While we've covered the growth of esports throughout the world for some time, it's also true that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in that growth accelerating with incredible speed. Back in March and April, when states began shutting down because we had -- checks notes -- 20k to 30k new COVID cases per day, esports really took off. Due to shut downs, IRL professional and college sports shut down too. The result is that Americans who thirst to watch competition dove headlong into esports broadcasts, with participation and viewership clipping at 20% growth month over month. An entire economy sprung up around the industry as well, with streaming companies and broadcasters catching up to the sudden rise in interest.

But if you thought this was a uniquely American thing, you're wrong. And if you think that this wave is going to crest once we're all putting vaccine needles in our arms, I think you're wrong about that, too. An Indian sporting news site recently did an interview with the CEO of Skyesports, a prominent esports company in India. While you will have to forgive some translation wonkiness in them, two questions and answers jumped out at me as I read the interview. The first was about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on esports' growth in India.

Q. Did Covid-19 really help esports in India as much as people say? Or were you expecting this kind of growth already?

Definitely, agree. Covid19 impact has amplified the gaming scene across the world. Our Viewership and user base increased 10x and we are seeing a 20x growth rate in terms of revenues for this year alone. We have created more IPs and all of this was due to covid situation.

Twenty times growth is the sort of thing industry captains salivate for. And, while it is tough to get too excited about the silver linings of a pandemic that has killed and hurt so many people, it is still true that this growth in esports is exciting for fans. With growth comes better competition, more professional broadcasts, deeper market penetration, and jobs and opportunities.

This pandemic is going to go away some day. But esports' growth might be here to stay. Why? Well, because in many markets, such as in India, all of this growth still hasn't scratched the surface of the potential market.

Q. Has Skyesports thought of expanding into South Asia? Where in specific?

A:In India, esports are explored by only less than 10%. There is more to explore in India before we think about stepping foot in the South Asia region. We want to grass-root in India at the largest level before thinking of other regions and we are focusing the most to conquer India. We want to take esports to nook and corner.

It's but one anecdotal example, but an important one. Given how ripe the Indian marketplace is, and how important its economy and industries are on the world stage, an explosion of esports there is a sign of worldwide growth as well. And, the horrors of this pandemic aside, that's fun for us fans.

This shouldn't be much of a surprise, unfortunately, but it appears that once again Facebook is the first to crack under political pressure, and has decided to sell out the open internet and free speech online. In testimony Mark Zuckerberg is planning to give tomorrow to the Senate Commerce Committee, he's going to say a few nice things about Section 230, immediately followed by him saying the company now supports reforming the law. The praise for Section 230 is accurate, but it doesn't much matter when he takes it back immediately:

However, the debate about Section 230 shows that people of all political persuasions are unhappy with the status quo. People want to know that companies are taking responsibility for combatting harmful content—especially illegal activity—on their platforms. They want to know that when platforms remove content, they are doing so fairly and transparently. And they want to make sure that platforms are held accountable.

This ignores that people are unhappy for contradictory reasons. Some are unhappy because sites are taking down propaganda and disinformation. Others are upset that they're not taking down propaganda and disinformation (or not taking it down fast enough). NOTHING will satisfy everyone. Pretending that there's some magical reform that will work is crazy talk.

But here's the real problem. Whatever nuance there is to be discussed here, whatever recognition of the problems this will cause, the following paragraph will be seen as declaring open season on Section 230 because "even Facebook supports changing the law."

Section 230 made it possible for every major internet service to be built and ensured important values like free expression and openness were part of how platforms operate. Changing it is a significant decision. However, I believe Congress should update the law to make sure it’s working as intended. We support the ideas around transparency and industry collaboration that are being discussed in some of the current bipartisan proposals, and I look forward to a meaningful dialogue about how we might update the law to deal with the problems we face today.

This is nonsense. It is working as intended. It's allowing companies to make their own decisions, and to experiment with different moderation regimes. That many people are unhappy with those choices is the very nature of content moderation. It's not like Congress is going to step in and create rules that work any better. It will only create rules that work worse.

