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August 27, 2025
Filling in the Blanks in NetChoice v. Fitch: Is First Amendment Doctrine in Danger?
Tracking the fate of Mississippi’s age-verification and parental-consent law for social media account holders in the face of a First Amendment challenge in NetChoice v. Fitch is like watching a ping-pong game between the trial and appellate courts. Observing the judicial back-and-forth also proves maddening because sometimes, when Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch prevails against…
August 22, 2025
Secrecy in Tension with Democracy and Privacy
When someone attacks your democracy, it tends to stick in your craw. I don’t know that democracy is the last, best way to arrange human affairs, but if we’re going to have a democracy, participants in it should stick to the rules. If they don’t, the tradition of tit for tat in politics suggests a…
August 22, 2025
AI Is Changing—Not Stealing—Our Jobs and Lives
There was much angst surrounding AI as it loomed as a potential part of daily life, even among the so-called AI experts. But is it warranted? Physicist Niels Bohr is famously reputed to have said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” And decision scientist Philip Tetlock confirms this sentiment, claiming that most experts…
August 21, 2025
What Does Agentic AI Mean for Interoperability, User Freedom, and Privacy?
Agentic AI, or automated systems that are capable of completing tasks and making decisions without human intervention, requires interoperability to remain innovative and competitive. But what does this degree of data access mean for user privacy? And how can this technology provide us with greater agency over our lives? In this episode of Explain to…
August 20, 2025
Prison Call Order Delays Reform of Market Ripe for Disruption
Earlier this summer, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unexpectedly delayed implementation of its 2024 prison call order until 2027. The order, which was mandated by Congress and had bipartisan support in the agency and on Capitol Hill, sought to correct long-standing market distortions through a combination of cost-based pricing and competition-friendly rules. The delay was…
August 19, 2025
When Fact Checkers Stop Checking Facts
A recent Washington Post headline claimed its tech columnist, Geoffrey Fowler, had shown that “Meta’s new crowdsourced system to fight falsehoods [has] failed to make a dent.” The claim would fail a proper fact check. Meta launched its new program—Community Notes—on April 7 to replace third-party fact-checking. If you took the Post’s headline at face…
August 15, 2025
Dial-Up Internet May Be History, but It Still Conditions Our Current Internet Experience
This week’s announcement that AOL will be discontinuing its dial-up internet access service on September 30 triggered a bout of nostalgia in me—an internet dinosaur who first dialed up to ARPANET in 1980. Most of today’s internet users have never experienced the electronic cacophony as modems performed their ritual handshake, or viewed online interaction as…
August 14, 2025
Illinois Bans AI Therapy. Questions about Enforcement Remain.
Last week, my home state of Illinois became one of the first in the nation to ban AI therapy when Governor Pritzker signed the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act (WOPR) into law. The bill, which is a clear nod to the 1983 film WarGames and its ominous supercomputer, signals lawmakers’ wariness about artificial…
August 14, 2025
Who Owns Information? Governments Are Asking the Wrong Question.
Who should control data? The question is increasingly central to policy debates in Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley. It’s being asked in antitrust lawsuits, AI regulation proposals, and sweeping data governance laws. But there’s a problem: The question is built on a faulty understanding of what information is—and what it takes to make it useful….
August 13, 2025
Reading the Mind of the Machine: Why GPT-5’s Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Matters for AI Safety
When OpenAI released GPT-5 last week, most coverage focused on the model’s performance gains, including fewer hallucinations, stronger multilingual abilities, and state-of-the-art results in health tasks. But buried deep in the 59-page system card is something far more consequential for AI safety: a section describing how OpenAI is monitoring GPT-5’s internal reasoning (“chain-of-thought”) in real-world…