Last December, an artistic piece appeared on the University of Iowa (UI) campus that rubbed a whole lot of people the wrong way. It resembled a hooded KKK member and was constructed from newspapers containing stories on racial violence. UI, being a typical university, removed and condemned the artwork, apparently unable to see anything past the shape of the object -- like the subtext or even what its own condemnation meant in this context. (It was this effigy that prompted a completely ridiculous/trollicious response at Thought Catalog -- one that compared free speech to Nazism.)

The school went on to soothe its thin skin by inviting its students -- especially those with equally thin skin/inability to contextualize artistic statements -- to come up with more ideas for repressing further free speech.

Emails obtained Wednesday by The Gazette reveal UI administrators sent that draft to student leaders who had expressed indignation over the effigy, asking for “suggestions.” The students sent a “response draft” with a handful of changes and stronger language.

UI Vice President for Student Life Tom Rocklin said in internal emails that “some of what they have written, I think, is out of the question.”

The students, for example, suggested [President Sally] Mason call the statue a “portrayal of hate” and say “this action of an individual at an educational institution at the pedestal of the Pentacrest was not and will never be tolerated.”

They also suggested Mason call for an investigation.

Fortunately, most of the suggestions were never implemented. But the university still forced the artist -- a visiting professor who was on hand during the controversial effigy's very brief appearance on campus to answer questions and explain his motivations -- to remove it from the campus' informal free speech area, called the "Pentacrest."

The better news is that another local college -- Kirkwood University -- has found a home for Professor Serhat Tanyolacar's artwork.

Titled, "Fear of Art: Free Speech, Controversy and Public Space," the forum attracted about 150 Kirkwood faculty, students and community members — who posed dozens of questions after a 30-minute opening statement from Tanyolacar.

UI, meanwhile, maintains that it didn't remove the effigy because it was supposedly offensive, but because Tanyolacar didn't ask its permission before exercising his First Amendment rights. The administration also claims that if it had been asked, it would have granted its permission. This, of course, can't be proven after the fact, so it's a safe thing to say, even if most people don't believe a word of it.

What the university has done with its swift removal of protected expression in response to a heckler's veto is provide the student body with a blueprint for further attacks on free speech. FIRE's (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) Ari Cohn phrases it this way:

@uiowa has turned its students into such anti-#freespeech goblins that they are calling police to report suspected unregistered protests.

If you don't like something, start tattling.

University of Iowa police Lt. Joe Lang, who was on scene at the demonstration, said the police were called to the event because someone saw the demonstration and decided to report it.

“We’re out here to make sure they went through the proper channels to get permission for this demonstration,” he said “We’re protecting the vested interest of the university; we just want to avoid a situation similar to what happened a few months ago.”

The "demonstration?" A public "free speech wall" where any student could write down anything he or she wanted to, provided -- with permission from the university -- by the school chapter of the Young Americans for Liberty. But someone (or someones) on campus would rather shut down free speech -- using law enforcement, no less -- than deal with the possibility that someone might be offended.

This is the culture that is indulged by the University of Iowa. It claims (like many other schools that say one thing and do another) to be a supporter of free expression, but its previous actions show nearly no heckler will be denied his or her veto power. The school has decided -- through its statements and actions -- that free speech can only be defended if it's popular speech. UI's president, Sally Mason, has already gone so far as to apologize to students who felt "terrorized" by Tanyolacar's "unauthorized" artwork. In complete seriousness, she also claimed to support free speech while simultaneously asserting that the UI campus was no place for "divisive or insensitive displays."

The censoring of Tanyolacar's artwork has already produced a chilling effect on free expression, as is evidenced by the summoning of police to a free speech "demonstration." The campus cops are already geared up to "prevent" students from being "terrorized" by protected speech. And now a certain subset of students has been given more power than they can responsibly handle. It's clear which "side" of free speech the college has chosen to throw its weight behind: the side that limits, rather than encourages, an open exchange of ideas.

If you love our nation's stupid Drug War and our government's legalized theft system d/b/a asset forfeiture… well, it's highly unlikely that you read this blog with any regularity. If you don't like either of those, then here's more bad news for you.

The ATF -- another rogue DOJ agency and one which was previously only adjacent to the Drug War -- has been formally invited by the DOJ to jump in and start seizing more stuff. The initial dip of the ATF's toe into drug-related administrative forfeiture has been such a moneymaker that the DOJ is permanently removing the only barrier between the ATF and warehouses full of other people's property.

