More "fake news" legislation is on the way. The Cambodian government -- borrowing US presidential rhetoric and bad ideas from neighboring Vietnam (tbf, the Vietnamese government has bad ideas to spare) -- is going to censor local press outlets under the pretense of protecting the public.

The government of Cambodia recently announced a new directive aimed at combating “fake news” that will reportedly, among other restrictions, require all websites to register with Cambodia’s Ministry of Information or face additional scrutiny. The announcement follows a meeting between the prime minister of Vietnam and the prime minister of Cambodia, and comes just ahead of Cambodia’s general election later this month.

This is only the latest move in the Cambodian government's regulation of internet speech. Earlier initiatives created blockades for anything deemed to be a threat to national security and "specialized units" composed of Ministry personnel surfed social media platforms looking for things to prosecute citizens for.

This also follows a couple of incidents seen as contributing to the government's consolidation of power. The sale of the Phnom Pehn Post to a Malaysian businessman whose PR firm does work for the Cambodian prime minister suggested the government wanted to be in the news production business. Another independent press outlet was hit with a large fine and a short deadline, forcing it to close up shop.

One of Cambodia’s most stridently independent newspapers, the Cambodia Daily, published its last edition on Monday with the headline “Descent Into Outright Dictatorship” as it closed amid a crackdown on critics of prime minister Hun Sen.

The English-language paper had been given a deadline of one month to pay $6.3m in years of back taxes, which the publication disputed and described as “astronomical”.

The Daily was a frequent critic of the prime minister and had extensively covered high profile "treason" prosecutions of prominent government critics. This closure followed the government's shutdown of 18 radio stations and the institution of a ban on leasing time to foreign broadcasters like the Voice of America.

Given this backdrop, the new directive appears to have nothing to do with "fake news" as it would have been defined prior to the 2016 election. Instead of combating speculative reporting and outright fabrications, the term -- and the initiative -- will be used to attack anything the ruling class doesn't agree with… just like here in the good old US of A.

Leaving private voter or customer data easily accessible on a public-facing server is the hot new fashion trend. You'll recall that it's a problem that has plagued the Defense Department, GOP data firm Deep Root Analytics (198 million voter records exposed), Verizon's marketing partners (6 million users impacted), Time Warner Cable (4 million users impacted), and countless other companies or partners that failed to implement even basic security practices. And it's a trend that shows no sign of slowing down despite repeated, similar stories (much of it thanks to analysis by security researcher Chris Vickery).

This week yet another pile of private voter data was left publicly accessible for anybody to peruse. According to analysis by Kromtech Security’s Bob Dianchenko, a Virginia-based political consulting and robocalling company by the name of Robocent publicly exposed 2,600 files, including voter file spreadsheets (including voter phone numbers, names, addresses, political affiliations, gender, voting districts and more) and audio recordings for a number of political campaigns.

When Diachenko contacted the firm, he was told that they were a "small shop" and that "keeping track of everything can be tough." In a statement to ZDNet, which first reported the latest exposure, Robocent co-founder Travis Trawick did his best to downplay the exposure by insisting the data was stale, and publicly-available anyway:

"In an emailed statement, Robocent co-founder Travis Trawick confirmed that the data had been secured, and claimed that the data was from "an old bucket from 2013-2016 that hasn't been used in the past two years." He confirmed that the company is investigating the scope of the data that was accessible. "All exposed data was publically available information," he said, adding that he will contact affected customers "if required by law."

The problem: what's deemed "publicly available" varies from state to state. While voter data is generally a matter of public record, states like Maine and Massachusetts restrict the use of such data for political campaign purposes. Other States, like South Carolina, have restrictions on only selling said data if you're a registered voter in the state. And while the data may have been stale, it still wasn't adequately protected however you slice it; it was quickly indexed by GrayhatWarfare, a searchable database where a current list of 48,623 open S3 buckets can be perused at your leisure.

This latest exposure is believed to be the fifth major breach of voter data in the last half-decade. It's a trend that shows no real sign of slowing down despite the simplicity of protecting this data and the rampant press coverage such exposures routinely receive.

