For those who've followed the progress of a dangerous stealth quota provision in Congress, I'm pleased to report that what looked three weeks ago like a retreat on the issue has turned into a full-fledged rout.
A new discussion draft of the widely touted American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) has been released. This bill was hailed as a bipartisan and bicameral compromise with overwhelming support when it first appeared. The original version contained a detailed blueprint for imposing race, gender, and other preferences on algorithms that use personal data. After a long analysis of the risks of such an approach ran here in the Volokh Conspiracy, a second version of the bill was released that dropped most of the detail but still had troubling provisions that could have encouraged similar preferences, as pointed out in a second Volokh Conspiracy post.
Now a third discussion draft has been released, and it drops all of the algorithmic discrimination and civil rights provisions that were driving quotas. It is a complete victory for those of us who objected to the smuggling of race and gender preferences into the digital infrastructure that will govern our economy and society for the next several decades.
