It should serve as no surprise that school district superintendents are not somehow universally amazing people. Like any population, there will be good ones and bad ones. All of that being said, it seems that the COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly good at highlighting just how bad at the job, not to mention at public relations, some superintendents can be. The most useful example of this came from Georgia, where a school district suspended, then un-suspended, students for posting pictures of just how badly their schools were failing at managing bringing students back during the pandemic.

But a more recent example comes to us from -- checks notes -- huh, my hometown of Elmhurst, Illinois. Dave Moyer, the superintendent for the Elmhurst public schools, kicked up a local shit-storm for himself a couple of weeks ago when he decided to have an exchange with a revered teacher in his district over the use of masks by teachers.

Last week, District 205 technology teacher Jennifer Leban tweeted, "Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I feel like parents would much rather have teachers talking to students via Zoom WITHOUT masks on instead of WITH... Seems like an obvious choice?"

Moyer responded, "Then take your mask off."

But Leban, a 2020 Illinois Teacher of the Year finalist, said she does not have her own room, so state regulations bar her from taking off her mask.

For context, while new case counts have been dropping across much of the country, the same is not true for the Midwest. Here in Illinois specifically, new cases have been on the rise since July, including a breathtaking day mere weeks after Moyer's suggestion that a teacher remove her mask where the state saw nearly six thousand new cases get reported. Leban, by the way, is immunocompromised, making Moyer's suggestion that she simply remove her mask all the more idiotic. She presented the district with a doctor's note that recommended she get a remote placement, for which there are some slots in the district, but that request was denied without explanation.

Others, of course, saw the Twitter exchange as well.

In the Twitter discussion, Kim Gwizdala, an English teacher from Glenbard West High School, said it was "absolutely wild to me that your own superintendent would suggest a thing when it is in direct violation with health guidelines and science."

Moyer took exception to that comment.

"Excuse me. The attorneys have indicated that the interpretation from the State is as follows: Teachers can take their mask off when they are in their rooms by themselves facilitating remote learning. Get your facts straight before you pontificate."

To Leban, he wrote, "Your entire media center isn't good enough? OK then."

Shortly after that, for reasons that should be obvious, Moyer deleted several of those tweets. No public apology came, however. Also, as parents began jumping into the conversation, Moyer chose to block them on Twitter, even though his account is that of the school district's website, not a personal account. It's worth noting here that the courts recently ruled that Donald Trump, as a public official, could not block the public from his official account because his control over the account and his status as a public official made that specific space a public forum. Why Moyer's account, tied to the district's website, should be any different is anyone's guess.

In a Twitter discussion last week about an Elmhurst teacher's position on masks, Alicia Duell, the director of technology and information services at Wheeling School District 21, said Moyer blocked her from his Twitter account. An Elmhurst resident, Duell noted Moyer was the superintendent of her children's school district.

Meanwhile, an Elmhurst resident emailed Patch over the weekend that she, too, had been banned from the superintendent's account.

Which brings us to the present, where the public has taken notice of Moyer's behavior at a recent board meeting and is voicing their complaints.

Last Monday, a number of written comments were read during the public comment portion of the meeting, including those critical of Moyer. Eileen Espinosa, a local resident who once served on a school council in Chicago, said she has "extended grace" to Moyer during the pandemic, but could no longer remain silent.

"His utter lack of leadership is overwhelming and you're ignoring it is no longer acceptable," Espinosa said to the board in her comments. "Dr. Moyer's inability to send communications that help the community to come together in the spring and throughout the summer and into the school year are a repeated reminder that he does not lead our district. He continues to air his grievances and personal opinions on social media."

There are more, as well. The ultimate lesson here is in just how badly Moyer handled this at every step. One-liners to immunocompromised teachers advising them to take of their masks against both state regulations and common sense is an obvious misstep. Doubling down with sarcasm and snark when called on it, all the more so. Deleting those tweets and thinking this would all go away, rather than simply apologizing, put this on the tee at the Streisand National Open. Going on a parent-Twitter-blocking spree to try to stifle dissent hit the ball right in the middle of the fairway. And the refusal to publicly comment to date on the matter made the Streisand crowd go wild.

