Judge Releases Final Diss Track In The Drake/Kendrick Feud: Dismissing Drake’s Pathetic Lawsuit Over Not Like Us

Defamation

from the hey-drake... dept

In what may be the most legally absurd aftermath of a rap battle in hip-hop history, Drake’s preposterously silly lawsuit against Universal Music has met its predictable end. The artist sued his own record label—not Kendrick Lamar himself—for the crime of also distributing Lamar’s devastating diss track Not Like Us. The judge overseeing the case has now dismissed it entirely, delivering what amounts to a final judicial verse in this musical feud.

Judge Jeannette Vargas recognizes a killer song when she hears one:

This case arises from perhaps the most infamous rap battle in the genre’s history, the vitriolic war of words that erupted between superstar recording artists Aubrey Drake Graham (“Drake”) and Kendrick Lamar Duckworth (“Lamar” or “Kendrick Lamar”) in the spring of 2024. Over the course of 16 days, the two artists released eight so-called “diss tracks,” with increasingly heated rhetoric, loaded accusations, and violent imagery. The penultimate song of this feud, “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar, dealt the metaphorical killing blow. The song contains lyrics explicitly accusing Drake of being a pedophile, set to a catchy beat and propulsive bassline. “Not Like Us” went on to become a cultural sensation, achieving immense commercial success and critical acclaim.

When you sue over a song, and the judge notes that the song has a catchy beat and a propulsive bassline, let alone “dealt the metaphorical killing blow,” I don’t think your lawsuit is going to survive. The court dumps it while noting that just because randos commenting on social media now call Drake a pedophile based on the song, that doesn’t make the song defamatory:

The Court holds, based upon a full consideration of the context in which “Not Like Us” was published, that a reasonable listener could not have concluded that “Not Like Us” was conveying objective facts about Drake. The views expressed by users @kaioken8026, @mrright8439, and @ZxZNebula, and the other YouTube and Instagram commentators quoted in the Complaint, Am. Compl., ¶¶ 73-74, do not alter the Court’s analysis. In a world in which billions of people are active online, support for almost any proposition, no matter how farfetched, fantastical or unreasonable, can be found with little effort in any number of comment sections, chat rooms, and servers. “[T]hat some readers may infer a defamatory meaning from a statement does not necessarily render the inference reasonable under the circumstances.” Jacobus, 51 N.Y.S.3d at 336.

The artists’ seven-track rap battle was a “war of words” that was the subject of substantial media scrutiny and online discourse. Although the accusation that Plaintiff is a pedophile is certainly a serious one, the broader context of a heated rap battle, with incendiary language and offensive accusations hurled by both participants, would not incline the reasonable listener to believe that “Not Like Us” imparts verifiable facts about Plaintiff

The judge actually does a fairly complete and detailed history of the war of words between Drake and Kendrick, even explaining the nature of the insults that pass back and forth between the two. Here’s just one paragraph of that section, but if you weren’t full up on the beef, now you can catch up:

Lamar fired back at Drake in “Euphoria,” which was released on April 30, 2024. Req. J. Not. at 3. In the track, Lamar claims, “I make music that electrify ‘em, you make music that pacify ‘em” and that he would “spare [Drake] this time, that’s random acts of kindness.” Req. J. Not., Ex. K. He accuses Drake of fabricating his claims: “Know you a master manipulator and habitual liar too/But don’t tell no lie about me and I won’t tell truths ‘bout you.” Id; see also Am. Compl., ¶¶ 14, 77. He insults Drake’s fashion sense, Req. J. Not., Ex. K (“I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress”), further raps “I believe you don’t like women, it’s real competition, you might pop a** with ‘em,” and taunts Drake for being a coward with his responses, id. (“I hate the way that you sneak diss, if I catch flight, it’s gon’ be direct.”)

Of course, in any defamation case, there can be fights over whether or not statements are facts (which can be defamatory) or opinion (which can’t be defamatory). Drake’s legal team had tried to argue that the question of whether the statements in Not Like Us were fact or opinion was a question of fact for a jury. But that’s not how that works. It’s a question of law that judges decide in most cases:

Whether a challenged statement is fact or opinion is a legal question. Celle, 209 F.3d at 178. Plaintiff argues that it is inappropriate for the Court to determine, at the pleading stage, whether a reasonable listener would perceive the Recording as fact or opinion. Opp’n Br. at 13-14; Hr’g Tr. at 24:11-26:8. Yet, because this is a question of law, New York courts routinely resolve this question at the motion to dismiss stage. See, e.g., Brian v. Richardson, 87 N.Y.2d 46, 52 (1995) (holding, on a motion to dismiss, that challenged statement constitutes opinion); Dfinity Found. v. New York Times Co., 702 F. Supp. 3d 167, 174 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), aff’d, No. 23-7838- cv, 2024 WL 3565762 (2d Cir. July 29, 2024) (“Whether a statement is a “fact [or] opinion is ‘a question of law for the courts, to be decided based on what the average person hearing or reading the communication would take it to mean’ and is appropriately raised at the motion to dismiss stage.”); Greenberg v. Spitzer, 62 N.Y.S.3d 372, 385-86 (2d Dep’t 2017) (holding that, because whether a statement is defamatory “presents a legal issue to be resolved by the court,” defamation actions are particularly suitable for resolution on a motion to dismiss). “There is particular value in resolving defamation claims at the pleading stage, so as not to protract litigation through discovery and trial and thereby chill the exercise of constitutionally protected freedoms.” Dfinity Found., 702 F. Supp. 3d at 173 (cleaned up); accord Biro, 963 F. Supp. 2d at 279.

