Our headline story for this episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast is the UK's sweeping new Online Safety Act, which regulates social media in a host of ways. Mark MacCarthy spells some of them out, but the big surprise is encryption. U.S. encrypted messaging companies used up all the oxygen in the room hyperventilating about the risk that end-to-end encryption would be regulated and bragging about their determination to resist. As a result, journalists have paid little attention to any other provision in the past year or two. And even then, they got it wrong, gleefully claiming that the UK had backed down and stripped authority to regulate encrypted apps from the bill. Mark and I explain just how wrong they are. It was the messaging companies who blinked and who are now pretending they won.
In cybersecurity news, David Kris and I have kind words for DHS's report on how to coordinate cyber incident reporting. Unfortunately, there's a vast gulf between writing a good report on coordinating incident reporting and actually, you know, coordinating incident reporting. David also offers a generous view of the conservative catfight over section 702 of FISA between former Congressman Bob Goodlatte on one side and Michael Ellis and me on the other. The latest installment in that conflict is here.
If you need to catch up on the raft of antitrust lawsuits launched by the Biden administration, Gus Hurwitz has you covered. First, he explains what's at stake in the Justice Department's case against Google – and why we don't know more about it. Then he offers a preview of the imminent FTC case against Amazon. Followed by his criticism of Lina Khan's decision to name three Amazon execs as targets in the FTC's other big Amazon case – over Prime membership. Amazon is clearly Lina Khan's White Whale, but that doesn't mean that everyone who works should be sushi.