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For somewhere close to a decade we've talked about journalism professor Jay Rosen's important concept of "the view from nowhere." This is the "professional" stance that many media operations (mainly big time newspapers) take in reporting the news, in which they stupidly refuse to actually take a stand on truth and instead tend to report the news in a "he said/she said" fashion, never bothering to tell you which one is actually true. Indeed, we've long argued that if journalists want to actually be relevant, they need to have a point of view, and that point of view should be about what is true, not granting "equal weight" to both sides of a story that doesn't deserve it. Taking the side of truth and pointing out lies for what they are is not bias, it's real journalism.

If you want a recent example of the moronic "view from nowhere," which is so frequently practiced by the NY Times, entitled Trump Now Says He Accepts U.S. Intelligence Reports on Russian Election Meddling. There's nothing factually incorrect there, but it's... complete bullshit in terms of what is actually happening. Yes, Trump says that, but an accurate report would explain why that's almost certainly a false statement from Trump given everything else he said about the situation during his press conference with Putin. Joshua Benton succinctly summarizes just a couple of the many, many problems with the NY Times "view from nowhere" approach:

The problem is again not that the Times description is inaccurate, but rather that it is meaningless if you understand the actual context -- with that context being that what Trump says this time clearly does not accurately portray the situation due to the many, many times he's said the opposite, or attempted to undermine the investigation, let alone the fact that he seems incapable of even comprehending that Russian meddling may be a separate issue from "there's no collusion!" But the NY Times insists that this is how it has to cover the President (even as the President likes to call the NY Times out as "fake news" pretty frequently), because it stupidly thinks that this "view from nowhere" helps them appear unbiased. But that's dumb. It doesn't make them appear unbiased. It makes them appear stupid and unwilling to do the job that reporters should be doing in helping to suss out the truth.

And "the truth" is not "just report the facts." The truth means putting the facts in context so that the news is actually meaningful. That means dropping "the view from nowhere" and picking up the view from somewhere. And that somewhere should be reality-based.

Reporter Dan Froomkin has a long and fascinating post at Medium that has gotten much less attention than it deserves on this subject, and I urge everyone to read it (especially if they're reporter). In it, Froomkin argues that the way past the "view from nowhere" is that newspapers (in particular, the LA Times) should take "the view from California":

So from California, the view is clear: Trump is a profoundly regressive force whose actions and statements are dangerous. And he’s being enabled. Congress has abdicated its role as a check to presidential power. The Supreme Court is no longer committed to protecting minority rights. The result: an irrational and unrestrained president threatens the future of our country as a pluralistic constitutional democracy.

A bureau that openly embraces this view as a baseline, and is unafraid to call out assaults on pluralism, for instance, would cover Trump very differently from more typical DC reporters, who censor themselves for fear of appearing to take sides.

It would operate almost like a foreign bureau. That means no undue deference to authority and no allegiance to stifling local conventions.

Some will -- incorrectly -- argue that he's suggesting they just take an "anti-Trump" stance, which would make them no better than various partisan news organizations that are either pro- or anti-Trump. But that's not what he's actually arguing if you read closely. He's arguing that it's time to take a reality-based approach. That's not a pro- or anti- any particular party or politician. It's just pro-reality.

And that takes us to what I think is the most important point in Froomkin's article: there are publications that take partisan viewpoints, and a bunch that claim to be "bi-partisan" or "non-partisan." Indeed, so much of the bad NY Times and Washington Post coverage we've seen tend to be them bending over backwards to try to appear "bi-partisan," which usually means bringing on some "conservative" opinion columnists to supposedly "balance out" their "liberal" reporters (though all of those labels are pretty silly). But that just leads to more nonsense for everyone. It's just reinforcing he-said/she-said. Instead, Froomkin says the good journalists today need to be anti-partisan:

I’m talking about being anti-partisan. Anyone coming to Washington who is not blinded by political ambition can see that both parties have failed and are corrupt and are out of step with most Americans.