Also, in defamation cases, the context of the speech always matters quite a bit. And here, the context is a rap battle. The judge points out how silly it is to go to court just because you got dissed too hard:

This is precisely the type of context in which an audience may anticipate the use of “epithets, fiery rhetoric or hyperbole” rather than factual assertions. A rap diss track would not create more of an expectation in the average listener that the lyrics state sober facts instead of opinion than the statements at issue in those cases.

For example, in “Euphoria” Lamar calls Drake a “master manipulator and habitual liar” and “a scam artist.” Req. J. Not., Ex. K. Drake responds in “Family Matters” by heavily implying that Lamar is a domestic abuser. See id., Ex. M. He also raps that he “heard” that one of Lamar’s sons may not be biologically his. Id. (“Why you never hold your son and tell him, ‘Say cheese’?/We could’ve left the kids out of this, don’t blame me/. . . I heard that one of ‘em little kids might be Dave Free”).

In “Meet the Grahams,” Lamar takes issue with Drake involving his family members in their feud. Req. J. Not., Ex. N (“Dear Aubrey/I know you probably thinkin’ I wanted to crash your party/But truthfully, I don’t have a hatin’ bone in my body/This supposed to be a good exhibition within the game/But you f***ed up the moment you called out my family’s name/Why you had to stoop so low to discredit some decent people?”). In that same track, Lamar alleges that Drake uses the weight loss drug Ozempic. Id. (“Don’t cut them corners like your daddy did, f*** what Ozempic did/Don’t pay to play with them Brazilians, get a gym membership.”). Lamar also insinuates that Drake knowingly hires sexual offenders. See id. (“Grew facial hair because he understood bein’ a beard just fit him better/He got sex offenders on ho-VO that he keep on a monthly allowance.”).

While Drake argued that the judge should ignore the other songs in the battle, the judge knows that’s not how any of this works:

Plaintiff argues that the Court should ignore the songs that came before and assess “Not Like Us” as a “singular entity.” Hr’g Tr. at 39:14-15; see also Opp’n Br. at 15-17. Plaintiff argues that the average listener is not someone who is familiar with every track released as part of the rap battle before listening to the Recording. Hr’g Tr. at 32:17-33:2; 35:9-19. Because the Recording has achieved a level of “cultural ubiquity” far beyond the other seven songs, Plaintiff contends that Court should not consider those other tracks in assessing how the average listener of the Recording would perceive the allegations regarding Drake. Hr’g Tr. at 36:10- 19; id. at 39:11-17; see also Opp’n Br. at 15.

There are a number of flaws with this argument. “Not Like Us” cannot be viewed in isolation but must be placed in its appropriate factual context. Immuno AG. v. Moor-Jankowski, 77 N.Y.2d 235, 254 (1991) (“[S]tatements must first be viewed in their context in order for courts to determine whether a reasonable person would view them as expressing or implying any facts.”). Here, that factual context is the insults and trash talking that took place via these diss tracks in the days and weeks leading up to the publication of “Not Like Us.” The songs released during this rap battle are in dialogue with one another. They reference prior songs and then respond to insults and accusations made by the rival artist. See, e.g., Am. Compl., ¶ 63. The songs thus must be read together to fully assess how the general audience would perceive the statements in the Recording. See, e.g., Celle, 209 F.3d at 187 (holding that two newspaper articles had to be read together to understand full context).

Also, the judge points out that part of the reason the song was so famous in the first place was because of the wider rap battle:

Additionally, it was not just the Recording which gained a cultural ubiquity, but the rap battle itself. In deciding this motion to dismiss, the Court need not blind itself to the public attention garnered by this particular rap battle. The Court takes judicial notice of the extensive mainstream media reporting that surrounded the release of “Not Like Us” and the associated feud between Drake and Lamar.

Then there’s the incoherence of Drake claiming that UMG was liable (remember, Kendrick was not a defendant here) because it kept “republishing” the song as it got more and more popular. But, as the judge notes, the later popularity of the song should have no impact on whether or not the song is defamatory (and it’s not):

Plaintiff counters that, even if the Recording was protected opinion at the time of its initial publication, UMG’s republication of “Not Like Us” in the months following, after it achieved unprecedented levels of commercial success, exposes it to liability. Hr’g Tr. at 37:20-38:17. This argument is logically incoherent. If the Recording was nonactionable opinion at the time it was initially produced, then its republication would not expose UMG to liability. Republication cannot transform Lamar’s statement of opinion into UMG’s statement of fact

There were other arguments Drake made in there as well, but they all fared about as well as Drake did in his rap battle with Kendrick.

The end result is that the case is dismissed. And, I gotta say, when you lose a rap battle so hard that your lawsuit over it is dismissed with a judge praising the catchiness of the song that went viral… that seems like you’ve lost that rap battle harder than anyone has ever lost a rap battle.

Filed Under: context, defamation, drake, jeannette vargas, kendrick lamar, not like us, rap battle
Companies: umg, universal music group

Why Things Are The Way They Are

Say That Again

from the can-we-un-fuck-a-nation dept

Right up front, I want to state that this is a very personal post. While it obviously draws from my many years of writing for Techdirt, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am expressing my own opinions about everything discussed below.

I’m not immune to reading the comments. In fact, I actually enjoy reading them here. We have a great collection of daily readers. Even the daily critics manage to raise a good point now and then.

But I do wonder why we still see people asking why we don’t cover more “tech” issues or (often disingenuously) claim they came to this site to read about “tech,” even though our coverage has expanded to cover lots of ancillary (and important!) subject matter. (The commenters who complain about this site being “too political,” however, are only arguing in bad faith, willfully ignoring the years of criticism directed towards Barack Obama, etc.)