When asked for comment about his deleted tweets late last month, Moyer did not directly answer. In an email, he said his public messages should be interpreted as seeking "a balance between safety for all and creating the healthiest learning environment for students. It is time for all of us to move beyond the negativity and keep the focus where it belongs."

Right now the focus may just be on whether Moyer is the best person to be leading a school district during a pandemic in a state that is suffering under a surge of the virus.

The biggest problem with all the proposals to reform Section 230 is that way too many people don't understand *why* they are a terrible idea. And the EARN IT bill is one of the worst of the worst, because it does not just break Section 230 but also so much more, yet too many people remain oblivious to the issues.

Obviously there's more education to be done, and towards that end Stanford's Riana Pfefferkorn and I recently gave this presentation at the Crypto and Privacy Village at Defcon. The first part is a crash course in Section 230 and how it does the important work it does in protecting the online ecosystem. The second part is an articulation of all the reasons the EARN IT bill in particular is terrible and the specific damage it would do to encryption and civil liberties, along with ruining Section 230 and everything important that it advances.

We'll keep explaining in every way we can why Section 230 should be preserved and the EARN IT bill should be repudiated, but if you're the kind of person who prefers AV explanations, then this video is for you.

(Note: there's a glitch in the video at the beginning. Once it goes dark, skip ahead to about 3 minutes 20 seconds and it will continue.)

Recently -- perhaps far too recently -- the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court said the bulk phone records collection the NSA engaged in for years was most likely unconstitutional and definitely a violation of the laws authorizing it. The Appeals Court did not go so far as to declare it unconstitutional, finding that the records collected by the government had little bearing on the prosecution of a suspected terrorist. But it did declare it illegal.

Unfortunately, the ruling didn't have much of an effect. The NSA had already abandoned the program, finding it mostly useless and almost impossible to comply with under the restrictions laid down by the USA Freedom Act. Rather than continually violate the new law, the NSA chose to shut it down, ending the bulk collection of phone metadata… at least under this authority.

But there's something in the ruling that may have a much larger ripple effect. Orin Kerr noticed some language in the opinion that suggests the Ninth Circuit is establishing a new notification requirement for criminal prosecutions. For years, the government has all but ignored its duty to inform defendants of the use of FISA-derived evidence against them. The DOJ has considered FISA surveillance so secret and sensitive defendants can't even be told about it. Defendants fight blind, going up against parallel construction and ex parte submissions that keep them in the dark about how the government obtained its evidence.

The language in the Ninth Circuit ruling changes that. It appears to suggest (but possibly not erect, unfortunately) an affirmative duty to inform defendants about surveillance techniques used by the government.

In Moalin, the question was whether defendants had to be notified about a warrantless national security program involving telephone metadata that had been collected about them as part of the investigation. I would have thought the answer is no. Most obviously, there was no search warrant about which to give notice. And beyond that, I would have thought the program under then-existing precedent not to be a search at all.

The Ninth Circuit imagines a different kind of notice requirement, though. Instead of a notice requirement that a warrant was executed, flowing from the warrant itself, this is a notice requirement that appears to be triggered only if and when criminal charges are filed providing notice that evidence about a person was collected using a surveillance practice that may or may not be a search. In effect, it’s a notice to criminal defendants to consider filing a motion to suppress to challenge the investigation and vindicate any Fourth Amendment rights that may or may not have been at stake.

Huge if true. This is the court giving defendants an opportunity to suppress evidence derived from surveillance efforts courts may not (at this point) consider searches under the Fourth Amendment. The Constitutionality may be unsettled, but that shouldn't limit defendants' ability to raise challenges. This is from the opinion:

The principal remedy for a Fourth Amendment violation is the exclusionary rule: a criminal defendant may seek suppression of evidence obtained from an unlawful search or seizure, as well as of the “fruits” of that evidence—additional evidence to which it led. See Wong Sun, 371 U.S. at 488. But criminal defendants who have no knowledge that a potentially unconstitutional search has played a part in the government’s case against them have no opportunity to vindicate any Fourth Amendment-protected rights through suppression.

