Blumenthal Thinks If Only The FTC Can Enforce KOSA It Won’t Be Abused; He’s Wrong

Policy

from the stop-regulating-what-you-don't-understand dept

It’s pretty amazing to me just how wrong one Senator can be about the internet for years and years and years. But we’ve been writing about Senator Richard Blumenthal and never, ever letting his own confusion about the internet get in the way of him boldly making foolish claims about the internet since before he was even Senator Blumenthal. Back in 2008, when he was simply clueless Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, we had to try to explain to him the internet and Section 230, and sometimes I feel like his ongoing vendetta against the internet stems from looking so foolish all the way back then.

I mean, the defining moment of Blumenthal’s demands to regulate the internet remains his “will you commit to ending Finsta” demand, which only cemented just how clueless many of our elected officials are about the internet.

But, really, Blumenthal’s defining moment of internet ignorance should be his role in passing FOSTA, legislation that has been roundly recognized as (1) not even remotely doing what Blumenthal promised us it would do and (2) instead harming many people while simultaneously shutting down speech of marginalized groups.

No one should trust Senator Blumenthal around literally anything having to do with regulating the internet. He is a danger to the public.

And, of course, he’s still pushing his follow up to FOSTA, called KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act). As with FOSTA, those who don’t understand the internet are doomed to get people killed. KOSA has all sorts of problems, in that its “duty of care” provisions will force websites to remove information that politically motivated enforcers will claim is “harmful.” Republicans have actually been quite upfront about this, publicly saying they support Blumenthal’s KOSA because they want to use it to drive LGBTQ content offline. Senator Marsha Blackburn, Blumenthal’s partner in crime on KOSA, has directly said that KOSA is needed to “protect minor children from the transgender in our culture.”

Yet Blumenthal still refuses to back down. While he agreed to some changes in the law to try to limit its scope to six designated areas of content, it’s not difficult to figure out how culture war enforcers could twist those areas to silence speech such as LGBTQ speech as “harmful” to children. We’re already seeing how Republican legislatures are doing exactly that.

The latest is that, in a paywalled article in Politico (thanks to a few of you who sent it over), Blumenthal (who denied there were any problems with the bill last year) says he’s open to changing the enforcement mechanism in the bill, potentially removing the provision that allows any state AG to enforce the law which would open it up to culture warrior AGs) and limiting it to just the FTC or possibly some other federal agency.

In the piece, Blumenthal admits that “as a former AG” himself, he would prefer to keep the AG enforcement mechanism in the bill, but he’s open to some other enforcement authority if it will get the bill over the finish line.

But, of course, this implies that the FTC is somehow not prone to abuse by whoever is in charge at the time, and wouldn’t use this new power as a political weapon. I mean, we already have Republicans constantly whining about Lina Khan’s somewhat rogue leadership and case selection at today’s FTC.

And, then, if Trump were re-elected, does anyone actually think he wouldn’t install some culture war MAGA crony to run the FTC and use it to hammer “big tech” with lawsuits? I mean, of course, he’d use KOSA — pushed by Democrats like Blumenthal — to force companies to remove pro-LGBTQ content as “harmful to kids.” How is that even in question?

Remember, this is the same Trump who tried to get the FCC to do his bidding in removing social media company’s right to moderate. That only failed when the clock ran out on his administration.

So, no, handing authority over to the FTC (or any federal agency) won’t fix the problems of KOSA. The problems of KOSA are inherent to the bill. They’re inherent to Blumenthal’s near complete ignorance of how the internet actually works, and what happens when you create these types of laws.

There are ways the government could help make the internet safer for kids. But it involves the boring, less flashy (but actually effective) things that Blumenthal will never look to do, because they don’t get him headlines or big attention-grabbing hearings.

Filed Under: ftc, kosa, richard blumenthal, state ags