More bad news on the privacy front, thanks to one of America's largest corporations. Documents obtained by the ACLU show Amazon is arming law enforcement agencies with cheap facial recognition tech, allowing them to compare any footage obtained from a variety of sources to uploaded mugshot databases.

The company has developed a powerful and dangerous new facial recognition system and is actively helping governments deploy it. Amazon calls the service “Rekognition.”

Marketing materials and documents obtained by ACLU affiliates in three states reveal a product that can be readily used to violate civil liberties and civil rights. Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon.

It's already been deployed to several areas around the country, with Amazon acting as the government's best friend a la AT&T historic proactive cooperation with NSA surveillance efforts. The documents [PDF] obtained by the ACLU show Amazon has been congratulated by local law enforcement officials for a "first-of-its-kind public-private partnership," thanks to its deployment efforts. On top of providing deployment assistance, Amazon also offers troubleshooting and "best practices" for officers using the tech. It has even offered free consulting to agencies expressing an interest in Rekognition.

These efforts aren't surprising in and of themselves, although Amazon's complicity in erecting a law enforcement surveillance structure certainly is. Amazon is looking to capture an underserved market, and the more proactive it is, the more market it will secure before competitors arrive. To further cement its position in the marketplace, Amazon is limiting what law enforcement agencies can say about these public-private partnerships.

In the records, Amazon also solicits feedback and ideas for “potential enhancements” to Rekognition’s capabilities for governments. Washington County even signed a non-disclosure agreement created by Amazon to get “insight into the Rekognition roadmap” and provide additional feedback about the product. The county later cited this NDA to justify withholding documents in response to the ACLU’s public records request.

Documents also suggest Amazon is looking to partner with body camera manufacturers to add its facial recognition tech. This is something body camera manufacturers are already considering, and licensing an established product is far easier than building one from the ground up.

The system is powerful and can apparently pull faces from real-time footage to compare to databases. It also allows agencies to track individuals. It puts passive cameras on surveillance steroids, giving any person who strolls past a government camera a chance to be mistaken for a wanted suspect. To date, facial recognition software has managed to generate high numbers of false positives, while only producing a handful of valid arrests.

These efforts have been deployed with zero input from the largest stakeholder in any government operation: the general public.

Because of Rekognition’s capacity for abuse, we asked Washington County and Orlando for any records showing that their communities had been provided an opportunity to discuss the service before its acquisition. We also asked them about rules governing how the powerful surveillance system could be used and ensuring rights would be protected. Neither locality identified such records.

It may be the NDAs discourage public discussion, but more likely the agencies acquiring the tech knew the public wouldn't be pleased with having their faces photographed, tracked, stored indefinitely, and compared to pictures stored in law enforcement databases. And if public agencies are unwilling to discuss these programs with the public, they're far less likely to create internal policies governing use of the tech. Amazon's push to secure a sizable portion of this market is only making things worse, and its use of NDAs is going to further distance these public agencies from being accountable to the people they serve.

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This is it — the last day of the campaign! If you haven't yet backed our project to revamp and produce the CIA's declassified training game, today's your last chance to check out the Kickstarter page for CIA: Collect It All and secure a copy.

The campaign closes tonight at midnight! Don't delay!

We've had a huge influx of last-minute backers thanks in large part to The Verge's review of an advance copy of the game, so if you're not yet a backer, help us keep that momentum going — and if you are, please tell your friends! CIA: Collect It All comes with over 150 high-quality playing cards, with physical copies available for $29 (shipping to 170 countries), the print-and-play PDF version for $10 (anywhere, of course!) and a five-copy bundle for retailers or groups who want to team up to save on shipping.

We are planning to continue accepting some additional pre-orders before we complete the game, but we don't have that set up just yet, and we still have no plans to continue production beyond a single print run — so if you definitely don't want to miss out, back the campaign before it's too late!

For years now broadband providers have used a lack of competition to impose all manner of obnoxious additional fees on the backs of broadband consumers. That includes arbitrary and obnoxious usage caps and overage charges, which not only raise rates on captive customers, but quite intentionally make using streaming video competitors more expensive and cumbersome. Once caps are in place, large ISPs often exempt their own content from usage caps while still penalizing streaming competitors (aka zero rating).

ISPs used to claim that such limits were necessary to manage network congestion, but as that argument was increasingly debunked (caps don't actually help manage congestion) they've shifted their justifications to more flimsy alternatives. These days, ISPs usually offer no justification at all, or issue vague declarations that they're simply trying to help users "better understand their consumption habits."