Notice is therefore a critical component of the Fourth Amendment in the context of a criminal prosecution. And although the Fourth Amendment may apply differently to foreign intelligence surveillance than to searches undertaken in ordinary criminal investigations, notice of a search plays the same role in the criminal proceeding: it allows the defendant to assess whether the surveillance complied with the Fourth Amendment’s requirements, whatever the parameters of those requirements are. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recognized that the notice provisions in FISA and the FAA serve precisely that function.

According to the Ninth Circuit, the Fourth Amendment standard of providing notice to defendants also applies to searches that the government (and some courts) have considered to be outside of the Fourth Amendment's reach -- like the acquisition of third-party records and foreigner-targeting surveillance efforts.

The government can still provide notice without giving up its secrecy, which should (hopefully) limit the number of times the government claims national security trumps all other rulings, regulations, precedential decisions, and Constitutional amendments. The government can have its secrecy and its notification, says the court.

Given the need for secrecy in the foreign intelligence context, the government is required only to inform the defendant that surveillance occurred and that the government intends to use information obtained or derived from it. Knowledge of surveillance will enable the defendant to file a motion with the district court challenging its legality. If the government avers that disclosure of information relating to the surveillance would harm national security, then the court can review the materials bearing on its legality in camera and ex parte.

This would be breaking new ground, especially in cases where the government is using FISA-derived evidence. As Kerr points out, this isn't limited to settled Fourth Amendment precedent. This would allow defendants to challenge evidence derived from techniques and programs courts have yet to address. And this will (hopefully) force courts to confront unsettled Fourth Amendment issues, rather than dismiss them out of hand because no court has previously addressed novel (or secret) surveillance practices.

[N]ot only does it not require a warrant, it doesn’t even seem to require a search. The notice seems to be that evidence was obtained using a surveillance authority. It doesn’t appear to require that this authority is anything that has been understood to involve Fourth Amendment searches or seizures. Rather, the notice is provided so a person can bring a challenge and argue to a court that it’s a search or seizure, and an unreasonable search or seizure at that.

Put another way, this appears to be a Fourth Amendment notice requirement to alert criminal defendants that the government took steps that might constitute a search—but also might turn out not to be a search at all once a court reviews the matter closely. It has faint echoes to me of Miranda v. Arizona, in that it’s a judicially created notice about your rights potentially at stake so that you can take action to vindicate your rights.

If this is what the court is saying, the Ninth Circuit will be handling all sorts of interesting -- and precedent-setting -- cases in the near future. If the government has to be honest about its surveillance techniques, it will no longer be able to dodge Constitutional scrutiny by citing the Third Party Doctrine or claiming national security issues prevent it from informing defendants of the origin of evidence used against them.

This will have the most impact in cases where FISA evidence is in play and the government -- perhaps secure that its national security mantra will encourage the court to aid and abet in obfuscation -- hasn't bothered to engage in parallel construction. On the flipside, government lawyers have probably already parsed this latent threat to unearned secrecy and will be encouraging everyone involved to perform their surveillance in triplicate to prevent the establishment of warrant requirements in cases where reasonable suspicion can't even be met.

Nearly a year ago we wrote about the somewhat complex (and misunderstood by many) trademark dispute involving Banksy. There is a lot of background here, so I'm going to try to go with the abbreviated version. Banksy -- who has claimed that "copyright is for losers" -- has always refused to copyright his random graffiti-based art. However, as it now becomes clear, one reason he's avoided using copyright is because to register the work, he'd likely have to reveal his real name. Instead, it appears he's spent a few years abusing trademark law to try to trademark some of his artwork, including his famous "flower bomber" image, which was registered to a company called Pest Control Office Limited. Of course, to get a trademark, you have to use it in commerce, and many Banksy creations don't fit that criteria.

Either way, a small UK print operation called Full Colour Black, had built a business selling postcards of various graffiti-based street art work -- using photographs that they themselves took. Whether or not that violates copyright or maybe other moral rights is, perhaps, an interesting question. But it wasn't one that was approached here. Instead, Full Colour Black simply (and quite reasonably) sought to get Banksy's (sorry, Pest Control Office Limited's) trademark on the flower bomber image canceled because it was clearly an invalid trademark, and the work was not being used in commerce by Banksy.