That doesn’t mean they are similarly culpable. Other than sharing the Republican Party’s slavish devotion to money, the Democratic Party has an entirely different set of failings. Its leaders remain the same elitist career politicians who brought you Hillary Clinton and managed to lose to Trump. They are inconstant, hedging, observably insincere, and prone to seeing the least-popular political positions as pragmatic.

In spite of this, mainstream reporters continue to craft their articles to reflect the presumption that there are exactly two sides to each issue — one Democratic and one Republican — that they are facially equally valid, and that people with alternate views are extremists. This is what The Atlantic’s James Fallows and others have so aptly called “false equivalence.”

But in reality, the American common ground may actually lie outside the current Democratic-Republican axis, rather than at its middle, which opens up a world of interesting political-journalism avenues.

In short, stop covering everything as if it's a horse race, with two horses: one red, and one blue. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are deeply flawed institutions, in different ways and (perhaps) to different degrees. But the real problem is the stupidly partisan nature of basically everything. We've long noted here at Techdirt that we're not even remotely partisan. We try to avoid naming any politician's political party because as soon as we do it seems to drop the intelligence level of any conversation as people immediately jump in with nonsense claims about "well, obviously he'd do something dumb he's a [Democrat/Republican], they all believe in [pure anti-American nonsense]."

And yet, any time we criticize someone from either party, we're also then automatically lumped in (falsely) as being a clear supporter of the other party. It's this tribalistic nature of partisan politics that leads to an inability to actually tackle large issues. Being anti-partisan and focusing on actual truth, as Froomkin suggests, has to be the way forward for news organizations these days. Obviously, there will always be those who are clearly partisan on one side or the other, but the supposedly "bi-partisan" view from nowhere news organizations are doing everyone a disservice. In pretending to be unbiased and "just presenting facts," they're failing to present truth by failing to present actual context or any sense of reality.

Anyone and everyone working in journalism today should read Froomkin's article (which is much longer and goes into more detail). I don't necessarily agree with every point in there, but on the key point, I wholeheartedly agree. The press today needs to be anti-partisan and anti-tribal. It shouldn't be looking for point/counterpoint on tough issues. It should be ferreting out the truth.

You'll recall that even back in 2014 a lot was being made about Putin's troll factories, or the oodles of hired underlings paid by the Russian leader to fill the internet with bile and disinformation twenty-four hours a day. Much of what we originally learned about these disinformation shops came from Russian whistleblowers like Lyudmila Savchuk. Savchuk spent two months employed by the operation and was so disgusted that she quit, launched an anti-propaganda social activist campaign, and successfully sued the Russian government for one Ruble in a bid to expose the effort.

Over the last few years we learned that these online propaganda efforts were much larger and sophisticated that originally believed. Reports as early as 2015 had already highlighted how these also extended well beyond just routine shitposting and clever memes and into the real world; like the time Russia went so far as to open a museum in Manhattan to try and spin its "annexation" of Crimea.

Many tried to downplay the impact and scope of these efforts in the following years, insisting that no real damage could come from a bunch of marginally-competent Russians with broken english shitposting on the internet (a narrative that doesn't quite gel with the DOJ indictment or the whistleblower accounts that have emerged since, showing the efforts were notably more nuanced and sophisticated than initial 2014 and 2015 reporting suggested).

This week, a new report from Buzzfeed made it clear that 2016's disinformation wave wasn't just constrained to a few warehouses in St. Petersberg. Back in 2016, reports emerged suggesting that some entrepreneurial "teens in the Balkans" had been part of a broad effort to spread disinformation in support of Trump ahead of the 2016 election. The stories at the time identified more than 100 pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. At the time, these efforts were largely brushed aside as the result of local teens eager to cash in on Facebook monetization of garbage information:

"The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don't care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles."

But an investigation by Buzzfeed has since uncovered a notably more industrialized propaganda effort, aided, in part, by Americans:

"But after reviewing social media posts, government records, domain registry information, and archived versions of fake news sites, as well as interviewing key players, BuzzFeed News, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and the Investigative Reporting Lab Macedonia can now reveal that Veles’ political news industry was not started spontaneously by apolitical teens.

