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Hey, everyone. Have you ventured out of the house yet? Gone on a road trip? Tippled at a bar? Enjoy the summer! Because somewhere in the world, a Covid variant might be working overtime to ruin our winter.
The tech world is currently quivering at the legislative equivalent of a multi-barreled mortar attack on its business models and monopolistic practices. No less than five prospective laws, introduced last week, would slam the industry’s biggest companies. One law would stop companies from buying off competition, and even threaten to roll back, say, Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram. Another would ban platforms from favoring their own products. To top it off, one demands that mergers that do go through be subject to high fees—to fund even more antitrust regulation. What’s scary for Cook, Bezos, Pichai, and Zuckerberg is that there is bipartisan support for all these. You know you’ve gone too far when both sides of a deadlocked and dysfunctional Congress agree that you suck.
This suite of bills is a fearsome fivesome. But I fear that they don’t fully address our troubles with tech. Also, the proposed legislation is so sweeping and complicated that passage will be difficult, in part because the esoteric solutions may not resonate with a frustrated public. So how about some targeted laws to address the most annoying practices of tech companies and their founders? In the spirit of public service, I offer a few suggestions for some quick-and-dirty bills that might apply a helpful band-aid to various woes and outrages. Here goes:
Apple’s products are designed in California. And SpongeBob and Transformers were conceived in Hollywood. Yet because the intellectual property of Apple and Viacom have, by some tax lawyer voodoo, been transferred abroad, the crown jewels of these and many other companies are foreign residents, thus avoiding American taxes. Apple’s brilliant innovations reside in the Emerald Isle, and the shape shifting robots and lovable sponge are in the hands of obscure Dutch subsidiaries. Techniques like the “Double Irish” are perfectly legal only because we aren’t closing the loopholes. Finally, we’re seeing pressure on the companies to stop, and Apple, Google, and Facebook have indicated that they will roll back these techniques, in part because of multinational proposals for a minimum tax. But let’s make sure we never see these tactics again. The Stop Sponging Act will lay tariffs on imported intellectual property. If Apple puts its patents for operating systems and touch-screen gestures in Ireland, the Bahamas, or an autonomous zone in the English Channel, let’s charge a tax when they use those features in hardware or software sold in the US. Note: We’d need a carve-out for literature, music, and movies that are actually created in the countries where the property is registered.
We keep passing anti-spam acts that don’t work. But maybe we can address one vile aspect of robo-calls that’s only gotten worse as AI-fueled natural language programs get better: the phony and misleading familiarity with which so many of those calls begin. “Hi, I’m Mary or Courtney, or Jason,” says an automated message sent to billions of people. The Truth in Robo-Call Act would mandate that any call not made by a human should begin with the words, “This is an automated call.” Using first names is forbidden, unless the spammer places it from their personal phone, with the number not blocked. This way, you can return the call: “Hi, Jason, I’m calling just to say hello!”
Yachts don’t scale, but tech moguls love them anyway. The late Steve Jobs had one, as did Paul Allen. Larry Page sails the Pacific. Jeff Bezos is building a yacht so big that he needs a support yacht to hold the heliport. While this is just a symbol of the larger issue of insane income inequality, it’s also an easy target! So while we’re still trying to figure out Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax, let’s zero in on the nautical wretched excess and pass what I call the Michael McDonald Ostentatiously Offensive Seagoing Vessel Act (named after the iconic voice of Yacht Rock). All yachts over $1 million will be subject to a tax equivalent to 100 percent of the cost, up to $50 million. Over $50 million, the tax is 200 percent, rising to 500 percent over $100 million. (Note to Larry Ellison: Yes, it’s retroactive!) Here’s the thing—these guys (always guys) can afford it, and even those high fees won’t stop them from playing the Mine’s Bigger game. And here’s a suggestion for enforcement: If any American citizen owns such a yacht, no matter what country it is registered in, and taxes are not paid, said vessel will be subject to torpedo attacks, with all liability ascribed to the owner.
While I’m rewriting the rule books, I might as well address another annoying issue that might only be solved through legislation. Did you ever pay for a subscription and then find yourself fuming when you constantly have to re-sign in to access it? (Of course you did—and maybe even with WIRED.) When it comes to serving ads and surveilling us in general, tech companies know us pretty well—look up a Boise address on your desktop browser, and your Facebook feed gets loaded with ads for Idaho hotels. So Congress should mandate an industry system where all paid subscriptions across platforms will show up everywhere. It would preserve anonymity and be totally separate from any ad services or tracking, other than confirming that the user is a paid subscriber. Once the system is set up, any paid subscriber to a streaming service, newsletter, or app who is forced to enter a password more than twice on the same device shall get a refund and a full year of free service.
Are these serious proposals? Not really. Well, maybe the one about intellectual property. And the yachts. Oh, hell, pass them all! The world would be improved if the problems addressed in those laws were resolved. So Congress, get to work on this stuff! Then you can focus on the more sweeping bills introduced this session that, if history is an indicator, will die in committee, or be devastatingly watered down by lobbyists and donors.
Sometimes legislators do speak up for good causes. In 2007, Pennsylvania congressperson Mike Doyle defended the mashup artist Greg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, for using fair-use samples in the songs he remixed. I was fascinated by his response to attacks on Gillis, so I conducted a summit between the representative and the DJ at a hot dog place in Pittsburgh, and wrote about it in Newsweek. Spoiler alert—Doyle figured out that he’d never be able to get a law passed to help Gillis:
I had brought the two together (at a local hot-dog joint called the Franktuary) because Mike Doyle had taken the audacious step of wondering if his constituent, instead of being dismissed as a Pittsburgh pirate, should be recognized as an artist—and that Congress should explore ways that his work could be legally sanctioned. In a March hearing of the House Telecom Subcommittee, Doyle lauded Gillis and his work, in which snippets from disparate artists fade into and out of a witty collage powered by hip-hop rhythms and rap lyrics. "Mr. Chairman," said Doyle, "he blended Elton John, Notorious B.I.G. and Destiny's Child, all in the span of 30 seconds!" "Maybe mash-ups are a transformative new art," he said.
The lunch's climactic moment came when the congressman asked how one could write a law "that would somehow square up with the 167 artists you've used and allow you to get on store shelves." Gillis said that he'd try to find a middle ground where some samples were OK because of fair-use provisions in the law and others paid for by a reasonable fee. The congressman listened, but admitted the odds were long for a Mash-Up Relief bill. "Some members don't even want to understand it," he said. "They just get a call from the industry saying, 'Bad'." On the other hand, Mike Doyle said he might catch one of Gillis's Girl Talk shows soon.
Richard asks, “Are quantum effects in the brain needed to explain consciousness?”
Richard, I am flattered that you think that I, a mere newsletter writer, can untangle a question as complicated as this. I’d love to supply you with a yes or no answer—the kind of response that legislators keep demanding of tech CEOs when they fire loaded questions at them. But I will defer, because the fact is that we are only at the beginning of our quest to deeply understand how the brain works, and explaining consciousness is the most elusive of all quests. You are evoking the work of Matthew Fisher, a UCSB theoretical physicist, who is currently exploring whether the brain is essentially a quantum computer, apparently building on the controversial theories of physicist and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose. Others disagree, and the word “crackpot” often finds its way into their objections. Let the studies flourish! The brain is a frontier that begs exploration, and recent tech efforts to exploit brain science, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, are barreling ahead well before we know what we’re doing. But I’d bet that Musk will reach Mars before he successfully masters that 3-pound universe inside our skulls.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
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