At Facebook, we don’t think tech companies should be making so many decisions about these important issues alone. I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators, which is why in March last year I called for regulation on harmful content, privacy, elections, and data portability. We stand ready to work with Congress on what regulation could look like in these areas. By updating the rules for the internet, we can preserve what’s best about it—the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things—while also protecting society from broader harms. I would encourage this Committee and other stakeholders to make sure that any changes do not have unintended consequences that stifle expression or impede innovation.

And, yes, he's repeating what he's said before, knowing full fucking well that any regulations that Congress puts in place will simply serve to lock in Facebook's position. Facebook can handle the compliance costs. The upstart companies that might disrupt Facebook will have a much harder time.

Make no mistake about it: this is Mark Zuckerberg pulling up the innovation ladder he climbed behind him.

This probably isn't a huge surprise. Facebook's vocal support for FOSTA -- the law that amended Section 230 and put lives at risk -- was only a first step. I was told, point blank, by a Facebook lobbyist that the company needed to support that "minor" change to Section 230 or Congress would have passed something even worse. And here we are, with Congress seeing Facebook's initial caving not as a way to be satiated, but rather as the go-ahead to continue dismantling the framework of an open internet.

And, once again, here's Facebook, happily willing to go along with it.

Facebook is throwing the open internet under the bus -- in part gleefully, as so-called "critics" of Facebook stupidly demanded "reforms to Section 230" incorrectly believing that 230 was a "special subsidy" for Facebook. Facebook doesn't need it any more, but all of the people who called for such reforms are now going to help cement Facebook's position of dominance.

Unfortunately, this is likely to be the focus of tomorrow's hearing, with Senators taking this as permission to destroy the open internet. It is likely that they will ignore fellow panelist Jack Dorsey giving the opposing message that Section 230 is necessary to enable new competitors and free speech on an open internet:

As we consider developing new legislative frameworks, or committing to self-regulation models for content moderation, we should remember that Section 230 has enabled new companies—small ones seeded with an idea—to build and compete with established companies globally. Eroding the foundation of Section 230 could collapse how we communicate on the Internet, leaving only a small number of giant and well-funded technology companies.

We should also be mindful that undermining Section 230 will result in far more removal of online speech and impose severe limitations on our collective ability to address harmful content and protect people online. I do not think anyone in this room or the American people want less free speech or more abuse and harassment online. Instead, what I hear from people is that they want to be able to trust the services they are using.

That's the right message and an accurate one. And it will be stomped on by the message from Zuckerberg agreeing to throw the open internet under a speeding bus.

With the pandemic spurring a mass switch to remote working for many people, especially those at tech companies that were among the earliest adopters of the trend, discussions about the uncertain future of Silicon Valley have resurfaced. This week, tech reporter and VC partner Kim-Mai Cutler joins the podcast to discuss whether the pandemic-driven changes in how we work will drive a mass-exodus from California and threaten its status as an innovation hub.

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Just about a year ago the courts partially upheld the FCC's hugely unpopular net neutrality repeal. But it also kicked some aspects of the repeal back to the FCC. Most notably, the courts stated the Ajit Pai FCC couldn't ban states from protecting consumers if the FCC is no longer interested in doing so. The courts also noted that the FCC (surprise!) did little to no research into how the repeal would impact public safety or efforts to bridge the digital divide (the latter being kind of important in a massive pandemic in which affordable access is essential to survival) and urged the agency to try again.

Knowing full well the polls suggest their good times may soon be coming to an end, the FCC this week voted along party lines (pdf) to ignore the court's complaint, pat itself on the back for a job well done, and double down on its Orwellian-titled "Restoring Internet Freedom" repeal. With no changes to it whatsoever:

"After thoroughly reviewing the record compiled in response to its request for additional comment on these issues, the FCC found no basis to alter the FCC’s conclusions in the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. The Order on Remand finds that the Restoring Internet Freedom Order promotes public safety, facilitates broadband infrastructure deployment by Internet service providers, and allows the FCC to continue to provide Lifeline support for broadband Internet access service."

