Have I cited TechDirt here before? I’m pretty sure I have. Anyway, in a sign of the weird times today, they’ve just come out and said that because they’re an outlet for technology and computer-science news, that means that now they’re a democracy blog whether they want to be or not… because suddenly, the way tech companies operate has become a fundamental part of American politics:
It’s difficult to explain how much it matters that we’ve seen this movie before. (Well, technically, we’ve seen the beta version — what’s happening now is way more troubling.) When you’ve spent years watching how some tech bros break the rules in pursuit of personal and economic power at the expense of safety and user protections, all while wrapping themselves in the flag of “innovation,” you get pretty good at spotting the pattern.
Take two recent stories that perfectly illustrate the difference in coverage. First, there’s the TikTok ban. Political reporters focused on which party would benefit from the ban, and who would get credit for being “tough on China” — the usual horse-race nonsense. Tech and law reporters, meanwhile, were highlighting how the legislation would actually weaken security protections and create dangerous precedents for government intervention in private companies. (Not to mention how it would undermine decades of US work promoting an open internet.)
Or take what’s happening at the FCC right now. The traditional media keeps repeating the claims that Brendan Carr is a “free speech warrior,” because that’s what Donald Trump called him. But if you’ve been covering tech policy for a while, you know full well that Carr isn’t actually a believer in free speech. Quite the opposite.
Carr made it clear he wants to be America’s top censor, but cleverly wrapped it in misleading language about free speech. Inexperienced political reporters just repeated those misleading claims. Then he started doing exactly what he promised: going after companies whose speech he seemed to feel was too supportive of Democrats. And now some of those same media companies who failed to cover Carr accurately are falling in line, caving to threats from the administration.
This is the kind of thing tech and law reporters spot immediately, because we’ve seen this all play out before. When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point. It’s about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.
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There’s something important to understand about innovation. It doesn’t actually happen in a vacuum. The reason Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley wasn’t because a bunch of genius inventors happened to like California weather. It was because of a complex web of institutions that made innovation possible: courts that would enforce contracts (but not non-competes, allowing ideas to spread quickly and freely across industries), universities that shared research, a financial system that could fund new ideas, and laws that let people actually try those ideas out. And surrounding it all: a fairly stable economy, stability in global markets and (more recently) a strong belief in a global open internet.