Rather, it was launched by a well-known Macedonian media attorney, Trajche Arsov — who worked closely with two high-profile American partners for at least six months during a period that overlapped with Election Day.

The report states that Arsov, in turn, was working with Americans like Paris Wade, who is currently running for office in Arizona. It also notes that at least one member of Russia's Internet Research Agency indicted by Robert Mueller was in Macedonia three months before the first web domain for the country’s US-focused disinformation site was registered. And while there's no hard, public evidence yet linking Russia to the effort, the report heavily implied that American and European investigators are pretty clearly headed that general direction:

"Reporters did not find any evidence connecting the Russian, Anna Bogacheva, to the Veles sites. Arsov denies any links to Russia. But now Macedonian security agencies are cooperating with law enforcement in the United States and at least two Western European countries to probe possible links between Russians, US citizens, and the pro-Trump “fake news” websites, two senior Macedonian officials said.

A senior FBI agent familiar with the Macedonia case confirmed that the bureau is assisting with the investigations. The agent said that information determined to be of interest to Mueller is being shared with his office, but declined to comment further."

Granted that's not to say that much of the motivation wasn't just simple profit for folks like Arsov, who proclaimed that duping Americans into consuming bullshit was profitable -- at least until Facebook started weeding out garbage. But the story also makes it clear that Arsov was pretty cagey about his relationship with allies in the States, and quotes former FBI agents like Clint Watts, who suspect that much of the initial funding and analytics know how may have originated with people like Anna Bogacheva, who was among the 13 Russian nationals indicted by the Mueller probe back in February:

"According to the indictment, Bogacheva at one point oversaw the “data analysis group” for the agency’s US operation. Along with another agency employee, Bogacheva allegedly traveled around the United States for about three weeks in June 2014, gathering information for an intelligence report that was shared with her superior at the agency.

Exactly a year later, she arrived in Macedonia."

And while there's again no hard ties between Russia and the Macedonia efforts yet, the report makes it clear that multi-country law enforcement inquiries are in their very "early stages" as they try to unravel the scope of the disinformation assault. Meanwhile, if there's one thing that has been made clear since this wave of propaganda was first unearthed, it's that this entire affair keeps getting larger, weirder, and more complicated, in stark contrast to those intent on framing it as some meaningless trolling by a handful of innocuous, ineffective and hapless shitposters.

Internet filtering -- whether it's for copyright reasons or "for the children" [INSERT FAVORED OFFENSIVE CONTENT HERE] -- doesn't work. It certainly never works as well as advertised. And when those ads are being paid for with your tax dollars to push filters that make the internet worse for the sake of making the internet "safer," you'd probably like to ask for a refund.

The UK is implementing porn filters and adding in fun stuff that's less definable like "extremist content. " Governments all over Europe want the biggest service providers to filter out whatever happened to be offending them this legislative session. Most recently, it was copyright infringement. Fortunately, the EU's proposed filtering legislation died before it could ruin the internet, but its unwieldy corpse is bound to be reanimated by seething publishers and performance rights groups.

But, hey, maybe a metric ton of anecdotal evidence isn't enough to convince you filtering doesn't work. Maybe you need more than failure after spectacular failure to erase your faith in harder nerding/legislative busywork. Maybe you're cool with overblocking and will simply close your eyes (and your browser) when the filter doesn't do any filtering at all.

If you're skeptical, there's always science. A recently-released research paper confirms what everyone (except politicians, moral majority types, legacy content industries...) already knows: internet filters aren't worth the bits they're expending.

In a paper entitled Internet Filtering and Adolescent Exposure to Online Sexual Material, Oxford Internet Institute researchers Victoria Nash and Andrew Przybylski found that Internet filters rarely work to keep adolescents away from online porn.

“It’s important to consider the efficacy of Internet filtering,” said Dr, Nash. “Internet filtering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily ‘underblock’ due to the constant development of new ways of sharing content. Additionally, there are concerns about human rights violations – filtering can lead to ‘overblocking’, where young people are not able to access legitimate health and relationship information.”

The lede isn't buried. The first paragraph of the article demonstrates that confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

Results suggested that caregiver's use of Internet filtering had inconsistent and practically insignificant links with young people reports of encountering online sexual material.