Case in point: Verizon DSL customers in Virginia recently began noticing language on Verizon's website indicating that the company's already expensive (and slow) DSL service will now face ambiguous "usage" limitations depending on the speed of your tier. While caps are now pretty common among cable ISPs, it's the first time Verizon has begun flirting with such limits:

For some context: Verizon has long been trying to get rid of DSL customers it doesn't want to upgrade so it can spend more of its time focused on slinging ads at Millennials via its new Oath (Yahoo and AOL) brand. It has been doing this by either refusing to repair and upgrade these users, or by constantly imposing rate hikes on lines that can't even get close to the FCC's 25 Mbps definition of actual "broadband." Because regulations require they keep servicing these lines (since most were taxpayer subsidized), they've had to engage in more creative methods to drive users off of them.

When I pressed Verizon as to why the company felt the need to impose any "usage" restrictions upon slow, over-priced DSL lines at all, it first informed me that these aren't caps because they aren't being enforced (yet). It then tried to claim that the company was simply trying to help consumers "see their usage":

"We're not applying data caps, overage fees or any sort of restrictions on DSL customers," Verizon claims. "There is a small trial in Virginia of displaying data usage in customer billing. It affects less than 2,000 homes over three remote terminals. But while the customers are shown data allowances of 150-250 GB, none of them are charged if they exceed those amounts."..."We've never had a way for these customers to see their usage," a company spokesman added, stating this is "just a very small trial with that." "Lots of cable companies display broadband data usage to customers even though they don't impose data caps. I'm afraid this isn't as exciting as you think," the spokesperson argued.

But there's simply no legitimate reason for Verizon to even be hinting at usage caps. The company's DSL lines are so slow, the cost of providing the service is largely negligible, and the volume of bandwidth these lines consume are largely irrelevant. And if the company really wanted users to understand their consumption, it could have simply provided an actual usage meter that mirrors the meters you often see on routers or the OS. So why is Verizon doing this?

As ISPs flirt with usage caps, usually they'll first employ "soft caps" (read; intially unenforced) and a usage meter (usually inaccurate) aimed at "educating" users on their monthly bandwidth consumption. This usually warms consumers up to later efforts at hard caps and overage fees (usually around $10 per each additional 50 GB). It's like the boiling frog anecdote: once users are ok with the idea of such restrictions, ISPs can then tighten the noose slowly to further monetize these users -- with less of a backlash if than if you'd simply imposed hard caps from the start.

But in this case Verizon didn't even bother to offer users an actual usage meter showing their usage. I pressed Verizon as to why, if it's simply concerned about consumers understanding their usage, it didn't just provide users with an actual bandwidth meter? Why even use language hinting at usage limits at all? It's at that point the company stopped responding to my inquiries.

Again, Verizon has made it abundantly, repeatedly clear that it doesn't want to keep these DSL users as the company shifts focus. For Verizon, the goal is either to drive them to Verizon Wireless, or to a cable competitor (that in many instances will upsell them to a Verizon Wireless service bundle anyway). The very worst case scenario for Verizon is these users stick around and wind up paying even more money for last-generation DSL. "Educating consumers" is traditionally the very last thing on an ISP exec's mind when a company begins flirting with this kind of language.

It's pretty clear Verizon was experimenting with the idea of caps and simply hoped the limited footprint meant nobody would notice. And with net neutrality now formally slated to expire June 11, there's going to be a lot more "experimentation" where this came from.

Journalist Adam Johnson's FOIA lawsuit against the CIA has been brought to a halt. Johnson sued the CIA for refusing to release classified documents it had previously voluntarily "leaked" to selected journalists. The CIA argued the documents were still classified and not subject to FOIA requests. Johnson argued the CIA had already released the documents to the public when it decided to release this classified info to journalists.

Back in February, it appeared the court was on Johnson's side. Responding to the government's motion to dismiss, the court pointed out the CIA couldn't waive FOIA exemptions when dumping docs to journalists and then seek to use them when other journalists asked for the same info.

There is absolutely no statutory provision that authorizes limited disclosure of otherwise classified information to anyone, including "trusted reporters," for any purpose, including the protection of CIA sources and methods that might otherwise be outed. The fact that the reporters might not have printed what was disclosed to them has no logical or legal impact on the waiver analysis, because the only fact relevant to waiver analysis is: Did the CIA do something that worked a waiver of a right it otherwise had? The answer: CIA voluntarily disclosed what it had no obligation to disclose (and, indeed, had a statutory obligation not to disclose).