You can argue that Full Colour Black profiting off of Banksy's work is unfair, but it's not trademark infringement. Banksy, somewhat bizarrely, ridiculously, and misleadingly, tried to frame the story as a big "greeting cards company" selling "fake Banksy merchandise," making it appear like Hallmark was ripping him off, rather than a tiny 3-person printing company that was trying to sell postcards of their own photographs of publicly-placed graffiti.

From there, Banksy got even worse legal advice. After realizing that his own lack of use in commerce was going to be an issue, Banksy created a "pop-up shop" in London, called (admittedly, cleverly) Gross Domestic Product. The pop-up shop itself was a Banksy-kind of performance art in its own way. The store was loaded up, but was never planned to be opened. You could just look in the windows from the outside. Banksy did, however, set up a way to buy some products online.

As we noted in our original post, despite claims that the pop-up shop was the right path to take from "arts lawyer and founder of the Design and Artists Copyright Society" Mark Stephens, who claimed he was giving "legal advice" to Banksy, the whole setup seemed much more likely to undermine his trademark claims, as it only underlined exactly how bogus the trademark claims were in the first place.

And, now the EU Intellectual Property Office has weighed in and... Banksy's trademark has been shredded like his Girl with Balloon painting. And, you know what? The EUIPO points out exactly what we argued in our original post:

However, Banksy’s audacious move appears to have backfired. The Cancellation Division today ruled that the EUTM “should be declared invalid” on the grounds of bad faith (with the non-distinction grounds not examined) because “it is clear that Banksy did not have any intention to use the EUTM in relation to the contested goods and services at the time of filing of the EUTM”. In the decision, the panel was scathing in its assessment of the shop, which it described as “inconsistent with honest practices”, stating: “The use, which was only made after the initiation of the present proceedings, was identified as use to circumvent the requirements of trademark law and thus there was no intention to genuinely use the sign as a trademark. Banksy was trying to use the sign only to show that he had an intention of using the sign, but his own words and those of his legal representative, unfortunately undermined this effort.”

The Cancellation Division also made clear that one of Banksy’s defining characteristics – his anonymity – was detrimental to his case. “Banksy has chosen to remain anonymous and for the most part to paint graffiti on other people’s property without their permission rather than to paint it on canvases or his own property... It must be pointed out that another factor worthy of consideration is that he cannot be identified as the unquestionable owner of such works as his identity is hidden; it further cannot be established without question that the artist holds any copyrights to a graffiti. The contested EUTM was filed in order for Banksy to have legal rights over the sign as he could not rely on copyright rights, but that is not a function of a trademark. Therefore, the filing of a trademark cannot be used to uphold these rights which may not exist, or at least may not exist for the person claiming to own them.”

The official cancellation notice actually goes further and, somewhat bizarrely, calls out Banksy's criticism of copyright law itself (which seems... to have nothing to do with the specific issue of whether a trademark should be cancelled).

Furthermore, Banksy has made numerous statements (which the applicant has submitted as evidence) in which he states that ‘copyright is for losers’, ‘Any advert in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use’ (excerpt from Wall and Piece 2006) and, indeed, Banksy has used the copyright of others in some of his works. He also allows the general public to download and use his images, but not for a commercial purpose, although the proprietor denied this in its arguments, the website extracts show that Banksy did allow this practice.

Perhaps even more damning to the trademark claim is the fact that Banksy himself directly admits that he didn't sell products that competed with Full Colour Black:

From an examination of the evidence filed by both parties it would appear that, at the time of filing of the application for invalidity, the proprietor (or Banksy) had never actually marketed or sold any goods under the contested sign. Moreover, some of the proprietor’s webpage extracts dated in 2010-2011 state that ‘All images are made available to download for personal amusement only, thanks. Banksy does not endorse or profit from the sale of greeting cards, mugs, t-shirts, photo canvases etc. …’, ‘Banksy does not produce greeting cards or print photo-canvases….Please take anything from this site and make your own (non-commercial use only thanks)’ and ‘Banksy has never produced greeting cards, mugs or photo canvases of his work’. Therefore, there is no evidence that Banksy was actually producing, selling or providing any goods or services under the contested sign either prior to the date of filing of the contested EUTM or up to the date of filing of the application for a declaration of invalidity.