As for myself, this is how that breaks down. I was plucked from the comment threads to contribute to this site, an anomaly for which I will be forever grateful. On top of that, Mike Masnick allowed me to branch out to subject matter not normally covered here, ranging from police accountability to what now appears to be my primary focus: the Trump administration’s war on migrants.

Even given my purview, I’ve asked myself the same question. I frequently come across court decisions handling issues I would have put front and center. For instance, more courts are ruling that the most frequent enabler of warrantless searches (“odor of marijuana“) is no longer an acceptable excuse in states where marijuana possession is legal (which is most of them).

It’s an important issue and it serves the greater purpose of limiting rights abuses by law enforcement. So, why am I not covering more of these?

The answer — at least subjectively — is a bit harrowing. It’s one thing to cover incremental changes in Fourth Amendment law when everything is operating normally. This means things are getting better for citizens and decreases the potential for abuse by the government.

But in this administration, it seems a bit weird to draw attention to incremental wins for constitutional rights when it seems most of those rights won’t survive the GOP assault on the nation — at least not in any recognizable form.

We’ve already seen the First Amendment converted into a vehicle for punishment. For Trump and his supporters, the First Amendment only protects their speech. They’ll be the first to point out there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment while simultaneously asserting that anyone who takes the side of Palestine via protests or public statements is providing “material support for terrorism.”

The rest of our rights are considered equally discretionary by this administration. While it will never do anything to alter the contours of an amendment that’s always been considered expansive enough to cover even the broadest definitions made by people operating with the least amount of good faith (that would be the Second Amendment), it seems like it’s more than willing to destroy the rest of them, especially those that put anyone that’s not white or male on (more or less) equal footing with the white males they (mostly) are.

So, while the Second Amendment will continue to be proclaimed as the right that protects the rest of the rights (by people who only started saying this after Obama was elected), the rest of our rights are up for grabs. And while the Founding Fathers may have firmly stated these right were inalienable, the current administration only cares for originalism when it’s being used to strip rights from people they think should never have had access to them (Blacks, women, LGBTQ+ people, accused criminals, pretty much any non-white person, etc.).

Mike has almost always made a point to focus on the positive with his New Year’s posts. And I’m glad he does. No one wants to read the collective output of a bunch of bitter pessimists. But it’s hard to retain hope when everything appears to be sliding from “slightly fucked” to “irrevocably fucked” on a daily basis.

The people we hoped would right this ship — political leaders, legislators, the US press, etc. — have failed us. Some have done it because their heart was never in it. Some have done it because it’s easier than walking directly into this administration’s fire hose. And some have done it because they, too, have lost hope.

I think we can still turn this around. I don’t know how, but I do know better than to forfeit the game. I don’t harbor any illusions that my writing is changing minds or speaking truth to power. I mean, I hope it’s doing the former and convinced it’s doing the latter. But the more time I spend interacting with people who think everything will be fine (or worse, think this administration is actually making America great) leads me to believe this nation is filled with people who are incapable of actually considering a competing point of view.

As for the latter, speaking truth to power only seems to work when someone in power is willing to honestly engage with criticism. The Democratic party has pretty much given up on doing anything that matters. Those who are still putting their hearts into this tend to be ridiculed by Trump supporters and Democratic voters alike as embarrassing aberrations. And the Republican party treats even mild criticism as an attack on America itself, responding with threats or belittlement but never with anything that might indicate the GOP contains anyone with any humanity.

The state of the nation is in flux. What we’ll look like on the other side of this — if there’s even an “other side” to reach — is unknown. But the way it looks now is that we’re engaged in the fight of our lives if we want to see anything resembling the America we’ve lived in and loved (albeit conditionally) for the past 250 years. It will take an organized effort to survive an administration that wants to convert the Land of the Free into a White Christian Nationalist paradise that will also welcome Jews who engage in genocide, but not the rest of them (George Soros, space lasers, etc.).

And while this top-down oppression generally won’t have the day-to-day effect on the everyday life of average Americans the way a court decision preventing “odor of marijuana” searches will, I can’t seem to find the latter compelling enough in the grand scheme of things to bring it to anyone’s attention.

It’s exhausting keeping up with this administration. But it’s worth doing. No one doing this sort of thing to the United States should be ignored just because their acts are normally part of this site’s subject matter. There’s a nation being destroyed in front of our eyes. The least I can do is make sure you see it.

Filed Under: censorship, dhs, doj, evil, fascism, martial law, mass deportation, rights violations, trump administration

Daily Deal: Linux/UNIX Certification Training Bundle

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Linux and UNIX operating systems have become increasingly popular in commercial computing environments. Due to their rapid growth in today’s businesses, Linux/UNIX administrators have also become very much in demand. The Linux/UNIX Certification Training Bundle will help you prepare for the CompTIA Linux+ and the Novell Certified Linux Professional certification exams. The 2-course bundle is on sale for $50.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Trump’s CISA Raid: Pulling Cybersecurity Experts Off Critical Infrastructure Defense To Process Deportation Paperwork

Failures

from the seems-bad dept

Last week we covered how Trump’s immigration theater was pulling federal agents off child sex crimes, drug interdiction, and terrorism investigations to chase landscapers and line cooks instead. Turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. Now we’re learning the administration is also pulling hundreds of cybersecurity professionals away from defending America’s critical infrastructure so they can help process deportation paperwork.

The latest reporting from Nextgov reveals the scope of this bureaucratic insanity:

Employees across various units of the Department of Homeland Security have been marked for reassignments to agencies focused on Trump-era border security and deportation work, and could be dismissed if they don’t comply, according to multiple people familiar with the matter and a copy of one notice viewed by Nextgov/FCW.