In February 2013, the Department of Justice started a pilot program allowing the ATF to process property related to drug offenses through administrative forfeiture, when weapons were also being seized. By Sept. 30, 2014, the ATF had seized and processed assets with a total value in excess of $19,300,000, according to the new rule.

The program will continue, according to the Justice Department.

The only thing holding the ATF back from being a full-blown soldier in the War on Drugs was paperwork and logistics. Formerly, if it seized something purportedly "drug-related," it had to turn it over to the DEA or a US Attorney for processing -- the latter option usually resulting in a trip through the court system. No longer. Now, it can handle forfeitures from start-to-finish.

This speeds things up for the US government, which still strongly feels (despite Eric Holder's recent rule tweak) that taking stuff from people under the assumption that the stuff itself is guilty of criminal activity is a great way to destroy drug empires, punish fraudsters and generally wreak law enforcement havoc on criminal enterprises. For the people on the other end of these "forfeitures" -- the only party saddled with the burden of proof -- it often looks like nothing more than government-ordained robbery.

According to the DOJ, "fast and effective" is better than "right."

Administrative forfeiture is expedient and effective, the Justice Department believes.

The DOJ notes, rather disingenuously, that all the legal hassle of disputed forfeitures is "costing" it thousands of dollars every year. Hence, it would prefer that its agencies be allowed to process their own administrative forfeitures, increasing the likelihood that due process will be bypassed some tax dollars can be "saved" while relieving taxpayers of their "guilty" property.

An uncontested administrative forfeiture can be done in 60-90 days for minimal cost, whereas judicial forfeiture generally can take 6 months to a year and cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. In the meantime, the government incurs additional costs if the property requires storage or maintenance until a final order of forfeiture can be obtained, the rule states.

Now, some entities (like the DOJ and its various three-letter underlings) believe that an "uncontested" forfeiture is a tacit admission of guilt. It's a stupid assumption but it probably lets them sleep better at night. In reality, an "uncontested" seizure is usually the result of a person realizing that an uphill court battle, multiple powerful government agencies and a massive amount of legal fees stand between them and their seized property. In most cases, it isn't worth the fight.

This policy change perverts the ATF's incentives, pretty much ensuring that the process will be abused (further) in the future. Anything that speeds up a corrupt and broken process will work out badly for those on the receiving end of the ATF's new powers. The further muddying of the lines separating agencies' jurisdictions will only make things worse, turning the ATF into a part-time Drug War ally who will now be looking for anything that might be "drug-related," rather than limiting itself to its designated duties.

Over a decade has passed since the 9/11 attacks, and the intelligence community still won't let the attack it didn't prevent be laid to rest. It is exhumed over and over again -- its tattered remains waved in front of legislators and the public, accompanied by shouts of, "YOU SEE THIS?!? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DON'T GET OUR WAY!"

It's grotesque and ghastly and -- quite frankly -- more than a little tiresome. The NSA's Section 215 program is set to expire on June 1st and James Clapper is making statements in its defense -- statements that read like someone attempting to sound more disappointed than angry. But this is James Clapper speaking, and all prior evidence points to him being unwilling to make any concessions on the domestic surveillance front.

Here's what he had to say about the impending death of the bulk phone records collection:

"In the end, the Congress giveth and the Congress taketh away," he said. "If the Congress, in its wisdom, decides the candle isn't worth the flame, the juice isn't worth the squeeze, whatever metaphor you want to use, that's fine."

"The intelligence community will do all we can within the law to do what we can to protect the country. I have to say that every time we lose another tool in our toolkit, it raises the risk," he added. "If that tool is taken away from us, 215, and, some untoward incident happens which should have been thwarted had we had it, I hope everyone involved in that decision assumes the responsibility and it not be blamed, if we have another failure, exclusively on the intelligence community."

The subtext is clear and Jason Koebler at Vice spells it out succinctly: Kill Section 215, but don't blame us if another 9/11 happens.

The intelligence community continues to argue -- without evidence -- that the program has aided in combating terrorism. It can't say how or offer any details as to attacks thwarted, but it makes the assertion all the same. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has access to intelligence documents most Americans will never see and yet it came to this conclusion: the bulk records program is both useless and a violation of civil liberties.