So, setting up a fake pop-up shop just to pretend to do so... is not looked upon kindly:

In the second round of evidence the applicant provided evidence that Banksy had begun to sell goods after the date of filing of the present application for a declaration of invalidity. There are a number of articles from some notable publications in the UK dated in October 2019 which speak of the opening of a Banksy shop which would not be opened to the public, but the public could look at the window displays and buy the products online, after a vetting procedure to ensure that they were not going to re-sell the items and were not art dealers. In these publications Banksy is accredited to saying that ‘the motivation behind the venture was “possibly the least poetic reason to even make some art” – a trademark dispute’. An article also quotes Mr. M.S. (the applicant has shown that he is a Director of the proprietor and also self-proclaimed legal advisor of Banksy) as saying ‘Banksy is in a difficult position…Because he doesn’t produce his own range of shoddy merchandise and the law is quite clear – if the trademark holder is not using the mark, then it can be transferred to someone who will…(Mr. M.S) proposed that Banksy begin his own range of merchandise and open a shop as a solution to the issue….’. In the same article Banksy says ”Sometimes you go to work and it’s hard to know what to paint, but for the past few months I’ve been making stuff for the sole purpose of fulfilling trademark categories under EU law” and admitted that the subject matter is “not a very sexy muse”. The article points out that the windows display his works which include paintings such as the ‘Flower Thrower’. The article concludes that ‘Banksy stresses that, despite trying to defend his rights in this particular case, he hasn’t changed his position on copyright. “I still encourage anyone to copy, borrow, steal and amend my art for amusement, academic research or activism. I just don’t want them to get sole custody of my name”. The shop is called ‘Gross Domestic Product’ and the applicant also submitted an extract of the webpage of the shop dated 28/10/2019, in which it also encourages the copying, borrowing and uncredited use of Banksy imagery for amusement, activism and education purposes and to make merchandise for personal entertainment and non-profit activism for good causes, but not for passing them off as authentic and re-selling them.

From the evidence submitted Banksy had not manufactured, sold or provided any goods or services under the contested sign or sought to create a commercial market for his goods until after the filing of the present application for a declaration of invalidity. Only then, in October of 2019, he opened an online store (and had a physical shop but which was not opened to the public) but by his own words, reported in a number of different publications in the UK, he was not trying to carve out a portion of the commercial market by selling his goods, he was merely trying to fulfil the trade mark class categories to show use for these goods to circumvent the non-use of the sign requirement under EU law. Both Banksy and Mr. M.S, who is a Director of the proprietor, made statements that the goods were created and being sold solely for this cause. Therefore, by their own words they admit that the use made of the sign was not genuine trade mark use in order to create or maintain a share of the market by commercialising goods, but only to circumvent the law.

Oops.

Anyway, it appears that Banksy still has a US trademark on the flower bomber, but it was granted based on the EU trademark which is now invalidated, so it's possible that the trademark may get invalidated here as well.

Next time, perhaps, Banksy should get some better legal advice.

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Sending out armed law enforcement officers to handle mental health crises has often been a bad idea. Situations that require compassion, de-escalation, and nuance are far too often greeted with force, more force, and deadly force. Since there's always "excited delirium" to excuse the deaths caused by officers ill-equipped to deal with mental health issues, very little has changed. Until now.

Recently, there has been a nationwide uprising against police brutality and the senseless killing of unarmed citizens by law enforcement officers. Legislators are actively pursuing reform efforts and finally suggesting some things cops just aren't trained to do well should be handled by others who can handle them better. Some police officials believe this is "defunding." But it isn't. It's just taking money being used badly and rerouting it to programs and personnel who are specifically trained to work with people suffering from mental health issues.

A lot of city lawmakers are talking about shifting resources away from the "guys with guns" approach that has seen a great many people in need of health intervention "assisted" to death by police officers. The city of Denver is actually doing something about it. Denver's Support Team Assistance Response (STAR) -- launched four days after George Floyd-related protests began in Denver -- sends out health professionals and paramedics to respond to 911 calls about people behaving erratically.