In recent weeks, hundreds of DHS employees have been directed to transfer to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Protective Service and Customs and Border Protection — the main units overseeing much of President Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation efforts. 

The people being reassigned include staff from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the very federal agency, created during the first Trump administration, responsible for coordinating cybersecurity across federal agencies and helping protect America’s critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. This includes issuing emergency directives when vulnerabilities are discovered, coordinating incident response when breaches occur, and working with private sector operators of power grids, water systems, and financial networks—you know, the stuff that might actually matter for “national security.”

Bloomberg provides more detail on exactly which CISA personnel are being moved:

Compulsory reassignments have gone in recent weeks to workers within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, who had focused on issuing alerts about threats against US agencies and critical infrastructure, current and former employees said. They described the orders on condition of anonymity over fears of retaliation.

Affected CISA staffers have been shuffled to agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which received a $150 billion infusion to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown, the employees said. CISA workers have been moved to Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protective Service, a domestic police force working with ICE and CBP on deportations.

Changes have hit particularly hard in CISA’s Capacity Building team, which writes emergency directives and oversees cybersecurity for the government’s highest value assets, the employees said. Reassignments have largely targeted senior CISA staffers, who are forbidden from joining unions because they work on national security issues, according to one person.

So we’re specifically targeting the people whose job it is to improve the cybersecurity of federal agencies and coordinate with international partners on cybersecurity threats.

Once again, the Trump admin seems to time these things to highlight how messed up their priorities truly are. We’re still dealing with the fallout from the Salt Typhoon hack and we’re only just starting to get a sense of just how bad the recent Salesforce hack really is.

But sure, let’s pull the people who deal with those threats off their jobs so they can help arrest landscapers.

What could possibly go wrong?

This fits perfectly with the broader pattern we’ve already documented, where Trump’s immigration obsession is gutting federal law enforcement’s ability to tackle actual crimes that matter. As we covered recently, federal agents are being pulled off child trafficking cases, drug interdiction, and terrorism investigations so they can chase non-violent immigrants instead.

But there’s an extra layer of stupidity here, because CISA has become a target of right-wing conspiracy theories. Republicans have spent years claiming that CISA is actually a “censorship” agency rather than a cybersecurity one, because the agency had the audacity to set up a system to help local election officials alert social media companies of election misinformation around the time, place, and manner of voting.

Senator Rand Paul has been particularly vocal about wanting to eliminate CISA entirely. As Politico reported last year:

“I’d like to eliminate it,” Paul told POLITICO Thursday. “The First Amendment is pretty important, that’s why we listed it as the First Amendment, and I would have liked to, at the very least, eliminate their ability to censor content online.”

Of course, CISA doesn’t actually censor content online. That’s not what the agency does. But when you’re dealing with people who think everything is a grand conspiracy, facts tend to be inconvenient.

The reality is that CISA was created in 2018 under Trump himself, and its actual mission is defending critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. You know, the kind of attacks that could actually shut down hospitals, banks, and power plants. The kind of attacks that represent genuine national security threats, as opposed to someone trying to mow your lawn without the right paperwork.

But with the MAGA GOP’s bizarre obsession with CISA, reassigning actual cybersecurity experts to bogus immigration jobs is hardly surprising. The weird obsession with CISA is causing all sorts of stupid decisions, including Rand Paul making sure a different “CISA” (the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015) basically expired, in part because Paul seemed unwilling to recognize the two CISAs are different things:

Senate aides echoed concerns that cybersecurity industry stakeholders have also shared with Axios: That Paul is conflating CISA the agency with the information-sharing program, which shares the same acronym.

When you’re more concerned with feeding red meat to your base than actually protecting the country, these distinctions don’t matter much.

The human cost of this bureaucratic madness is becoming clear. As Nextgov reports:

The shifts could slow ongoing responses to cyber threats that have targeted the federal enterprise. 

CISA personnel are addressing a Cisco vulnerability — recently exploited by a hacking group potentially linked to China — that predominantly affects government networks. And over the summer, a hacker stole employee data from both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and CBP, Nextgov/FCW first reported.

So while CISA personnel are being reassigned to help with deportations, actual foreign adversaries are actively exploiting vulnerabilities in government networks. But I’m sure the Chinese hackers will politely wait until we’re done processing paperwork on restaurant workers.

The DHS response to this criticism is predictably tone-deaf and filled with culture war nonsense, rather than actually addressing the underlying issues:

“DHS routinely aligns personnel to meet mission priorities while ensuring continuity across all core mission areas,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Any notion that DHS is unprepared to handle threats to our nation because of these realignments is ludicrous, especially given the abject failure at the hands of CISA in the last administration.”

“CISA was adrift and was focused on censorship, branding, and electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure. Today, CISA is focused squarely on executing its statutory mission: serving as the national coordinator for securing and protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure and is delivering timely, actionable cyber threat intelligence, supporting federal, state and local partners, and defending against both nation-state and criminal cyber threats,” she added.

Ah yes, the “abject failure” of… defending critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. Because apparently the real threat to America isn’t foreign hackers potentially shutting down our power grid, it’s people trying to work in agriculture and construction.

This is what happens when you let people who fundamentally don’t understand how anything works make decisions about complex systems. They see an agency that viewed foreign influence attacks on elections and assume it must be part of some grand conspiracy to silence red-blooded Americans on social media.

The end result is that we’re making America demonstrably less safe in the name of political theater. When you pull cybersecurity experts off incident response and vulnerability management so they can help with deportation paperwork, you’re not making the country more secure. You’re just making it easier for foreign adversaries to exploit the next zero-day vulnerability, breach more federal systems, or potentially disrupt critical infrastructure.