If you want to believe it's working, you can. But you'd better not ask the people it's supposedly protecting. Because it isn't. As the report notes, filtering systems -- especially those erected through government mandate -- are the worst of both worlds. They both underblock and overblock, creating two problems and zero solutions.

Despite their wide adoption in the developed world, filters are expensive and imperfect technologies in three key ways: First, in financial terms, they are costly to develop and maintain, and even if offered free at the point of use, their costs are ultimate borne by the consumer or taxpayer. Second, in practical terms, they present the problem of underblocking, a phenomenon in which new problematic sites, content, and apps may slip through. Finally, in informational terms, filters also present the problem of overblocking, wherein the content is unnecessarily blocked, restricting access to necessary health, cultural, and social information. In practice, this means that filters offer only imperfect protection, and impose informational costs on children and adolescents seeking legitimate information, contrary to the information rights recognized in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Overblocking weighs most heavily on those who lack accessible sources of information offline; research suggests that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning adolescents, for example, are particularly reliant on the Internet for information about health and relationships.

Filters are a waste of time and money. The only value they add -- if it can even be called that -- is a slightly smug feeling of wellbeing for those who implement them. Politicians and caretakers like filters because it lets them believe they're doing something. But research shows they may as well have done nothing at all.

We found that this protective effect was modest, accounting for less than 0.5 percent of the variability we observed in our outcome variables. In other words, more than 99.5 percent of whether a young person encountered online sexual material had to do with factors beside their caregiver's use of Internet filtering technology.

It's one thing when a parent or direct caretaker spends their own money to buy something that doesn't work. It's quite another when a government mandates it, requiring every tax payer to pitch in for useless services. But there's nothing in this report that will dissuade filtering advocates from advocating for more filters. Evidence and research is no match for fervent beliefs.

Earlier this year, we wrote about EPIC, makers of the popular Fortnite game, picking up the baton from Blizzard to pretzel copyright law such that it believes it can sue those that cheat in its game for copyright infringement. This belief centers on the claim that these cheaters break the EULA, despite the fact that no actual copying occurs when breaking a EULA. To make PR matters worse for EPIC, the company managed to sweep up a fourteen year old in its lawsuit-blitz. Despite the teenager supposedly being quite brazen in his use of cheats, and in his communications to others about how to cheat in Fortnite, I had assumed that EPIC would find a way to quietly back away from this particular suit, given how shitty the optics would be. It did the opposite, pursuing the case and seeking a summary judgement after the teenager failed to respond. The court refused, however, citing a letter to the court from the teen's mother, who argued that the suit against her son was overkill and, critically, that the argument over the EULA was null because her minor son couldn't legally enter into such an agreement without her input.

Rather than again trying to salvage some PR positivity from any of this, EPIC then decided instead to take on the mother's letter as a legal matter, with its lawyers countering it as a legal argument. EPIC argued that caselaw is clear that such contracts aren't void, even if one party is a minor, so long as that minor enjoyed the benefits of the contract. Unfortunately, the judge in the case has decided that he will not dismiss and will allow this lawsuit to move forward.

“As detailed in plaintiff’s response memorandum, defendant has not shown that the complaint fails to allege sufficient facts to state a claim for relief that is plausible on its face,”

“[T]herefore, in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, plaintiff has stated a plausible claim, and the motion to dismiss must be denied.”

Now, in fairness to the judge, the court is required to adjudicate motions to dismiss with an eye towards favoring the plaintiff. Frankly, it was somewhat of a commitment to fairness that the court even allowed the mother's letter to serve as a motion to dismiss in the first place. On the other hand, it's useful to frame this ruling as one that comes from a judge steeped in the law, favoring a large company with a legal team likewise steeped in legal knowledge, and against the mother of a fourteen year old who cheated in an online game. When seen in that light, this whole thing is plainly ridiculous.