Since its launch June 1, the STAR van has responded to more than 350 calls, replacing police in matters that don’t threaten public safety and are often connected to unmet mental or physical needs. The goal is to connect people who pose no danger with services and resources while freeing up police to respond to other calls. The team, which is not armed, has not called police for backup, [Carleigh] Sailon said.

This limits the number of interactions involving weapons with the power to maim or kill. This makes it a program that saves lives -- not only because the STAR team gets people the help they need, but because it prevents situations from escalating to the point where jailing or force deployment (or both) seem to be the only options. This new task force is all that much more important since so many Denver residents appear to feel 911 is just a city customer service line.

The team has responded to an indecent exposure call that turned out to be a woman changing clothes in an alley because she was unhoused and had no other private place to go. They’ve been called out to a trespassing call for a man who was setting up a tent near someone’s home. They’ve helped people experiencing suicidal thoughts, people slumped against a fence, people simply acting strange.

The STAR team only handles a small percentage of the city's 911 calls. Most are still handled by law enforcement. But it does free up police resources to handle situations requiring their presence, rather than asking under-trained officers to handle everything residents ask them to handle because they don't know who else to ask.

Police are always talking about working smarter. But they rarely seem to recognize their own shortcomings could be addressed by others who won't take an approach that ends in death, arrest, or injury. They should embrace programs like these that allow them to pursue actual criminals, rather than treating people who are victims of mental illness, homelessness, or suicidal thoughts like criminals because that's how they're trained to treat everyone.

It was the technology that was supposed to change the world. According to carriers, not only was fifth-generation wireless (5G) supposed to bring about the "fourth industrial revolution," it was supposed to revolutionize everything from smart cities to cancer treatment. According to conspiracy theorists and internet imbeciles, 5G is responsible for everything from Covid-19 to your migraines.

Unfortunately for both sets of folks, data continues to indicate that 5G is nowhere near that interesting.

A number of recent studies have already shown that U.S. wireless isn't just the most expensive in the developed world, U.S. 5G is notably slower than most overseas deployments. That's thanks in large part to our failure to make so-called middle band spectrum available for public use, resulting in a heavy smattering of lower band spectrum (good signal reach but slow speeds) or high-band and millimeter wave spectrum (great speeds, but poor reach and poor reception indoors). The end result is a far cry from what carriers had spent the last three years promising.

PC Magazine was the latest to put carrier promises to the test and came away decidedly unimpressed. Networks certainly are getting faster, the report concludes, but it's largely due to steady evolutionary improvements being made to 4G networks, not newer 5G networks. As such, PC Magazine is forced to admit they bought into early carrier hype promising an amazing revolution:

"We admit it, we bought into the 5G hype. Carriers, phone makers, and chip makers alike have all been selling 5G as faster and more powerful than 4G, with lower latency. So I was shocked to see that our AT&T 5G results, especially, were slower than 4G results on the same network. This is a crisis for marketing, not for performance. All three US carriers showed significantly higher download speeds and better broadband reliability than they did in our 2019 tests. It's just that these gains, particularly on AT&T, are largely because of improvements in 4G, not 5G networks."

Wireless carriers haven't given much thought to the perils of over-hyping 5G, thereby associating the standard with empty bluster and frustration in the minds of consumers. You'll recall that AT&T has lied repeatedly in trying to pretend that 4G is 5G via misleading phone icons, and Verizon perpetually enjoyed hyping 5G market launches, only to have those looking for an actual 5G signal find that availability is these markets is spotty... at best (one study found that a Verizon 5G signal was available around 0.4% of the time in launched 5G markets).

Not too surprisingly then, PC Magazine routinely found it difficult to actually obtain a 5G signal:

"It's been more than a year since the US carriers launched 5G. AT&T purports to have 5G in 22 of our 26 test cities; Verizon has it in 18; and T-Mobile has it in all of them. But our 5G results were disappointing all around, on every carrier. Often, it was a choice between faux G (we’ll explain this shortly) and no G...most of our current 5G coverage offers people a slightly improved 4G experience dressed up with a shiny new icon. That’s not bad, but to live up to their lofty promises about how 5G will change education, medicine, industry, and home internet, the carriers will need to use more spectrum and better technology than they’re currently giving us.