But hey, at least the people cheering this on will have someone to blame when the lights go out.

Filed Under: breaches, cisa, cybersecurity, donald trump, immigration, rand paul

Broadband Monopolies Are Mad Because California Won’t Let Them Rip Off Apartment Dwellers

Broadband

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

California this week signed a new law that tries to prevent your landlord and broadband ISP from teaming up and preventing you from using broadband competitors.

Starting January 1, AB1414 requires that landlords “allow the tenant to opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party ISP, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy.”

The law doesn’t ban “bulk billing,” which usually involves an ISP and a development or apartment landlord striking a deal locking you into one provider. Such models sometimes can be useful in situations where mandated usage is the only way to recoup investment into hard-to-reach areas by smaller providers. But the idea is broadly abused by monopolies trying to elbow out competitors.

California’s new law simply makes it so consumers can opt out of such deals, without retaliation from their landlords. If landlords still try to force tenants to pay for broadband they don’t want and don’t use, the tenant can subtract the cost from their monthly rent.

It needs to be clear that California’s effort is basically the bare minimum to rein in such anti-competitive relationships. So, of course, big ISPs like Comcast and AT&T are having a big hissy fit about it:

“The California Broadband & Video Association, which represents cable companies, called it “an anti-affordability bill masked as consumer protection.”

U.S. broadband monopolies should consider themselves lucky that U.S. regulators have traditionally been too corrupt to truly tackle what generally has been a much bigger problem.

For decades, U.S. broadband providers have struck cozy deals with landlords effectively elbowing out competitors and allowing them to create building-by-building broadband monopolies (in some cases even banning the advertising of a competing service inside a development or apartment). That stifled competition results in higher costs, slow speeds, and worse overall service.

And while the FCC passed rules in 2007 trying to ban the practice, they were never seriously enforced and so full of loopholes as to be effectively useless.

Susan Crawford wrote pretty much the definitive story on this at Wired in 2016, noting that the original rules were so terrible, ISPs and landlords could easily tap dance around them by simply calling what they were doing… something else:

“…The Commission has been completely out-maneuvered by the incumbents. Sure, a landlord can’t enter into an exclusive agreement granting just one ISP the right to provide Internet access service to an MDU, but a landlord can refuse to sign agreements with anyone other than Big Company X, in exchange for payments labeled in any one of a zillion ways. Exclusivity by any other name still feels just as abusive.”

Every so often the FCC tries to update the rules, but because the agency is either under the thumb of Republicans (who actively support predatory monopolization) or Democrats (who nibble around the edges with performative solutions that fail to attack or often even acknowledge monopoly power), things never really get better.

After being nagged about this for fifteen years (!), the Biden FCC finally updated the rules again in 2022. But again, the updated language still didn’t actually fix the problem, in part because the rule revisions only applied to cable and phone companies, not any of the numerous broadband-only fiber, fixed-wireless, or Wi-Fi ISPs that cut exclusivity deals directly with landlords to avoid having to compete.

Now that the Trump administration has basically lobotomized the FCC’s consumer protection authority, there’s zero chance the federal government will be enforcing any of this anytime soon. That leaves things to a small smattering of states that sporadically care about consumer protection.

You’ll find that this is going to be a common theme as a patchwork of functioning states try to step in and fill the void created by a federal government that’s actively hostile to consumer protection and corporate oversight. But in most states, companies like AT&T and Comcast literally and genuinely all-but run the state legislature. Even in “progressive” California it’s an uphill climb to get the bare minimum passed.

Filed Under: apartment buildings, broadband, bulk billing, california, competition, developments, high speed internet, landlords, tenants
Companies: at&t, cbva, comcast

Another Measles Outbreak Leads To 3 Week Quarantine For Over 100 Children

Failures

from the sick-of-this dept

Measles is so back, baby! I know, you had thought we were done talking about this vile disease. After all, the outbreak that started in Texas among communities that are relatively unvaccinated finally slowed down at the tail end of the summer. That came after that outbreak almost single-handedly generated more cases of measles in America than had occurred since 1992, as well as caused three deaths. This all occurred under the watch of RFK Jr. as head of HHS. Kennedy is largely responsible for the disease’s return, thanks to his long anti-vaccine advocacy and due to his direct mismanagement of the measles outbreaks. He also blames the victims of the disease, too.

Those who wanted to cover for Kennedy and the Trump administration attempted to point to the Texas outbreak starting before Trump was in office. That’s both not really true and besides the point since the explosion of cases happened well into the year, but it’s also a moot point since there are more outbreaks than just that one. 44 outbreaks, in fact, according to the CDC, compared with only 16 outbreaks in all of 2024. And, as always, the cases largely effect children and the unvaccinated.

And to give you yet another real world example of how this is all playing out, an outbreak is South Carolina has resulted in the necessary quarantining of 150 children due to their being unvaccinated.

Last week, officials in Greenville identified an eighth measles case that is potentially linked to the outbreak. Seven outbreak cases had been confirmed since September 25 in neighboring Spartanburg, where transmission was identified in two schools: Fairforest Elementary and Global Academy, a public charter school.

Across those two schools, at least 153 unvaccinated children were exposed to the virus and have been put in a 21-day quarantine, during which they are barred from attending school, state officials said in a press conference. Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period, spanning from when a person is exposed to when they would develop a rash if infected.

As the ArsTechnica post goes on to note, Spartanburg has more unvaccinated children as a result of religious exemption than anywhere else in the state. South Carolina as a whole used to have the 95%+ vaccination rate that experts indicate provides the kind of herd immunity that keeps everyone safe, but that has dropped in the past several years to 93.7%. That might not seem like a big deal, but it is. And it’s even worse nation-wide when it comes to school-aged children.