Clapper's defense of the program seems to be faith-based. In a single clumsy metaphor, Clapper summons the spirit of two Simpsons characters.

"215, to me, is much like my fire insurance policy for my home," he said. "The house never burns down, but I buy fire insurance, just in case."

Lisa Simpson argued against Homer's specious "bear patrol" reasoning by claiming a rock she found on the ground could keep tigers away -- noting that the lack of nearby tigers "proved" the rock worked. This is Clapper's sales pitch: the lack of another 9/11 attack is "proof" the program is necessary. Well, we haven't had a Summer Olympics hosted in this country since 1996, so it could also be claimed that Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act has been instrumental in preventing the US from hosting this extremely destructive parasite momentous event. After all, the roots of Section 215 also trace back to a 1990s partnership between the NSA and DEA to collect phone records on calls to foreign countries originating in the US.

Ned Flanders -- perhaps the most upstanding (and naïve) Springfieldian -- notably considered insurance coverage to be a form of gambling. Clapper's "gamble" -- his supposed "insurance" -- bets on surveillance state wins while putting Americans' privacy up as collateral. Even when viewed through Clapper's twisted perspective, the metaphor fails.

The difference here, is that the NSA's "insurance" is intrusive information on just about every citizen in the United States, regardless of whether or not they've done anything wrong.

The defenders of the surveillance framework always point to attacks they didn't prevent (like the Boston Bombing) as justification for intrusive spy programs. That argument alone should be greeted with riotous, disbelieving laughter. But they press this even further, giving themselves credit for every lull between major attacks and ignoring every report or investigation that shows their favorite programs do little more than make the job of counterterrorism more difficult.

Clapper seems to believe the death of the Section 215 program will be the death of us all. It's an absurd belief. Unfortunately, it's shared by far too many of those in the position to prevent its expiration.

About a year ago we noted how Comcast has a weird tendency to prevent its broadband users from being able to use HBO Go on some fairly standard technology, including incredibly common Roku hardware. For several years Roku users couldn't use HBO Go if they had a Comcast connection, and for just as long Comcast refused to explain why. Every other broadband provider had no problem ensuring the back-end authentication (needed to confirm you have a traditional cable connection) worked, but not Comcast. When pressed, Comcast would only offer a generic statement saying yeah, it would try and get right on that:

"With every new website, device or player we authenticate, we need to work through technical integration and customer service which takes time and resources. Moving forward, we will continue to prioritize as we partner with various players."

And the problem wasn't just with Roku. When HBO Go on the Playstation 3 was released, it worked with every other TV-Everywhere compatible provider, but not Comcast. When customers complained in the Comcast forums, they were greeted with total silence. When customers called in to try and figure out why HBO Go wouldn't work, they received a rotating crop of weird half answers or outright incorrect statements (it should arrive in 48 hours, don't worry!).

Fast forward nearly a year since the HBO Go Playstation 3 launch, and Sony has now announced an HBO Go app for the Playstation 4 console. And guess what -- when you go to activate the app you'll find it works with every major broadband ISP -- except Comcast. Why? Comcast appears to have backed away from claims that the delay is due to technical or customer support issues, and is now telling forum visitors the hangup is related to an ambiguous business impasse:

"HBO Go availability on PS3 (and some other devices) are business decisions and deal with business terms that have not yet been agreed to between the parties. Thanks for your continued patience."

Since every other ISP (including AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable) didn't have a problem supporting the app, you have to assume Comcast specifically isn't getting something from Sony or HBO it would like (read: enough money to make them feel comfortable about potentially cannibalizing traditional TV/HBO viewers). Fortunately for users, HBO's about to launch a stand alone app that won't need cable authentication, taking Comcast out of the equation anyway.

Still, this is a good example of how crafting net neutrality rules is only part of the conversation. It's great to have rules, but they don't mean much if bad or outright anti-competitive behavior can just be hidden behind half-answers and faux-technical nonsense for years on end without repercussion.

As the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov last week reminds us, the political situation in Russia is not just difficult, but extremely dangerous. Presumably hoping that technology might offer a relative safe way to cope with this situation, a Russian NGO has announced that it will be launching a nationwide social network dedicated to fighting bribery and corruption. You might expect that anonymity would be a crucial aspect, given the risks faced by those who choose to join. And yet, as this RT article explains, that's not the case (via @prfnv):

the new project will have one major difference from existing social networks -- a complete lack of anonymity. Membership will only be granted by invitation from existing members, and even when this condition is met, the institute that launches the project promises to open accounts only after verifying the identity of potential members in real life.