Again, despite chirping from some "experts," the repeal of net neutrality mattered. It not only killed off consumer protections, it hamstrung the FCC's ability to protect consumers and competitors from entrenched telecom monopolies. It shoveled much of this authority to an FTC telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T know full well lacked the authority, funds, or willpower to properly police one of the more problematic sectors in all of tech. That was the entire goal: zero accountability for widely disliked telecom monopolies. Anybody who claims the repeal "must not of mattered because the internet still works" is advertising their immense ignorance as to the chain of problems this obvious regulatory capture created for consumers and competitors alike.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, in her own statement, lambasted the agency's unsurprising hubris:

"The decision before us today was an opportunity to step back in. It was an opportunity to rethink this agency’s rollback of net neutrality from top to bottom and front to back. I regret that it is not. Instead, it is a set of three cobbled-together arguments designed to tell the court to go away, the public that we are not interested in their opinion, and history that we lack the humility to admit our mistake."

Again, keep in mind that the entirety of the FCC's justification for repealing net neutrality is based completely on fabricated data from the telecom sector. The supposed benefits of the repeal? Also completely fabricated. And the repeal itself involved the broadband industry using fake and/or dead people to stuff the FCC comment section with bogus support with the FCC's help. Nobody, on absolutely any level, has been held accountable for any of this. In fact, when many journalists and pundits talk about the repeal, most of these facts are routinely ignored.

This is all before you even get to Ajit Pai's blistering hypocrisy in the subsequent Section 230 attacks. The same folks who repeatedly claimed that natural telecom monopolies shouldn't be treated as a common carrier, have pivoted 180 to claim that non-dominant social media platforms like Twitter should be. The same folks who spent years insisting the FCC had no authority over the parts of the internet it actually had authority over, now insist the FCC must regulate the parts it has no authority over. The same folks who whined incessantly about the perils of the Fairness Doctrine, now mindlessly support something arguably worse in Trump's sloppy social media executive order.

All to keep social media giants from policing toxic political disinformation to protect GOP power, now highly reliant on online disinformation to gloss over what are usually, much like the net neutrality repeal, often extremely unpopular policies.

Despite obvious net neutrality fatigue in policy circles, this is still a battle that matters if you give a shit about things like monopolization, competition, healthy networks, consumer rights, and even playing fields. "Big telecom" has done a great job the last few years convincing DC that "big tech" needs massive, expansive new oversight while "big telecom" should be allowed to engage in whatever anti-competitive behavior it likes. But if we genuinely want to police unchecked corporate power and its impact on competition and innovation, undermining our regulators using, fraud, deceit, and bogus data isn't the solution.

Nearly a year ago, Sacha Baron Cohen presented a polemic speech to the Anti-Defamation League about how Facebook was evil for refusing to take down (loosely defined) "bad stuff" on their platform. We wrote a fairly thorough rebuttal, while simultaneously suggesting that SBC misunderstands his own comedy -- which is often held up as revealing the inner prejudices of the people he parodies. While that may be true in some cases, I think the stronger argument is that in many cases, the people playing along with his schtick are simply trying to be nice to the awkward idiot that SBC is playing in front of them. In non-consequential social interactions, this is how many people will reasonably act. Rather than lecturing the idiot on why what he's saying is ignorant bigotry, they'll just humor him. Under this interpretation, many of the people SBC confronts are not ignorant, bigoted hicks, but people trying to be nice and humoring him.

His own take on Facebook is similarly blinkered. And, with his latest Borat movie, he's taking aim at Facebook with part of the film. We won't get into that, but I do want to note this bit of irony. A few weeks back Baron Cohen again trashed Facebook, in the pages of Time Magazine, demanding that the company do more to block conspiracy theories and misinformation. Time Magazine illustrated the story with a photograph of someone wearing a facemask that says "COVID-19 Is A Hoax" as the primary image ( I will leave aside the question of why someone who believes it's a hoax would still wear a mask, but that's a separate issue.)

Of course, when you post something to Facebook, it will usually take the primary image and attach it to the story. So if you posted Baron Cohen's article, the image would be of the guy with that facemask, claiming that the pandemic is a hoax.

So Facebook blocked people from linking to the article.