The latest data indicates that the MMR vaccination coverage for US kindergartners was just 92.5 percent in the 2024–2025 school year, down from 95.2 percent in 2019–2020. Non-medical exemptions are now at 3.4 percent, an all-time high.

I am confident that any Almighty that may exist, and certainly any one worth believing in, doesn’t want you to get measles. If we don’t reverse the trend on our MMR vaccination rates, these outbreaks will continue to sprout up and more people will become infected. Eventually more of them will die.

But I don’t see that trend reversing while RFK Jr. is still in charge of American healthcare.

Filed Under: cdc, health and human services, measles, rfk jr., south carolina, vaccines

Against The New Feudalism Of Algorithms And Oligarchs

Culture

from the we-are-not-peasants dept

Americans are not peasants. We are citizens of a republic founded on the revolutionary proposition that ordinary people can govern themselves. This isn’t poetry or aspiration—it’s the foundational premise of the American project. And right now, a faction of tech oligarchs is betting everything on proving that premise wrong.

They want to replace “We the People” with “We the Users.”

When Peter Thiel writes that democracy and freedom are incompatible, he’s not making a philosophical observation. He’s stating a preference. When Elon Musk guts federal agencies while posting American flags, he’s not reforming government. He’s replacing citizenship with administration. When Silicon Valley oligarchs speak about “optimization” and “efficiency,” they’re not talking about improving systems that serve citizens. They’re talking about managing peasants.

Because that’s what they think we are. Peasants. Masses incapable of self-governance. Users to be monetized. Workers to be replaced. Voters to be manipulated through algorithmic feeds designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. Populations requiring management by those with superior intelligence and technological sophistication.

You see this in your daily life. An algorithm decides what news you see, not your own judgment about what matters. Your feed is curated by systems optimized for engagement rather than truth, designed to keep you scrolling rather than thinking. Your attention becomes their commodity. Your consciousness becomes their resource. Your capacity for independent judgment gets systematically eroded by platforms that treat you as a user to be optimized rather than a citizen capable of self-governance.

This represents the complete inversion of the American founding premise. The revolutionary generation staked everything on a radical proposition: that ordinary people could govern themselves, that citizenship was possible, that republican self-governance was superior to rule by kings, aristocrats, or anyone claiming the right to govern based on superior status, breeding, or intelligence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident” means exactly what it says—not that kings acknowledge these truths, not that the intelligent agree with them, not that the powerful grant them, but that citizens assert them as the foundation of legitimate government. Self-evident to whom? To us. To the people who govern ourselves through collective deliberation rather than submitting to administration by our betters.

Lincoln understood what was at stake when he stood at Gettysburg and declared that the war would determine whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Not government for the people by superior managers. Not government of the people by technological elites. But government by the people themselves—the radical proposition that citizens possess the capacity to govern rather than requiring governance by those who claim superior qualification.

The distinction between citizens and peasants isn’t semantic. It’s ontological. Peasants exist to be governed. Their role is obedience, tribute, and acceptance of decisions made by those qualified to make them. Citizens govern themselves. Their role is participation, judgment, and shared responsibility for collective outcomes.

We are not peasants. And yet every assault on American institutions over the past several years represents the systematic effort to transform us into exactly that.

The systematic elimination of civil service protections doesn’t improve government efficiency—it replaces professional judgment answerable to law with personal loyalty answerable to power. The attacks on independent agencies don’t reduce bureaucratic waste—they eliminate the institutional mechanisms through which citizens check oligarchic extraction. The celebration of “disruption” doesn’t foster innovation—it destroys the stable frameworks within which genuine self-governance becomes possible.

DOGE isn’t a government efficiency project. It’s the systematic replacement of citizenship with administration, democratic accountability with optimization metrics, collective self-governance with management by superior intelligence. When Elon Musk eliminates entire agencies staffed by career professionals and replaces them with political loyalists, he’s not improving government. He’s implementing his explicit belief that most people are incapable of meaningful judgment and require direction from those smart enough to know better.

This is why the flag-posting rings so hollow. Genuine patriotism implies reciprocal obligation—that loving your country means contributing to its maintenance as a collective project, that national pride entails responsibility for national institutions, that citizenship is something you participate in rather than perform. What the tech oligarchs demonstrate is nationalism without reciprocity: they want the aesthetic of belonging to a great nation while refusing every actual obligation that citizenship requires.

They love America as a brand, as an identity marker, as a territory they control. But they hate America as an actual collective project requiring their submission to democratic judgment, their participation in shared governance, their acceptance that other citizens possess equal standing to challenge their preferences and constrain their power.

Even Steve Bannon—nationalist populist, former Trump strategist, authoritarian movement builder—recognizes what the Silicon Valley faction represents. In a rare point of agreement across factional lines, Bannon has observed that the tech oligarchs aren’t patriots but post-national extractors using patriotic language to disguise systematic looting. When even authoritarian allies can see that you’re not engaged in national renewal but oligarchic capture, the performance has become too obvious to maintain.

Americans are not peasants. We are citizens of a republic founded on the revolutionary proposition that self-governance is possible, that ordinary people possess the capacity for judgment, that democratic deliberation beats optimization by superior intelligence. Every accommodation to oligarchic extraction, every acceptance of their framing, every failure to defend citizenship against those who would reduce us to subjects in their optimization experiments—all of it betrays the fundamental premise that makes America America.

We deserve better than this because citizenship is the foundation of what we are. Not subjects. Not users. Not populations to be managed. Citizens.