The users will have to provide a lot of details about themselves -- from name and date of birth, to place of work, e-mail and phone numbers. The people launching the project say that this is a necessary measure to prevent attempted slander, which they see as the main danger threatening their network.

That people could use the network to spread false accusations is certainly a risk, but hardly the main danger, which is surely that those accused of corruption may decide to settle things in the same way as Nemtsov's enemies. Creating a network of anti-corruption activists and lawyers will make its membership database extremely desirable for many nefarious actors, who would doubtless find things like place of work and phone numbers useful for future attempts to "dissuade" people from coming forward with information about bribe-taking. Let's just hope the new social network's security advisers are really good.

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A major reform of the EU data protection rules has been grinding through the system for over three years now, subject to some of the fiercest lobbying yet seen in Europe. The original European Commission proposal was amended and accepted by the European Parliament in 2014, but leaked documents obtained by the European digital rights group EDRi show that the Council of the EU, which is made up of the member state governments, is trying to sabotage the new rules (pdf):

Since 2012, the European Commission and the European Parliament both have produced a text that, while not being perfect, would greatly benefit citizens and businesses, establishing a common set of rules for the whole EU and guaranteeing high standards for personal data protection. Unfortunately, within the Council of the EU, Member State governments are working to undermine this reform process. For more than three years, the Council has not only failed to show support for this reform and negotiations, but is now proposing modifications to the text that would lower down the existing level of data protection in Europe guaranteed by the Directive 95/46 and even below the standards required to be in line with the EU treaties.

That's taken from a detailed analysis of the documents by EDRi, Access, Panoptykon Foundation, and Privacy International. It provides a very clear explanation of the five main areas where the Council of the EU is seeking to undermine much of the hard work done over the last two years. Here's a summary of the issues:

According to the leaked proposals, crucial privacy protections have been drastically undermined, including the right to be asked for consent, the right to know how your data are used and the right to object to your data being used, minimum standards of behaviour for companies exploiting individuals' data. In several places, the text would not likely pass judicial scrutiny under Europe’s human rights framework.

This is a really disappointing development, and one that might prove hard to undo, as EDRi explains:

The Council is trying to complete its work by the summer, before negotiating with the Parliament on a compromise. Unless something is done urgently, the Council will simply complete its agreement, at which stage only an absolute majority of the European Parliament would be the only way of saving Europe's data protection reform.

And so the saga of the EU's new data protection rules continues.

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Intrusive surveillance programs -- especially domestic surveillance programs -- are sold to wary legislators with promises of stringent oversight and periodic reporting. That's how they're sold. The reality is nowhere near as assuring.

The warrantless acquisition of Canadian ISP subscriber information was so thoroughly exploited by law enforcement that by 2011, subscriber data was being requested every 27 seconds. The recent addition of a warrant requirement has slowed these requests to a comparative crawl and resulted in cases being dropped by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). With this information no longer available on demand, law enforcement is apparently having to prioritize its cases. You know a system has gone off the rails when agencies would rather cherry pick enforcement efforts than deal with something so "onerous" as a warrant application.

No matter what the process entails, there's supposed to be oversight in place to prevent abusive behavior and/or civil liberties violations. In Canada, the oversight body is willing, but the law enforcement body is weak… and riddled with massive holes.

Last fall, Daniel Therrien, the government’s newly appointed Privacy Commissioner of Canada, released the annual report on the Privacy Act, the legislation that governs how government collects, uses, and discloses personal information. The lead story from the report was the result of an audit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police practices regarding warrantless requests for telecom subscriber information.

The audit had been expected to shed new light into RCMP information requests. Auditors were forced to terminate the investigation, however, when they realized that Canada’s national police force simply did not compile the requested information. When asked why the information was not collected, RCMP officials responded that its information management system was never designed to capture access requests.

So, there is no audit. And without a periodic audit, there can be no oversight. There may be an entity in place to collate reported data, but what's being reported is incomplete and inaccurate. And not in any small way. The problem appears to be systemic, ingrained and possibly deliberately misleading. Some meaningful details have been redacted from the memo, but the mostly intact closing paragraph is far from comforting.