After another round of submissions by the plaintiff and the government, the judge has reached a final decision [PDF]. What once looked like a win for the FOIA requester has been turned into judicial support for selective disclosure. The CIA can waive and reinstate FOIA exemptions as often as it wants, so long as it only dumps documents to "trustworthy" journalists who won't make the waiver permanent by publishing them in full. (h/t Chris Geidner)

I fail to see why the fact that the information exists in electronic form on some private organization's server, which server can theoretically be hacked by an unauthorized user, should be treated any differently. If the only way that information can be seen by the general public is by stealing it from an authorized recipient, logic dictates that the information is not available to the general public- it is not "in the public domain." Plaintiff and Amici make a good deal out of the fact that the newspapers' servers are not secure servers, but I do not believe that the security level of a sending or receiving server makes the slightest difference to the analysis.

So Plaintiff fails because he is unable to demonstrate that the information he seeks resides today in the public domain; assuming, for purposes of argument, that the CIA' s decision to email the information to the reporters placed it there.

There is another reason why one cannot conclude that these particular emails are in the public domain. Even if there were a copy of the emails in the files of Mr. Shane or Mr. Ignatius or Ms. Gorman, or even if the reporter-recipients could still readily call up the full text on their computers, there is no evidence in the record that any member of the public could walk into the offices of the Times or the WaPo or the WSJ and demand to see a copy. For that matter, there is no evidence that anyone could obtain the information via service of a subpoena on the reporter-recipients. This court would be shocked if the three eminent news organizations whose employees received these emails did not fight tooth and nail against any effort to make them public; and as I understand matters, the law is on their side. If that were not so, Johnson would not be asking the CIA to disclose the redacted information; he would be suing the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

The court notes the judicial system has bent over backwards to insulate national security agencies from FOIA requesters and these agencies' own careless handling of classified material. Agencies that regularly participate in selective leaking can still keep leaked documents out of FOIA requesters' hands so long as the leak recipients haven't published the documents in full. In this case, Johnson had redacted copies of the emails sent to journalists and was seeking to have the redactions stripped away. He had already cleared the high hurdle of knowing exactly what documents had been leaked to journalists. But despite clearing a nearly impossible hurdle, the court, while sympathetic, notes judicial precedent allows the CIA to have it both ways: release info to members of the public while claiming the information was never released publicly.

When grappling with the possibility of waiver via selective and limited disclosure of classified information, courts clearly outlined a way for Government officials dealing with national security and foreign affairs material to have their cake and eat it, too. They could make disclosures to third parties when the Director deemed it necessary to protect intelligence sources and methods, and they could do so without waiving their right to invoke relevant FOIA exemptions, as long as they did so in a way that created no permanent record outside the confines of the agency of exactly what was disclosed (exactly meaning, literally, "in haec verba "). In that way, the courts could never be entirely sure that whatever "public" record did exist (the notes taken by the people who were briefly shown the records at issue in Muslim Advocates, for example) was the "specific information" that had been disclosed previously. This bit of sophistry allowed the courts deny FOIA requests on the basis discussed in Wilson v. CIA, 5 86 F .3d 171, 186 (2d Cir. 2009).

It all comes down to one thing: the journalists who received the CIA's leaks never published the documents in full. Because of this -- despite there being copies of unredacted classified info residing on certain newsroom servers -- the CIA can claim this was not a public release and keep its redactions in place. The court's refusal to hold the government to a higher standard when it invokes national security claims has resulted in this illogical conclusion: what's been made public is not public info if certain caveats apply. To celebrate this ridiculous victory for government opacity, the journalists who received these documents should publish them in full. As the court notes, they'd be well within their legal rights to do so. But that would mean they wouldn't be trusted with selective leaks in the future, so it's unlikely these members of the public will undo the damage done by 40 years of NATSEC jurisprudence.

Whenever a company like HBO gets targeted with a lawsuit over intellectual property concerns, you might think we find it tempting to jump all over them in each and every case. After all, HBO has the distinction of being notably horrible when it comes to enforcing its own IP, from shutting down viewing parties, to offering streaming options, to abusing the the DMCA process just to keep spoilers from existing, as though that could possibly work.