And citizens don’t wait for permission to defend what we are. We govern, or we lose everything that makes us who we are. The choice is here. The choice is now. History will not forgive us if we forget what we are—and surrender without a fight to those who would reduce us to peasants in a land our ancestors bled to make free.

We are not peasants. We are citizens. And citizenship is not a gift granted by superior intelligence. It is a responsibility we claim, a burden we carry, a right we defend—or lose forever to those who never believed we deserved it in the first place.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Filed Under: algorithms, america, culture, democracy, elon musk, governance, government, liberty, optimization, peter thiel, steve bannon, tech bros

Prop 50, The Better Of Two Bad Choices

Legal Issues

from the with-held-nose-because-things-stink dept

It’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t choice appearing on the California ballot this Election Day: choose gerrymandering, or have gerrymandering chosen for you. It’s an ugly decision to be forced to make. But, for the moment, at least, one that needs to be made.

At issue is Proposition 50, which would change the law affecting how California Congressional redistricting is done in the near term. Under current California law, it is done after every 10-year census by an independent commission tasked with balancing districts, subject to certain criteria imposed by state and federal law. State law, for instance, requires neighborhoods and local communities be kept together to the greatest extent possible, and the commission is ordinarily prohibited from considering political parties, current office holders, or prospective candidates when it draws its district maps.

The problem is that not every state plays by the same rules. And, in particular, states like Texas have now openly taken steps to redistrict again, even though there has been no new census to provide a basis for making any changes to their existing maps. Worse, the changes they want to make are changes deliberately intended to disadvantage Democrats and instead produce, statewide, as many Republican representatives as possible, irrespective of any local community preference to the contrary, in order to ensure Republican control over the House of Representatives in DC, even if nationwide the party would lack the support to be a majority. In other words, these states, controlled by Republicans, are trying to force the House majority into Republican hands by manipulating the Congressional representation of the people in their own state.

In response, the California legislature put Prop 50 on the ballot primarily to fight fire with fire. If these red states try to artificially inflate the number of Republicans to Congress then California will change its law to produce as many Democrats as possible in order to try to neutralize the Republican advantage those red states are trying to engineer.

There are, of course, strong reasons not to change California’s law this way. Gerrymandering is an incredibly anti-democratic policy, no matter who’s doing it. It dooms some communities to always be in the political minority, even when a fair measurement of the state’s overall political will should result in these minority preferences being entitled to at least some representation. Setting aside a principled approach to apportioning congressional seats that goes out of its way to not gerrymander, to instead join these other states in a race to distort election results is hardly something to enthusiastically cheer.

There’s also a chance that it could potentially backfire. While the goal may be to make sure that overall Democratic representation in Congress is preserved, it’s possible that these manipulations could result in weakening otherwise strong Democratic districts by now remapping them to include more likely Republican voters. Of course, the same is true in states like Texas, which may be sabotaging Republican districts by rolling into them more voters more likely to vote for Democrats.

But there are also points in favor of this plan, and they seem to, on balance, outweigh those against as well as ameliorate some of the concerns. For one thing, the change Prop 50 would bring is inherently temporary. Prop 50 has a built-in sunset provision so that, no matter what happens, we go back to the old system after the next national census in 2030. Prop 50 would only cover the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections, and if we really hated it after 2026 there’s nothing that would keep us from passing another proposition to end it sooner, apart from the logistical burden of running another ballot measure. Which is not negligible, but if the politics really turned against the change, it is still reversible. After all, the current law Prop 50 would change is itself is the result of its own ballot measure.

And that current law itself offers yet another reason to vote for the new one: because there’s actually a problem with the current one. Not in terms of its general approach, which tries to use a politically neutral committee to do apportionment so that communities can best be represented by those most accurately reflecting their political will. The problem with this law is that it hardcoded into the rules for how the committee members should be appointed a requirement that the membership should always include some number of Democrats, and some number of Republicans, as well as some number unaligned with either. A better way to do it would have been to require some number of people affiliated with the two most popular parties, whichever they may be, and the rest be unaffiliated. By hardcoding either party into the law however it means that the law can end up out of sync with the political makeup of the state as partisan politics evolve.

In fact, that’s the problem driving Prop 50: partisan politics have evolved. While it may have seemed, back in 2010 when the current law was passed, that Democrats and Republicans were timeless political forces never subject to change, history has shown otherwise—which is the problem that Prop 50 is responding to. Even though Democrats and Republicans had been around for decades by that point as generally stable parties, now that the Republican party has essentially become the new American Nazi party, continuing to give it a potentially outsized seat at the table seems much less advisable, not just in terms of giving it influence but also because it means that the system itself can’t adapt to any evolutions in the partisan landscape. If new parties become popular, perhaps because people are disenchanted with the old ones, the system won’t be able to treat them as major players so long as the old players get the benefit of this built-in advantage in how they get to participate in the redistricting system.

But the more immediate problem is that, given the way Republicans have changed, giving Republicans any political power threatens the entire democratic system. It would ordinarily be unthinkable to manipulate an electoral system to favor or disfavor a party—except that’s the business Republicans themselves are now in. And adopting a principled position to not engage in such practices unfortunately has the practical consequence of yielding to those eager to weaponize them the power to do so, and in a way inconsistent with the continued function of our representative democracy.

Allowing Republicans to grab gerrymandered power now surrenders our nation to them, which is not a decision we can afford to make if our nation is to have a future. At this moment in history there are existential reasons to ensure that Democrats can get to Congress in strong enough numbers to exert political power instead. Not because Democrats are necessarily all that great, but because Republicans are openly committed to autocratic policies that upend our constitutional order. If our federal system is going to be defended, the party not going out of its way to attack it at least needs a shot at getting into office in sufficient numbers to protect it.