In other words, Facebook did exactly what Baron Cohen has been demanding they do for a year now: to block information on hoaxes and conspiracy theories. You'd think that this would make him happy. But, no. It just made him mad:

He demanded they take down certain content, and they did. And yet he's mad because it's his content.

Of course, it also demonstrates just how little he understands about how content moderation works in practice. Baron Cohen is obviously intelligent. I just wish he'd actually talk to an expert on content moderation to understand how this works. Or maybe just listen to that Radiolab episode about Facebook's content moderation, to understand that him saying "hire more humans to moderate and fact check" is still missing the point. Facebook has hired more humans to moderate and fact check.

At last count, the company has 15,000 content moderators in the US alone (and many more overseas). But, in order to moderate reasonably across that many users, they need standard rules. And those rules on COVID-19 likely include something along the lines of "we don't allow posts claiming it's a hoax." It's kind of ridiculous to say that they should add an exemption "if an angry comedian is illustrating his ignorant article about our practices with such a picture."

If he expects the company to be quick enough to block conspiracy theories and misinformation, then it's literally impossible to expect that every one of those people can take the time to read through all the details, understand the cultural context of his article, recognize that the photo attached to the article is being used to (incorrectly and misleadingly) make a point, and then decide that this makes it okay. Because if every content moderation decision had to go through that process, it would take fucking forever, and Baron Cohen would be even more upset because more conspiracy theories and hoaxes would remain online because the moderators are spending all this time learning about how Baron Cohen is making a point against hoaxes, rather than trying to perpetuate a hoax.

Either way, Sacha Baron Cohen's freak-out here is yet another example of the Masnick Impossibility Theorem in practice. Content moderation seems so simple until its your content that's being moderated.

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This Administration -- like the one before it -- isn't a fan of leaks or whistleblowing. This Administration seems to be leakier than most, possibly due to the Commander-in-Chief's vindictive shit-canning of anyone insufficiently deferential. When distrust abounds, the leaks will flow.

The Administration would like these leaks to stop. To accomplish this, it has tried several things -- most of them legally-questionable. During his stint at the DOJ, Jeff Sessions suggested subjecting every National Security Council staffer to a polygraph test to sniff out who had leaked transcripts of Oval Office phone calls. The State Department issued a memo warning its employees about the dangers of leaking, including the possibility of prosecution. The memo against leaks was promptly leaked. The DHS has decided to focus its attention on exterior "threats:" namely, journalists who publish leaks. The First Amendment is apparently secondary to leak stoppage.

The DHS is still struggling with leaks. And it's struggling to contain its struggles with leaks. Earlier this month, a memo demanding employees report leaks, leakers, and anything else they might think is suspicious was leaked to journalists.

Randolph D. "Tex" Alles, a senior DHS official, emailed all employees on Tuesday warning them to be careful handling “all classified, controlled unclassified, and draft information” and that unauthorized disclosures — whether deliberate or inadvertent — risked violating agency policy and potentially federal law. Alles sent the email after “sensitive but unclassified” information had been shared with “external entities.”

Reporter Ken Klippenstein also received a copy of the leaked memo. His "copy" was two screenshots apparently taken by a DHS employee.

So far, we have a leaky DHS, an attempt to plug leaks, yet another leak, and, two weeks later, claims the leaked anti-leak memo is actually illegal. Citing Klippenstein's October 13 tweet, the American Federation of Government Employees (the largest federal employee labor union) says the memo issued by DHS Under Secretary Randolph Alles violates the law.

We are writing to seek your reconsideration of a recent directive that illegally stifles guaranteed whistleblower rights of its employees. (Exhibit A) This action is a crude violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act and appropriations provisions that shield DHS employees' free speech rights and must be remedied immediately.

Exhibit A is Klippenstein's tweet. The letter also refers to Buzzfeed's reporting on the same memo from Alles.

DHS officials are apparently willing to violate the law to shut down leaks. That's why the agency's targeting of journalists wasn't shut down while it was still just a bad idea. I doubt the DHS will rescind this memo without a court order or Congressional investigation, but it's safe to say threatening to violate the law isn't going to do much to deter future leaks or whistleblowing. The DHS's problems with leaks will continue.