In conclusion, based on our review of statistics and interviews with senior officials at the RCMP we were unable to rely upon the numbers provided for warrantless access requests, nor was there any linkage between reports of such requests and the actual operational files containing such requests.

And the oversight entity? Apparently, almost as untrustworthy. Michael Geist points out that crucial wording was omitted from the Privacy Commissioner's official report.

The incident highlights the limits of Canadian oversight over law enforcement and surveillance activities. The use of the privacy commissioner’s audit power is frequently lauded as a mechanism to ensure that government does not run afoul of the law. Yet despite identifying inaccurate and incomplete data on a high profile privacy issue, the public audit report does not use the terms “inaccurate” or “incomplete.”

The commissioner may have kept these damning terms (temporarily) out of the public's eye in the official report, but even the more hedged version deployed there does nothing to instill confidence in the RCMP's ability to handle this access responsibly or to submit to any form of accountability.

Ultimately, our efforts to review files, combined with our interviews with RCMP personnel, did not allow us to determine whether the RCMP, as a whole, was compliant, or non-compliant, with the provisions of the Privacy Act with respect to the collection of subscriber information without a warrant. Moreover, other than through a manual review of all case files stored, the RCMP does not have a means to demonstrate its compliance in this regard.

Even if the Privacy Commissioner is unwilling to say it, the conclusions speak for themselves. The RCMP is "non-compliant." Stringent procedures that were implemented to ensure accountability have been largely ignored. The RCMP tries to claim it's really just a "software program," but that assertion doesn't explain why more than four years down the road from the cited 2010 report, nothing has changed.

There is a likely explanation for this lack of careful reporting by the RCMP. For one, it helps obscure the paper trail. It also makes the possibility of mounting a legal challenge on its domestic data-gathering a much more daunting prospect. The RCMP may be unable to show what it's doing right, but its lack of proper documentation helps ensure it will be equally as hard to prove it's doing anything wrong.

The genes that make humans distinct from other animals are being narrowed down. We have a lot in common with other mammals and especially other primates, but relatively tiny differences in a set of genes could explain how human language and intelligence evolved and developed. Understanding the complexity of human intelligence and genetics will likely take decades or longer -- and we may never fully understand every aspect of consciousness. However, we're making some progress and creating some smarter mice along the way. Check out a few of these experiments.

• Injecting human astrocytes (the most abundant cells found in the brain) into a mouse brain actually makes mice measurably smarter. This isn't exactly the beginnings of the rats of NIMH, but the researchers are going to try rats next.... [url]
• Activating a certain gene called HARE5 ("human-accelerated regulatory enhancers") leads to the development of bigger brains in humans -- and perhaps other mammals like mice and chimpanzees. A mouse embryo treated with a human HARE5 sequence developed a 12% larger brain than a mouse embryo with a chimpanzee HARE5 gene. [url]
• Hundreds of mice have been genetically engineered to express the human version of the FOXP2 gene -- a gene linked to speech and language. The resulting mice were able to learn a maze faster than control mice. And are you pondering what I'm pondering? [url]
• The ARHGAP11B gene could be a unique gene for developing modern humans' massive neocortex. Adding this gene in mice gave them larger neocortices and brain folds (mice brains are usually tiny and smooth) -- but the mice weren't necessarily more intelligent. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Dennis Toeppen of Suburban Express is still deploying his highly-peculiar brand of "customer service" -- something that includes doxxing unhappy customers, suing unhappy customers, suing unhappy customers, suing unhappy customers and being arrested for "harassment through electronic communications."

Nothing has changed. Toeppen is still a lawsuit fan who believes negative reviewers or anyone who doesn't fully appreciate how hard it is to run a shuttle bus service should be forced to pay $500 (at least) in "liquidated damages." Now, he's looking to pave himself a downhill slope for his future lawsuit filing. Techdirt reader Kionae sends over this article from the University of Illinois' campus newspaper which contains a small detail that shows just how far Toeppen is willing to go to get his $500.

Suburban Express recently changed its “Terms & Conditions” so any legal action arising on the online transaction of tickets should take place in Ford County, roughly 30 miles north of Champaign.

In a statement on its website, the company said it chose Ford County “because of high availability of court dates, efficient court operation, excellent staff work ethic, low costs for both parties, easy parking, and other factors.”

