“I’m not anyone that understands the industry”

Observations from inside the COVID bubble

(A reminder that you’re subscribed to semi-regular email updates from me, Nancy Scola.) 

E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse, Washington D.C.

Hey there. I’m laid up with COVID this week, my second spin on that merry-go-round. It’s meant canceling several plans in the last handful of days: a source coffee, attending a Senate hearing, stopping by a maybe-I-will-maybe-I won’t conference, an appointment with a booked-up haircutter, dinner with some old college friends, that sort of thing.

None were the biggest deal, but COVID, I find, introduces a level of uncertainty to everyday living — “Sure, that sounds fun, but we’ll see what the virus thinks” — that this Virgo very much does not enjoy. 

That said, all this indoor-cat time has given me a chance to do a lot of reading and watching. So I thought I’d share a list of what I found interesting this week at the intersections of tech, politics, and policy:

• Much attention is deservedly being paid to the secrecy of the big, ongoing U.S. v. Google antitrust trial, as such hush-hushness can be one way society’s big public institutions pay deference to our country’s biggest companies. But there’s another powerful dynamic more quietly shaping the hugely consequential case: the idea that government can’t possibly understanding the complexities driving the U.S. tech industry. Take how Judge Amit Mehta, a graduate of Georgetown and the University of Virginia law school, explained his reasoning for allowing the obscuring of hearing exhibits and testimony from the public: “I am not anyone that understands the industry and the markets in the way that you do... And so I take seriously when companies are telling me that if this gets disclosed, it’s going to cause competitive harm.” The belief that only Silicon Valley is clever enough to understand Silicon Valley has fallen out of favor in Joe Biden’s Washington. But not in Judge Mehta’s courtroom. 

• You can make a decent case that Yelp’s Luther Lowe did perhaps more than anyone else in the country to make this Google trial happen, and now he’s on to the next.

• Speaking of antitrust, with a LiveNation-negotiated deal taking a hefty cut from the merchandise sales at the rather neat D.C.-area performance venue Wolf Trap, the artist Tomberlin opted just not to sell stuff.  

• Joe Biden keeps plugging away against “junk fees,” concert-related and otherwise. Open question is whether voters are paying any attention.

• American Compass’s Oren Cass is trying to do on the right something akin to what Matt Stoller has been attempting to do on the left. Per New York’s Eric Levitz writes that Cass’s group “is not prosecuting the case against modernism in an ivory tower or mocking the ‘laptop class’ in a digital publication. Rather, it is translating the populist right’s irritable mental gestures into model legislation for prioritizing workers in corporate bankruptcy and increasing wage subsidies for parents.”

• One pillar of the “algorithm” that Elon Musk, per Walter Isaacson in his new biography, uses to build things is a page out of the U.S. Digital Service playbook: “Question every requirement.” 

• Of the Musk biography itself, well, it reads like a quickly baked extended biographical entry, with only the lightest dusting of analysis. Musk is portrayed again and again as having genius insights that somehow escape highly trained experts. “There is a shit ton of metal that doesn’t make any damn sense,” he tells a room of accomplished SpaceX engineers building rocket engines. But given the central role Musk is playing in everything from space travel with SpaceX to autonomous electric cars with Tesla to satellite-based Internet with Starlink to social media with Twitter/X to artificial intelligence with xAI to whatever this thing with the monkeys is — it’s pretty wild, when you stop and list it all out! — it’s worthwhile to have Isaacson’s detailed reporting on Musk’s decision-making all in one place. One key takeaway from that record is that Musk is unbearably uncomfortable when not in crisis. It’s fair to think he bought Twitter because nothing else in his life was at the moment on fire. Now, there are a few folks that push back against some of his more questionable moves. After Musk tweets a totally unfounded rumor about Paul Pelosi, his brother Kimbal reportedly tells him, “You’re an idiot… Stop falling for weird shit.” In another episode, staffers resist his ad hoc upending of an entire server farm that ultimately led to the crashing of Ron DeSantis’s debut “Twitter Spaces.” But given how spread around Musk’s life is — he rarely seems to be working on one company in one location for more than a few days at a time, at most — there’s no one with enough standing to tell him, sometimes, just stop.

• About that U.S. Digital Service, some critics say they’re stuck playing small ball. 

• The Biden ‘24 campaign is gearing up to try to win the Internet: "Aides involved in it have adopted the mantra ‘more is more.’” But here, too, up pops Musk. Deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty tells Politico’s Elena Schneider, “We’re going to be thinking about this as platform agnostic because we just don’t know what the long-term outlook looks like for Twitter.”

• For Washingtonian, I take a look at some of the most interesting folks doing the most important work on tech in the DMV. 

• The FTC is taking its long-awaited swing at Amazon, and it’s a case designed in part for public consumption, with punchy lines like this: “Amazon is a monopolist. It exploits its monopolies in ways that enrich Amazon but harm its customers.”

• Worth keeping in mind that the hometown paper of Washington D.C. is owned, personally, by the founder of Amazon. Columbia Journalism Review’s Dan Froomkin argues that “The Washington Post has a Bezos problem.”

• Former Post editor Marty Baron explains how Bezos landed last-minute on “Democracy dies in darkness.”

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency dreamt up in the lab of then-professor Elizabeth Warren in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, is facing an existential threat. The Supreme Court will hear Tuesday a case alleging that it violates the Constitution’s appropriations clause. The CFPB doesn’t get much attention. (For one thing, the acronym is a beast to remember. Eff-pee-bee? Eff-bee-pee?) But should the economic-populist push from the left get lasting institutional traction, it’s a key place where it’d expand to next. That would require it existing.

• The FCC, meanwhile, is newly back to full strength for the first time in the Biden era. And the return of a Democratic majority means the fight over “net neutrality” is back, too. 

• Campaigns & Elections held a good session this week on “deciding where the ethical lines are” when it comes to using AI in campaigning. Is it okay, for example, to use an AI-generated voiceprint to recreate something your candidate said in print? What if it’s what your opponent said? The experts were very much in the dunno stage, but IMGE creative director Emily Karr suggested that the truism going around that “AI won’t take your job, a person using AI will” applies in politics, too.

• Some things don’t change, though: “Emails have been a primary driver of the D.C. information economy for nearly two decades.”

Enjoying the newsletter? Recommend it to a friend. And thanks, as always, for reading. 

—Nancy