But the truth is the fun we have in cases where these types are found to be in legal trouble over intellectual property only extends to when that legal trouble is in some way warranted. When its not, we find that there is a helpful other party on which to heap our ire. That's the case in a lawsuit HBO recently won against graffiti artist Itoffee R. Gayle, who complained about his work appearing in a scene of the HBO show Vinyl. The court ruled that HBO's use was de minimis, or so fleeting so as to cause no injury and therefore not be actionable.

But just how fleeting was HBO's use? Well...

One episode of the show included a scene of a woman walking down a street in New York City where she passes by a dumpster tagged with graffiti that says “art we all.” The graffiti artist, Itoffee R. Gayle, claims that this depiction violated his copyright and trademark rights. According to his complaint, HBO never tried to contact him or license the graffiti. Of course, as the court agreed, HBO didn’t actually need to try to contact Gayle and no license fee was needed because not all copying is unlawful.

Looking at the use of the graffiti art in the episode, the court notes that Gayle’s claims “are premised on a fleeting shot of barely visible graffiti painted on what appears to be a dumpster in the background of a single scene” and that the art appears for no more than two to three seconds. Two to three seconds. Of an entire episode. Yup, sounds pretty de minimis to me. The court goes on, noting that the graffiti is not pictured by itself or close-up, plays no role in the plot, and “is hard enough to notice when the video is paused at the critical moment. It is next to impossible to notice when viewing the episode in real time.” The judge seems pretty annoyed by the copyright infringement claim, noting that “Gayle’s [claims] border on frivolous.”

I'll say this: the court showed far more patience and restraint than an Honorable Judge Geigner would have to Gayle. To waste the court's time with an argument over both copyright and trademark rights dealing with the background scenery of 2 seconds worth of film is so plainly absurd that anger is the only proper response. This was a clear money-grab and, frankly, one based on a premise of silly. It only takes a moment of backing up and thinking about what motivation HBO had here in using this scenery in this shot to know that nothing untoward was done with Gayle's art. It wasn't a theme, it wasn't featured, it wasn't referenced beyond barely being in the shot. It was entirely incidental.

The trademark claim fell for the same reason.

While Gayle attempts to argue that HBO intentionally picked this particular piece of graffiti art to use in the background, the court concludes, “HBO’s motive in depicting the graffiti is irrelevant to the de minimis inquiry.” The copying is not actionable, because its use was so small, even if there was a thematic reason for it. For similar reasons, the court also rejects Gayle’s trademark claims.

It's long past time that courts start issuing some punishment to those that gum up the court system with this sort of bullshit. If nothing else, putting me in the corner of HBO deserves some sort of punitive action.

When the FBI sued Apple a couple of years ago to compel Apple's help in cracking an iPhone 5c belonging to alleged terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, the lines seemed clearly drawn. On the one hand, the U.S. government was asserting its right (under an 18th-century statutory provision called the All Writs Act) to force Apple to develop and implement technologies enabling the Bureau to gather all the evidence that might possibly be relevant in the San Bernardino terrorist-attack case. On the other, a leading tech company challenged the demand that it help crack the digital-security technologies it had painstakingly developed to protect users — a particularly pressing concern given that these days we often have more personal information on our handheld devices than we used to keep in our entire homes.

What a difference a couple of years has made. The Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report in March on the FBI's internal handling of issue of whether the Bureau truly needed Apple's assistance. The report makes clear that, despite what the Bureau said in its court filings, the FBI hadn't explored every alternative, including consultation with outside technology vendors, in cracking the security of the iPhone in question. The report also seemed to suggest that some department heads in the government agency were less concerned with the information that might be on that particular device than they were with setting a general precedent in court. Their goal? To establish as a legal precedent that Apple and other vendors have a general obligation to develop and apply technologies to crack the very digital security measures they so painstakingly implemented to protect their users.

In the aftermath of that report, and in heartening display of bipartisanship, Republican and Democratic members of Congress came together last week to introduce a new bill, the Secure Data Act of 2018, aimed at limiting the ability of federal agencies to seek court orders broadly requiring Apple and other technology vendors to help breach their own security technologies. (The bill would exclude court orders based on the comparatively narrow Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act—a.k.a. CALEA, passed in 1994--which requires telecommunications companies to assist federal agencies in implementing targeted wiretaps.)