This has nothing to do with "efficient court operations" and has everything to do with making it economically unfeasible for sued college students to fight back. Taking the action 30 miles away strips students of the following protection:

According to the Student Legal Services Operational Plan, Student Legal Services can only represent eligible students who have cases in or originating in Champaign County.

Toeppen's change of venue is carefully calculated to extract the most money/misery from the situation. That situation, of course, is Toeppen's inability to run a business and field criticism at the same time. In Toeppen's defense, he'll say he's never wrong and it's these spoiled brat students with overactive mouths who are to blame. (What? Did you think I was going to half-heartedly defend any aspect of Toeppen's behavior?)

With students forced to pay for their own defense against Toeppen's frivolous, vindictive lawsuits, the needle moves towards a higher default judgment rate. That's what Toeppen wants, considering his legal arguments are mostly indefensible. This should see his lawsuit-filing rate approaching the stratospheric highs of 2012-13, a two-year span in which Suburban Express filed 126 lawsuits. Toeppen is misusing the judicial system. Hopefully, the judges there will recognize his venue-shifting for what it is and push cases back to the proper courts.

While net neutrality justifiably received a ton of press attention last week, we were quick to point out that the FCC's other major decision -- to start attacking protectionist state broadband laws -- may just be a bigger deal. These twenty or so laws, as we've explored in detail, are written and lobbied for by incumbent ISPs and prohibit towns and cities from deciding for themselves what they should be able to do regarding local telecom infrastructure. If you realize that neutrality violations are just a symptom of a lack of competition, the FCC's decision to start dismantling the onerous parts of these laws strikes much deeper at the root of the problem.

Make no mistake: these laws are the worst sort of protectionism. And despite ISP attempts to make this a partisan issue, most municipal broadband deployments are being approved by Republican voters in Conservative areas. Similarly, Democrats and Republicans alike realize that letting AT&T or Comcast write a law that tells you what you can or can't do (and in some cases even eliminates eminent domain rights) only benefits AT&T and Comcast. Municipal broadband is an organic, community reaction to the telecom market failure they're "enjoying" on a daily basis.

That's why it's been amusing to see Marsha Blackburn rushing to the defense of the ISPs and these bills, breathlessly trying to argue that she's just terribly, terribly concerned about states' rights. Almost immediately after the FCC's vote to limit the reach of such laws in Tennessee and North Carolina, Blackburn and Senator Thom Tillis introduced the "States' Rights Municipal Broadband Act of 2015 (pdf)," which would amend the Telecommunications Act to strip back FCC authority over states when it comes to timely broadband deployment.

Both Blackburn's and Tillis' states have passed laws that have prevented municipal broadband deployments from expanding and encroaching on the territories of companies like AT&T, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable and Comcast. EPB Broadband (in Tennessee) and Greenlight (in North Carolina) petitioned the FCC for help in removing state-level barriers to deployment after a decade of FCC apathy to the issue. According to a statement on Blackburn's website, she's not blindly protecting her state's broadband duopoly, she's protecting locals from the FCC's vile assault on their freedom:

"I’m pleased to be working with Senator Tillis on this important issue. As former state legislators, we strongly believe in States’ rights and will fight the FCC’s liberal agenda. Chairman Wheeler’s regulatory appetite appears to know no bounds and is seeping dangerously into the lives of Americans. It is time for Congress to assert itself and protect States once again from unelected Washington bureaucrats."

Just so we're clear: letting AT&T and Comcast write awful state law that strips away "states' rights" to the sole benefit of their monopoly revenues is perfectly fine. But the FCC using its legal authority to restore those same rights -- is a frontal assault on states' rights? Blackburn and Tillis are actually trying to dress up duopoly protectionism as some form of noble ethos in a particularly blistering wave of nonsensical hubris.

Blackburn's effort is unlikely to go anywhere, in part because even the ISPs that write these laws don't want to be publicly associated with them. You'll notice that while many large ISPs felt free to complain about net neutrality rules, most of them remained mute on the FCC's municipal broadband decision -- largely because buying protectionist state law is nearly impossible to coherently defend (as Tillis and Blackburn so deftly illustrate). Both Comcast and AT&T have mergers awaiting FCC review, so any full-throated support for keeping U.S. broadband uncompetitive will have to remain the purview of disingenuous intermediaries.