And because Democrats aren’t just the current minority party in those red states but more often than not the party preference of minorities. The goal of getting them elected isn’t just to further that specific party but to make sure that communities favoring them can simply be represented in Congress at all. As long as Republicans have the power to frustrate that representation, it’s important that the rest of us make sure to have their backs so that everyone can participate in directing the future of our country.

Furthermore, the proposition does a bit more than just change how California’s congressional districts are to be mapped for the next few election cycles. Although it is mostly symbolic, the proposition declares its support of the principle that congressional apportionment should be done by “fair, independent, and nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide.” It further declares that there should be federal legislation and even a constitutional amendment to ensure that this approach become the rule nationwide that all states must follow to end, once and for all, the gamesmanship that these red states are engaging in, so that no state is able to frustrate the political will of their people in pursuit of their own disproportionate power ever again.

Filed Under: california, fairness, gerrymandering, politics, prop 50, redistricting, texas

Nearly Half Of FBI Agents In Large Field Offices Have Been Put On ICE

Failures

from the get-your-federal-crime-on! dept

As far as the Trump administration is concerned, there’s only one crime worth targeting: not being white.

Despite ICE now being the best-funded federal law enforcement agency and military troops being scrambled to any area of the country that pisses Trump off, ICE is no closer to reaching White House advisor Stephen Miller’s baseline target of 3,000 arrests per day than it was the day after Trump’s second inauguration.

Since this seems to be the only thing Trump consistently cares about (give or take his antipathy towards renewable resources, “transgender for everyone,” and whatever the fuck “woke” is), every federal law enforcement agency is starving itself of resources in hopes of turning this administration’s fascist, bigoted fantasies into reality.

The DHS — under puppy-killing Bratz doll Kristi Noem — has already done its part, shifting pretty much the entirety of its investigative wing into support roles for ICE operations. This happened despite the GOP being collectively (and vocally) convinced anyone straying from binary gender roles is nothing more than a child molester. HSI used to hunt down child predators. Now, it’s decided to throw kids to the wolves while it targets day laborers without criminal records. (Or maybe it just got tired of arresting Republicans and evangelical religious leaders on the regular for their crimes against children.)

It’s one thing for the DHS to do stupid stuff with its own talent. It’s quite another when it begins bleeding into other federal agencies and infecting them with the same “get the brown people” energy that’s made DHS and ICE the repugnant agencies they are.

There’s never been a better time to engage in federal crimes, as The Guardian reports.

Personnel data obtained by Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, and shared with the Guardian, suggests the Trump administration has moved 45% of FBI agents in the country’s 25 largest field offices to support the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown. Across all of the FBI’s offices, 23% of the roughly 13,000 total agents at the bureau are now working on immigration, according to Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.

If nothing else, it will probably please Charlie Kirk’s widow to know the FBI is being flown at half-staff. Throwing this manpower at immigration enforcement doesn’t seem to be budging the arrests-per-day needle much. Meanwhile, other criminal investigations are being under-served, which says something much nastier about an already-nasty administration: it doesn’t care about crime; it only cares about rounding up non-white people and removing them from the country.

The only upside given this influx of FBI agents, ATF officers, and DEA personnel is that fewer people are getting caught up in federal law enforcement entrapment schemes (stash house stings, radicalizing people into terrorism arrests, etc.). On the other hand, people who’ve done nothing more than engage in civil violations are being subjected to the combined force of multiple federal law enforcement agencies who have been encouraged — if not explicitly instructed — to engage in biased policing.

And it’s probably even worse than it immediately appears, what with the government’s general unwillingness to be completely honest about its form and functions. Senator Warner says this is probably an under-count:

The data is understating the scale of the reorganization, as the FBI only provided counts for agents who are now spending more than half of their job doing immigration enforcement, according to Warner. The senator’s office said it was likely that more than a quarter of FBI agents’ total hours were now dedicated to immigration, and that in some field offices, more than half of the agents had been redirected to DHS.

The FBI isn’t an anomaly. It’s just another symptom of this administration’s anti-immigrant sickness. The administration pretends this massive surge of immigration enforcement is essential to the nation’s security. And it says this while rerouting actual national security personnel to DHS support roles, compromising what little is left of this nation’s security forces:

The US Department of Homeland Security has shifted hundreds of national security specialists, including cyber personnel, into jobs that support President Donald Trump’s deportations and said it would dismiss anyone who refuses to go along, according to current and former DHS employees.

[…]

Refusing a new role would be considered grounds for termination, according to two copies of letters from DHS human resources seen by Bloomberg News. Mandatory job changes often include disruptive geographic relocations and give affected workers a one-week deadline to either accept or resign, employees said.

A lot is said about the banality of evil and its contribution to authoritarianism. But not enough is said about this administration’s absolute contempt for pretty much anyone who actually works for the federal government. The DOGE purges were never enough. This administration is so banally evil it considers even raising concerns about unemployment or unexpected upheavals of employees’ lives as acts of disloyalty.

Even the most callous of corporations tend to throw a few incentives towards people being laid off and/or expected to immediately relocate (severance packages, relocation assistance). But this government considers anyone outside of Trump’s immediate circle to be acceptable collateral damage, pompously assuming there are millions of similarly qualified people just dying to work for a madman with access to nearly unlimited power.

But beyond the obvious and deliberate disregard for anyone unwilling to toe the line at a moment’s notice is the brain bleed this sort of action initiates. Talent will be leaving, either because they can’t survive the mandatory disruption of their lives or because they’re now being forced into becoming part of an effort that only serves Trump’s basest urges, rather than the good of the nation.

Filed Under: dhs, fbi, ice, mass deportation, trump administration