX over the past three years has enabled NRAO and SpaceX to better understand each other’s systems and how to actively coexist in this part of the spectrum.”

In that time, “scientists and engineers performed multiple tests and analyses to determine the best way to maximize satellite internet service without hindering the missions within the NRQZ,” the announcement said. During the one-year assessment period for Starlink’s home Internet service, “scientists and engineers will monitor for interference issues and work to resolve them without interrupting Internet service.”

Starlink steers beams away from telescopes

Starlink said in August that it worked with the NRAO “to enable Starlink satellites to avoid transmissions into the line-of-sight of radio telescopes, leveraging our advanced phased array antenna technology to dynamically steer beams away from telescopes.”

Starlink published a summary noting that “direct transmissions from satellites towards the eye of radio telescopes may pose a significant risk of interference to astronomical research.” The technique for steering beams away from telescopes is “made possible by a real-time data sharing framework between radio astronomy observatories and Starlink that provides the Starlink network with a telescope’s planned observation schedule, including the telescope’s pointing direction (aka ‘boresight’) and its observed frequency band. With this information, the Starlink network can ensure that satellites passing near the boresight of a telescope dynamically redirect their beams away from the telescope.”

The redirection happens “in milliseconds” and “protects the telescope’s observations while ensuring Starlink service remains uninterrupted for customers near the telescope.” Starlink is also using the technology with NRAO’s Very Large Array in New Mexico.

Counties want quiet-zone rules scrapped

The quiet-zone rules should be scrapped, a number of local officials say. The Pendleton County press release said that 10 West Virginia counties and one Virginia county “have formally expressed their need for change regarding the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) through Resolutions and Letters of Support.” These counties have a combined 262,296 residents, the press release said.

“We do not seek the closure of these federal entities but rather their commitment to identifying and funding viable solutions that would enable our communication systems to operate effectively, similar to those in the majority of America,” Gillespie said in the press release.

Gillespie told Ars that local communities are hampered by “archaic 1950’s regulations. We are being left behind when it comes to the modern advancements in public safety and personal communications.” He said that “absent some relief in a timely fashion, we will explore taking our plight to the FCC seeking waivers.”

The Pendleton County Commission resolution approved in September called for dissolution of the quiet zone or “total waivers of any NRQZ restrictions imposed on Public Safety Radio Frequency Bands currently in use, as well as all the commercial cellular/wireless Bands, and commercial satellite Internet providers, such as Starlink.”

The county resolution said the quiet zone is effectively “an ever-growing unfunded federal mandate on our county emergency services/911 operation wherein it causes us to spend large amounts of funding building a larger number of tower sites than would be needed absent the NRQZ restrictions.” The restrictions have greatly diminished access to the AT&T FirstNet public safety network and other networks used by first responders and residents, the resolution said.

The Pocahontas County Commission issued a resolution in September calling for total waivers of restrictions imposed on public safety spectrum, or federal funding to offset costs associated with developing public safety communications systems under “the unique burden of NRQZ regulations.”

Limited fiber and cellular access

Starlink service wouldn’t be as necessary for home Internet access if the area had universal access to fiber broadband. Recent government grants could help, as one funded project is designed to subsidize Spruce Knob Seneca Rocks Telephone’s installation of fiber lines in Pocahontas and Pendleton counties.

Ideally, residents would have access to both fiber home Internet and strong cellular networks. But the NRAO still warns that cellular signals could threaten its scientific research.

“Optical fiber as a broadband solution is far better than service from space or via wireless or cellular links, which are less reliable and have the potential to undo much of the coordination work that has happened in the National Radio Quiet Zone over many decades,” Sheldon Wasik, Zone Regulatory Services Coordinator for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, said in March 2024.

Starlink enters National Radio Quiet Zone—but reportedly cut off access for some Read More »

RFK Jr. claims Trump promised to put him in charge of NIH, CDC, and more

Policy, public health, rfk jr, Science, Trump, vaccines / Mike M. / October 31, 2024

Earlier this week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. used a Zoom call to tell his supporters that Donald Trump had promised him “control” of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal agency that includes the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, as well as the Department of Agriculture. Given Kennedy’s support for debunked anti-vaccine nonsense, this represents a potential public health nightmare.

A few days after, Howard Lutnick, a co-chair of Trump’s transition team, appeared on CNN to deny that RFK Jr. would be put in charge of HHS. But he followed that with a long rant in which he echoed Kennedy’s spurious claims about vaccines. This provides yet another indication of how anti-vaccine activism has become deeply enmeshed with Republican politics, to the point where it may be just as bad even if Kennedy isn’t appointed.

Trump as Kennedy’s route to power

Kennedy has a long history of misinformation regarding health, with a special focus on vaccines. This includes the extensively debunked suggestion that there is a correlation between vaccinations and autism incidence, and it extends to a general skepticism about vaccine safety. That’s mixed with conspiracy theories regarding collusion between federal regulators and pharmaceutical companies.

While there is no evidence for any of this, and some of it is clearly wrong, the conspiracies have real-world consequences. An anti-vaccine activist in Samoa, aided by a visit from RFK Jr., helped pave the way for a measles outbreak that shut down the government and ultimately led to over 80 deaths.

Kennedy has long been interested in getting access to the agencies that regulate vaccines and other interests of his, such as food safety, under the assumption they are hiding the data that would vindicate his views. And, long before his recent presidential run, he viewed Trump as the route to that access. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Kennedy claimed that he would be appointed to head a vaccine safety commission that Trump would supposedly create once in office. Nothing ever came of that, and it was never clear whether that was due to Trump lying to him, Kennedy exaggerating his significance, or Trump simply telling him what he wanted to hear at the time and never following up.

RFK Jr. claims Trump promised to put him in charge of NIH, CDC, and more Read More »