Late on Friday news came out that Facebook had sent a cease and desist letter to researchers at NYU working on the Ad Observatory project. At issue was that the project had asked people to install a browser extension that would share data back to NYU regarding what ads they saw. Facebook -- responding to significant criticism -- has put forth an ad library that allows researchers to search through what ads are being shown on Facebook and who is behind them (which is good transparency!), but it does not show how those ads were targeted. This is what the researchers at NYU were trying to collect data on. And that is a reasonable research goal.

Facebook has argued that this is a breach of Facebook's terms of service -- though it does seem notable that this is coming out right around the same time that these very same researchers discovered that Facebook's promise to properly label political ads isn't working so great (it's a tangent, but this is why promising to label political ads may be problematic in the first place: you're going to miss a bunch, especially on a platform this big).

The Knight 1st Amendment Center at Columbia is representing the researchers and is condemning this move (and the researchers are refusing to comply with the cease-and-desist). Here's the Knight Center's litigation director Alex Abdo:

“Frankly it’s shocking that Facebook is trying to suppress research into political disinformation in the lead-up to the election. There’s really no question more urgent right now than the question of how Facebook’s decisions are shaping and perhaps distorting political discourse. It would be terrible for democracy if Facebook is allowed to be the gatekeeper to journalism and research about Facebook.”

This is not the first time that the Knight Center and Facebook have clashed over research. Two years ago, the Center had asked Facebook to create a special safe harbor for journalists doing research on the platform, to avoid having them face CFAA claims. Facebook declined.

I think this is a bad move by Facebook and a huge mistake. I think it's a mistake on multiple levels: political, technological, legal and just on general PR. However, I will give one sliver of a defense to Facebook: it likely feels somewhat forced into this because of the years-long over-reaction to Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica did a bunch of bad stuff, and it started out as an "academic" claiming (misleadingly) that he was merely doing "academic research" on Facebook users -- creating a Facebook app that would get users to basically cough up data about their entire social graph. The "academic" then gave the data over to the company (violating the rules), which then became part of a political advertising machine. Eventually, Facebook was pretty significantly fined, in part because of Cambridge Analytica's ability to extricate and share that data.

You may note some similarities. Ostensibly academic researchers asking users to install something to collect some data about Facebook users, and then collecting that data for "research." Given what happened with Cambridge Analytica, you might see why some folks within Facebook would be reasonably gunshy about letting this happen again -- and that may explain the company's aggressive legal response. And, you and I can say "but NYU is a respected institution -- they're not going to abuse this data" but the guy who did the data for Cambridge Analytica was initially at Cambridge, also a respected university.

You might also argue that since Facebook has been dinged by the FTC, in part over this, and the consent decree doesn't really specify that this there are separate rules for "legitimate" research, it has to do this. Indeed, that's kind of what Facebook itself is now arguing in response to this:

However, I believe the scenario here is quite different for a few key reasons. The original data used (eventually) by Cambridge Analytica was created via a Facebook app, for which the developer had to sign an agreement with Facebook that promised not to use the data in this way. And he was using the setup of Facebook's own tools to extract this data. That is, it was Facebook's API making this information available.

This is very, very different from what the NYU researchers are doing. They're asking users to install a browser extension (i.e., outside the Facebook ecosystem and not using the Facebook API or signing any kind of agreement with Facebook) in order to extract data from their own computers (again, not via the Facebook API, or the Facebook servers). And while Facebook may not like it, it's problematic that the company is arguing that it can step in and argue that end users can't -- by their own choice -- install an app they want on their own computers to capture the data that is on their own computers.

So, I think there's a pretty strong argument that me on my computer installing software to collect data in my own browser is not "unauthorized access" in any sense of the term, no matter what Facebook or the FTC might think. In fact, I'd argue that thinking that me collecting data out of my own browser and willfully handing it over to someone I chose to is, frankly, none of Facebook's business -- and it suggesting that this is a form of "unauthorized access" (which has a specific meaning under the CFAA) is crazy.