And dangerous, too, particularly as part of a trend in gaming companies misusing copyright law in this way to go after cheaters in online games. Yes, those cheaters are annoying. Yes, this teenager appeared to be a fairly bad actor. And, yes, EPIC has gone out of its way to suggest it wouldn't be trying to bankrupt this family and mostly just wants the cheating to cease. All of that can be true while it also being true that abusing copyright law in this way is both bad and opening a litigious door that we should want to remain shut.

As was widely expected, earlier today, the EU Commission brought down its latest antitrust fine against Google, this time for an eye-popping $5 billion. The number gets the attention, but it's worth looking at the underlying details here. This was the result of a two year investigation, specifically into certain bundling practices that Google used concerning Android and some of its apps. When Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager first announced the investigation in April of 2016, she more or less explained where they were headed:

The Commission's preliminary view is that Google has implemented a strategy on mobile devices to preserve and strengthen its dominance in general internet search. First, the practices mean that Google Search is pre-installed and set as the default, or exclusive, search service on most Android devices sold in Europe. Second, the practices appear to close off ways for rival search engines to access the market, via competing mobile browsers and operating systems. In addition, they also seem to harm consumers by stifling competition and restricting innovation in the wider mobile space.

And... that's more or less exactly what the Commission found in today's announcement.

Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said: "Today, mobile internet makes up more than half of global internet traffic. It has changed the lives of millions of Europeans. Our case is about three types of restrictions that Google has imposed on Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. In this way, Google has used Android as a vehicle to cement the dominance of its search engine. These practices have denied rivals the chance to innovate and compete on the merits. They have denied European consumers the benefits of effective competition in the important mobile sphere. This is illegal under EU antitrust rules."

In particular, Google:

• has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store);
• made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators on condition that they exclusively pre-installed the Google Search app on their devices; and
• has prevented manufacturers wishing to pre-install Google apps from selling even a single smart mobile device running on alternative versions of Android that were not approved by Google (so-called "Android forks").

I've been critical of some antitrust activity and supportive of others over the years, and I think it's important to take a step back and look at whether or not this actually will likely lead to greater innovation -- no matter what the reasoning is (and, it should be noted, many European officials have made it clear they think EU antitrust activities should be used to harm American companies because they're big and American, rather than for any principled reason concerning competition or innovation). And, of course, there are some people who simply hate big tech companies and will cheer on any attack on them whether it's for good or bad reasons.

Just to set some signposts for the discussion: I believe, and have argued strongly over the years, that competition is the key to innovation and innovation is an important component of making everyone's lives better. You are free to disagree with those claims, but then we're having a very different discussion. This is the lens through which I view this entire discussion. Based on that, antitrust activities are useful when they are used to stop truly harmful monopolistic practices that hold back competition and innovation. But, antitrust activities for other reasons, or which don't seem likely to result in greater competition and innovation tend to be wasteful and silly. So... where does this latest fine from the EU come down?

As I noted when the investigation was first announced, it seemed that only one of the three "prongs" of the investigation really seemed like a big issue: the preventing manufacturers from selling phones with alternative versions of Android. There is a non-nefarious reason why Google might want this -- because if those non-Google Android versions are poorly done, it could confuse people and reflect poorly on Google... but this condition could clearly be used to stifle competition and innovation in the space. There's a reasonable argument that this was always a step too far, and Google never should have gone down that path in the first place.

The other reasons given for the fine remain... a lot less compelling. First, there's the issue of tying Google search and Chrome to offering Google Play as a pre-installed app. First off, the EU admits (oddly) that this is unfair because everyone expects the Google Play store to be pre-installed:

As part of the Commission investigation, device manufacturers confirmed that the Play Store is a "must-have" app, as users expect to find it pre-installed on their devices (not least because they cannot lawfully download it themselves).

Okay, fair enough. But you know what that very same Play Store lets you do? Download other browsers and search apps. I don't use Chrome on my phone (I use Firefox, Firefox Focus -- which is fantastic, or Brave). I've even used alternative app stores in the past, but eventually shifted back to the Play Store, mainly because Google seemed to do a much better job of stopping dangerous or crappy apps from getting on my phone. And, as Google has suggested, part of the reason for requiring Chrome to be installed is that tons of other apps actually use Chrome components as part of how they work. So not installing Chrome with the Play Store would actually lead to a lot of apps not working properly.