It's also worth noting that despite all the promises surrounding the T-Mobile and Sprint merger, the initial result has been slower speeds overall as the companies work to integrate discordant networks:

"So far, T-Mobile's absorption of Sprint hasn't shown much advantage for consumers. It's to the contrary, really: In our results, it looks like the rush of Sprint users onto T-Mobile's network has created some congestion that has caused T-Mobile to fall behind in comparative performance. All of the carriers' speeds increased from 2019 to 2020, but T-Mobile's increased less than AT&T's and Verizon's did."

PC Mag's study was mirrored this week by a Washington Post investigation that basically concluded all the same things. Namely that 5G isn't much to write home about, and in many instances U.S. 4G networks outperform 5G in 5G launch markets:

"Your experience with a 5G phone in 2020 is likely to be all over the map. I got searing fast 750 Mbps downloads from AT&T in one corner of downtown. But in the same spot, my 4G phone got an also extremely fast 330 Mbps. Moreover, because of the pandemic, those aren’t places I go very often. As I write this from my home office in the middle of San Francisco, I’m getting 11 Mbps downloads on my AT&T 5G phone. On T-Mobile, I get a laughable 8 Mbps on 5G, which is barely enough to stream HD Netflix."

I regret to inform you that despite a lot of tech policy bluster and carrier marketing, we are most assuredly not winning the "race to 5G." In fact, our broadband maps are so routinely terrible, I'm not sure we'd be able to confirm it if we were.

Again, 5G will certainly offer faster speeds, lower latency, and more reliable networks over the long haul, especially as carriers push new middle band spectrum to market. Even then, don't expect 5G pricing to be particularly innovative thanks to the death of net neutrality and reduced competition due to consolidation. Carriers are also lobbying the FCC to exclude 5G from broadband mapping improvements (meaning don't expect an accurate read on where it's truly available any time soon). The more things change...

We recently filed comments in the still ongoing FCC comment period regarding the NTIA's petition to get the FCC to reinterpret Section 230 to match with the President's bizarrely warped view of social media content moderation. I filed personal comments from my perspective running Techdirt, and we also filed more official comments as an organization. Both were filed during the initial comment period, but we're now in the middle of a second comment period -- officially for "responses" to the initial comments -- which are due by September 17th.

It really is not particularly difficult to file a comment with the FCC, though if you do, I recommend that you write out a letter and submit a PDF that clearly states the issue and your argument (rather than just ranting incoherently) as many FCC commenters have been known to do.

However, if you want it to be even easier, the good folks over at Fight for the Future have announced that they've set up a new site, SaveOnlineSpeech.org to make it even easier to file a comment.

The comments will be submitted directly to the FCC’s public docket, which so far has been mostly filled with nonsense, including identical astroturf comments backed by AT&T –– some that still include boilerplate “XYZ group” language –– and hundreds of comments from an anti-LGBTQ hate group backing the executive order. 

The page notes that, while there may be very real problems with how big internet companies are managed and how platforms are run, messing with Section 230 is not the way to fix that.

There’s no question that Big Tech companies have amassed tremendous power to limit expression, spread dangerous misinformation, silence dissent, and manipulate public opinion. These are serious problems that impact our lives, and it’s long past time the government took action to address this dangerous behavior by enacting strong legislation to prevent corporate data harvesting, banning abusive practices like microtargeted advertising, and taking on Silicon Valley’s monopolistic business practices at their root. But this Trump executive order, and similarly misguided proposals from Democrats to rip up Section 230, won’t do any of that. Instead, they’ll make these problems worse.

Punching a hole in Section 230 will allow any president to decide what speech is allowed on the Internet. If the government doesn’t like how social media websites moderate content, the government can simply shut those companies down. That might seem like a good idea when someone you support is in the Oval Office, but political power changes quickly. No matter what your political beliefs are, we should all be able to agree that letting governments and corporations restrict the free flow of information is a bad idea.

Feel free to check it out if you're looking for a way to file a comment, and the FCC page was not user-friendly for you.