This isn't the first time members of Congress in both parties have tried to limit the federal government's ability to demand that tech vendors build "backdoors" into their products. Bills similar to this year's Secure Data Act have been introduced a couple of times before in recent years. What makes this year's bill different, though, is the less-than-flattering light cast by the OIG report. (The bill's sponsors have expressly said as much.) At the very least the report makes clear that the FBI's own bureaucratic handling of the research into whether technical solutions were available to hack the locked iPhone led to both confusion as to what was possible and to delays in resolving that confusion.

But worse than that is the report's suggestion that some technologically challenged FBI department heads didn't even know how to frame (or parse) the questions about whether the agency possessed, or had access to, technical solutions to crack the iPhone's problem. And even worse is the report's account that at least some Bureau leaders may not even have wanted to discover such a technical was already available—because that discovery could undermine litigation they hoped would establish Apple's (and other vendors') general obligation to hack their own digital security if a court orders them to. As the report puts it:

After the outside vendor successfully demonstrated its technique to the FBI in late March, [Executive Assistant Director Amy] Hess learned of an alleged disagreement between the CEAU [Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit] and ROU [Remote Operations Unit] Chiefs over the use of this technique to exploit the Farook iPhone – the ROU Chief wanted to use capabilities available to national security programs, and the CEAU Chief did not. She became concerned that the CEAU Chief did not seem to want to find a technical solution, and that perhaps he knew of a solution but remained silent in order to pursue his own agenda of obtaining a favorable court ruling against Apple. According to EAD Hess, the problem with the Farook iPhone encryption was the "poster child" case for the Going Dark challenge.

There's a lot to unpack here, and one key question is whether "capabilities available to national security programs" — that is, technologies used for FBI's counterintelligence programs — can and should be used in pursing criminal investigations and prosecutions. (If such technologies are used in criminal cases, the technologies may have to be revealed as part of court proceedings, which would bother the counterintelligence personnel in the FBI who don't want to publicize the tools they use.) But the case against Apple Inc. was based on a blanket assertion by FBI that neither its technical divisions nor the vendors the agency works with had access to any technical measures to break into Farook's company-issued iPhone. (Farook had destroyed his personal iPhones, and the FBI's eventually successful unlocking of his employer-issued phone apparently produced no evidence relating to the terrorist plot.)

Was the problem just bureaucratic miscommunication? The OIG report concludes that this was the fundamental source of internal misunderstandings about whether FBI did have access to technical solutions that didn't require drafting Apple into compelled cooperation to crack their own security. (The report recommends some structural reforms to address this.) And certainly there's evidence in the report that miscommunication plus the occasional lack of technical understanding did create problems within the Bureau.

But the OIG report also suggests that some individuals within the Bureau actually may have preferred to be able to argue that the FBI didn't have any alternative but to seek to compel Apple's technical assistance:

The CEAU Chief told the OIG that, after the outside vendor came forward [with a technical solution], he became frustrated that the case against Apple could no longer go forward, and he vented his frustration to the ROU Chief. He acknowledged that during this conversation between the two, he expressed disappointment that the ROU Chief had engaged an outside vendor to assist with the Farook iPhone, asking the ROU Chief, "Why did you do that for?" According to the CEAU Chief, his unit did not ask CEAU's partners to check with their outside vendors. CEAU was only interested in knowing what their partners had in hand – indicating that checking with "everybody" did not include OTD's trusted vendors, at least in the CEAU Chief's mind.

I have to note here, of course, that the FBI has consistently opposed strong encryption and other essential digital-security technologies since the "Crypto Wars" of the 1990s. This isn't due to any significant failures of the agency to acquire evidence it needs; instead, it's due to the FBI's fears that its ability to capture digital evidence of any sort may someday be significantly hindered by encryption and other security tech. That opposition to strong security tech has been baked into FBI culture for a while, and it's at the root of agency's fears of "the Going Dark challenge."

Let's be real: it's not clear that encryption will ever be the problem the FBI thinks it is, given that we live in what law professor Peter Swire has called "The Golden Age of Surveillance." But if the day that digital-security technology significantly hinders criminal investigations ever does come, then it would be appropriate for Congress to consider whether CALEA should be updated, or whether a new CALEA-like framework for technology companies like Apple should be enacted.