The other issue for which Google was dinged was the payments to device manufacturers to make Google search the "exclusive" pre-installed search on those devices. Now, I could totally see a valid antitrust complaint on this point if Google were forcing manufacturers into this agreement against their will, and were able to force them to do so. But... here it's about Google doing a business deal to pay manufacturers to be the exclusive. As we pointed out at the beginning of the investigation, how is that different than when Google paid Mozilla to be the default search engine in Firefox? Then Microsoft outbid Google and Bing became the default.

Either way, on this issue, Google stopped doing this practice entirely in 2014.

Google says it's going to appeal this decision, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai is hinting that if the ruling is upheld, Google may no longer be able to offer Android for free in the EU. Google also argues that the way its designed its Android business has created a tremendous amount of choice -- including providing smart phone / tablet / other devices that are available at price points and in markets where Google's main competitor in this space, Apple, refuses to make any real offerings. And that's a fairly compelling point.

The bigger question, again, though is what will be the real impact on innovation for end users of all of this. I'm not convinced (should this hold up) that it will have much of an impact either way. I doubt making any of the required changes will really harm Google that much (as noted, in at least one case, it already gave up the practice four years ago). But I also don't see how any of the required changes really helps competitors or app developers in any significant way. It doesn't make any of them more likely to get more users, or provide a better way for them to get their services out there.

One of the issues with anything having to do with innovation is that it's impossible to envision the "innovation that would have occurred" in the counterfactual scenario in which the supposed antitrust violations never occurred. But looking over these issues, I'm hard pressed to think of how anything would have developed all that differently if Google hadn't done these things in the first place. Perhaps Amazon's Fire devices would have a larger market? Perhaps we'd have seen more innovation with other third parties building out their own versions of Android with their own playstores. But it seems unlikely that it would have materially changed how the search market and browser market developed.

Of course, it should be noted that there is some amount of karma here. Back during the Microsoft antitrust fight, Google stepped up in 2006 to complain to the EU Commission about Microsoft's bundling and default practices. Specifically, Microsoft's browser at the time included a built in search box that defaulted to Microsoft's own search (at the time, called MSN search). And Google didn't like that.

"The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don't think it's right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose."

And, amusingly, Microsoft's own response to that criticism was nearly identical to Google's today, saying that "the user is in control" and it's easy to change the defaults. So there's absolutely some hypocrisy in how Google has acted through this whole thing.

However, in the end, I'm still hard pressed to see how today's fine will actually change anything in a way that improves innovation and what the public gets to do. Google is competing with lots of companies on a variety of different fronts these days. Earlier this year we had a podcast exploring how companies might disrupt Google, and I don't see how these moves make any of what we discussed any easier at all. Instead, it seems to be fighting the last fight, over mobile UI, rather than the next real competitive and innovative fights on different kinds of services.

Do you guys remember Hadopi? This French version of a law designed to kick copyright infringers off of the internet essentially ended in 2016, after all kinds of reports showed the program to be an inefficient, unreasonably harsh failure that actually resulted in more infringement rather than less. Well, this travesty probably seems altogether silly here in 2018, given that Hadopi largely targeted filesharing infringement, while the majority of "piracy" these days takes the form of streaming content online rather than downloading it. Those enforcing Hadopi have no real way to track that kind of "piracy", making the whole thing useless.

But the French government appears to want to see if it can repeat its mistakes all over again, with reports that it will institute a streaming site blacklist, which will be every bit as effective as Hadopi. Making all of this especially odd is that it comes at a time when so-called pirates in France are increasingly turning to legal offerings and spending gobs of money on them.

A new report published by consultancy firm EY reveals that the number of French pirates has dropped by 8%, from 11.6 million in 2016, to 10.6 million last year. The remaining pirates also downloaded and streamed less infringing content than the year before, with consumption dipping 4%.