Indeed, this gets back to the infamous (and dangerous) lawsuit between Facebook and Power, in which Facebook won a CFAA claim, in part because it had sent a cease-and-desist. I still think this case was wrongly decided and the ramifications are huge, and are one of the reasons why Facebook remains so dominant today. But, in that case, again, it involved a third party offering a service to end-users who willingly chose to use the software, in order to gain access to their Facebook data in order to interact with it in a different way (in Power's case via a universal social media dashboard).

Unfortunately, I fear that the similarities to the Power case make this dangerous for the NYU researchers -- though they make a much more sympathetic defendant than a for-profit startup. And, the facts here are somewhat distinguishable from the Power case (the app here is simply collecting data in a user's browser, rather than doing an independent login and sucking out data).

We should be able to install whatever software we want -- even if Facebook doesn't like it -- to access data on our own computers. Facebook should have no say in that, and shouldn't be able to reach into our computers with a legal effort to block it. If the services were somehow damaging Facebook's technology, I could understand the issue. But this is just about reading the information on your own computer sent by Facebook and collecting and sharing that information, and it's done entirely outside the Facebook ecosystem. Facebook should not only drop the threat, but it should actually support this kind of important research.

The CBP and ICE likely have loads of misconduct records. Not that they mean much. These records are compiled and stashed someplace where it's inconvenient to find them for FOIA requesters. No one at the CBP or the DHS seems to have much interest in punishing misconduct, much less investigating it, so the records are far from complete and tend to be rubberstamped with EXONERATED.

The records do exist and the public should be able to access them. But DHS agencies do everything they can to keep these records and the public separated. Responses are dragged out to the point of litigation and then the litigation gets dragged out for as long as possible in hopes of deterring not only the requester suing, but others who might think about asking the agency for records.

The CBP wants to make its refusal to part with misconduct records a feature, rather than an all-too-common federal agency bug. It has asked the National Archive to treat many of its misconduct records as "temporary," giving it permission to discard these as soon as possible rather than having them preserved for posterity.

The Border Patrol’s proposal to the National Archives, which makes decisions about the retention of U.S. government documents, would designate as temporary all records regarding CBP’s dealings with DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties: a recipient of complaints of civil rights abuses from across the department. These records include reports on concluded investigations, sworn witness statements, and transcripts of interviews — material that constitutes invaluable testimony of CBP’s conduct. The proposal would also mark as temporary internal records concerning administrative and criminal investigations of CBP agents, as well as records collected by CBP in connection to the Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA.

If granted this request, the CBP could start shredding some records in as little as four years. Others would have to be retained for 25 years, but the CBP would have no obligation to turn records over to the Archives, where they would become part of the agency's permanent record.

History isn't always written by the winners. Sometimes it's written by those who can find a way to control the narrative in perpetuity. The record of the CBP's wrongs will be allowed to vanish into the ether. With a four-year plan for some documents, the CBP has a shot at destroying records before requesters know they exist or before litigation commences.

The problem here is that the National Archives has already allowed ICE to selectively edit its history, which the CBP is hoping will pave the way for its history-erasing proposal to be accepted by the federal government's historians.

In their review of CBP’s proposal, National Archives officials referred to the designation of ICE’s abuse complaints records as temporary to justify marking CBP’s complaints records the same way. The officials argued that “these records do not have value beyond their functional use for tracking complaints and ensuring fulfillment of obligations.”

And the CBP isn't the only problem here. Somehow the National Archives has convinced itself that a running record of civil liberty abuses and other misconduct isn't historically significant enough to preserve.

None of this may ultimately matter. The National Archives has been pretty much ignored by multiple administrations. It has been gradually stripped of funding as the amount of documents created by the government has increased. As the Intercept's article notes, it's been years since Congress has shown any interest in preserving the preservers. No hearings have been held and no effort made to shore up an entity swamped with other agencies' paperwork.

If Congress won't act, it's aiding and abetting in the destruction of historically significant records. It's allowing federal agencies to whitewash their abusive pasts. This shouldn't be acceptable but somehow the National Archives has become less than an afterthought in Washington. Without more oversight, it's just going to become the Ministry of Truth, housing only records agencies feel show them in the best light.