But that day hasn't come yet. That's why I favor passage of the Secure Data Act of 2018 — it would limit federal agencies' ability to impose general-purpose technology mandates through the courts' interpretation of a two-century-old ambiguous statute. (Among other features, the Act also would effectively clarify that that the All Writs Act, general-purpose statutory provision from 18th century can't be invoked all by itself to compel technology companies to undermine the very digital security measures they've been working so hard to strengthen.) In the long term, our security (in both cyberspace and meatspace) is going to depend much more on whether we all have technical tools that protect our information and data than it will depend on the FBI's has a legal mandate compelling Apple to hack into our iPhones.

Of course, I may be wrong about this. But I share Apple CEO Tim Cook's argument that this public-policy issue ought to be fully debated by our lawmakers, which is a better venue for policy development than a lawsuit filed based on a single dramatic incident like the terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

Mike Godwin (@sfmnemonic) is a Distinguished Senior Fellow with R Street Institute.

If you haven't yet heard about CIA: Collect It All, here's the short version: the CIA recently declassified a top secret card game that it uses to train new recruits, and we're making a version that you can play at home. The game puts players in the shoes of analysts leveraging a variety of real-world intelligence gathering techniques to solve global crises. It comes with over 150 high-quality playing cards, and is also available as a print-and-play PDF.

And you've got less than 36 hours to back the Kickstarter campaign and secure your copy!

We currently have no plans to continue production of the game beyond this first print run, so now might be your only chance to get your hands on CIA: Collect It All. For more information on what the game's all about, check out our recent Kickstarter update all about gameplay, as well as the latest episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

We're continuing to work on playtesting the game, redesigning the cards, and filling in the redacted text from the CIA documents. We're really excited to get this game into everyone's hands, so check out our Kickstarter before the campaign ends tomorrow at midnight.

Oh, Rupert Murdoch. When we last checked in with him, he was literally begging Facebook to pay News Corp. money because (he claimed) News Corp was "enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook." We noted at the time that Murdoch -- a staunch public defender of free market capitalism and a loud opponent of "socialism" -- seemed to be a bit hypocritical in effectively demanding a corporate handout from other, more successful companies, when his own company had struggled for years to adapt to the internet.

He's not done yet. Apparently, if Facebook (and, one presumes, Google) don't want to just hand him money for nothing, he's now demanding that they be heavily regulated:

Robert Thomson, the CEO of Murdoch’s company, News Corp., took a step beyond criticism last week in an investor call, when he advocated the creation of an “algorithm review board,” which would essentially regulate the secret formulas platforms use to determine, among other things, what news is shown to which people.

What a fucking hypocrite. Just compare this to what Murdoch was saying just a few years ago about free markets, competition, regulation and s haring:

But while we’ve won the efficiency argument, we have yet to persuade people that the market does better because it is more moral — or that socialism fails because it is largely immoral in its denial of fundamental freedoms.

To the contrary, too many people think that the market succeeds because it is based on a vice — greed. And that socialism is better, because it is based on a virtue — sharing.

Naturally, they conclude from this one of two things: that the way to make capitalism more just and more humane is to temper it by injecting a large dollop of government-mandated sharing, or that, like President Obama, government is better.

Or how about this gem:

How often do you hear the same people who say they are for free trade then push for stronger anti-dumping laws, a backdoor form of protectionism?

How often do we hear the same politicians who say they believe in free markets go on to carve out a special tax credit for some industry they favor?

Oh, Rupert, why it happens all the time. Sometimes from people like yourself.

Crony capitalism is not capitalism. It’s cronyism.

Yes. So why are you trying to get your crony's to regulate your competitors who have done a much better job than you in the market?

The market succeeds because it gives people incentives to put their own wants and needs aside to address the wants and needs of others. To succeed, you have to produce something that other people are willing to pay for.

And if he fails to get people to pay for it, Rupert Murdoch will run to the government, demanding that more successful companies just pay him, and then will also advocate for heavily regulating those companies while pretending to be for the free market and against cronyism.

What’s fair about taking money from people who’ve earned it and giving it to people who didn’t?

Says the guy demanding money he didn't earn from internet companies...

In short, as we work for freer markets, we must also work to persuade our fellow citizens that we do so not simply because a free market is more efficient but because it is fair and just and right.

Yes, Rupert Murdoch believes this right up until his own companies have trouble adapting and competing. Then he goes running to government to regulate those companies who are actually succeeding.

There may be reasonable arguments for certain kinds of regulations. But Murdoch's only reason for calling for regulations of internet companies -- after whining about socialism and talking up free markets -- is pretty blatantly an attempt to whine for a handout for his own businesses that have failed to adapt to changing times.

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