In fact, it appears that pirates are increasingly “going legal.” This doesn’t mean that they have quit their copyright infringing habits completely, but they are more likely to pay for access too. In the span of a year, the number of pirates without a video on demand subscription dropped by nearly 30%. The result is that more than half of all pirates also pay for a legal movie streaming service now.

The reasons why someone might simultaneously pirate content and pay for it through legit services have been covered here many times in the past. It ends up coming down to some combination of content-availability, not wanting to work through the silos content-providers have erected around what customers want, and reasonable pricing models for that content. What data like this ultimately shows is that so-called pirates are perfectly willing to pay for content if its offered to them in a convenient and reasonable way with few mental transactions needed. You know, how all of commerce works.

And, yet, for some reason the French government has decided to try to censor streaming sites -- which it is guaranteed to do badly -- in the face of this optimistic data. Instead, it should be working with content producers and streaming providers alike to make that content as widely available as possible.

“Netflix has managed to reel in pirate consumers who weren’t signed up with a legal service before. In 2017, there were 20% more pirate consumers paying for a Netflix subscription than the year before,” EY’s report states.

This suggests that the main goal of movie studios and other content providers is to make sure that their work is widely available on legal streaming platforms. Ideally, without any delays and at a reasonable price.

Giving the customer what they want, how they want it, at reasonable prices. What a completely novel and hard to grasp idea.

The dumpster fire that passes for security and privacy standards in the internet of things space is by now pretty well understood. It's also pretty clear that in this sector, "smart TV" vendors have been among the laziest sectors around in terms of making sure private consumer data is adequately encrypted, and that consumers understand that their viewing habits and even some in-room conversations are being hoovered up and monetized, usually sloppily.

Recent studies have found that upwards of 90% of smart TVs can be compromised remotely, and leaked documents have made it clear that intelligence agencies have been having a field day with the lack of security in such sets, easily exploiting paper-mache grade protections in order to use TV microphones to monitor targets without anybody being the wiser.

Meanwhile, set vendors and viewing tracking firms continue to do a pretty dismal job clearly explaining to the end user what data is being collected and monetized. The New York Times, for example, recently did a profile piece on a company named SambaTV, whose viewer-tracking software is now collects viewing data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States. Owners of these sets will find Samba's Interactive TV software already installed, and are told that the software simply lets you receive handy recommendations and experience TV "in a whole new way":

"Interact with your favorite shows. Get recommendations based on the content you love. Connect your devices for exclusive content and special offers. By cleverly recognizing onscreen content, Samba Interactive TV lets you engage with your TV in a whole new way."

But at no point during set up does the company really make it obvious just how much data is being collected or how it's used:

"Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched."

That's certainly something that would never be abused, right? Especially since we keep seeing story after story after story about how anonymized data isn't really "anonymous", such data isn't particularly well protected, and consumers don't actually have the faintest understanding of what's being collected and monetized in the first place. Consumer advocates say that transparency about what data is collected remains utterly lacking, as most users of this software have zero understanding it can potentially even track their political leanings:

“It’s still not intuitive that the box maker or the software embedded by the box maker is going to be doing this,” said Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy and technology policy at the advocacy group Consumers Union and a former policy director at the Federal Trade Commission. “I’d like to see companies do a better job of making that clear and explaining the value proposition to consumers."

The FTC last year fined TV vendor Vizio $2.2 million for hoovering up the viewing data on 11 million consumer TVs without consumers’ knowledge or consent. But FTC enforcement is inconsistent, and is often slow to address how companies now use numerous devices in concert (your smart phone, your home assistant, and your TV) to deepen in-home surveillance capabilities further. The rabbit hole gets deeper still when you consider that your ISP is also cashing in on your IOT device usage without much transparency or oversight thanks to the recent attacks on privacy rules and FCC authority over ISPs.

Quite often, such data hoovering systems are actively misrepresented as being of ambiguous benefit to the end user. And because users can technically dig through Samba's 4,000 word privacy policy and 6,500 word terms of use to discover what's actually happening (something companies know users won't do and may not even understand if they did), they're technically adhering to the law. Eventually we'll get around to working together on modernizations of the law, but pretty clearly not before years and dozens of additional privacy and security scandals drive the point home.