Posts

The privacy bill that exempts government and beefs up the FTC

Last week, a discussion draft of the American Privacy Rights Act was published. Considering I’ve written about the need for a national privacy law for some time, I wanted to be sure I gave it a honest read. I will publish a more detailed summary on the Consumer Choice Center website here soon. Herein you’ll find my Q&A with Reason Magazine Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan…

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Misinformed Jon Stewart Applauds FTC Chair Lina Khan

It’s not often that the head of a U.S. federal agency is given the red carpet treatment on Comedy Central, but for Jon Stewart, it’s to be expected. Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), appeared on the revamped Daily Show featuring Stewart as host on Monday nights, to hype up the FTC’s work battling the “monopolies” of the current era. Khan was certainly in…

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Litigation Finance Exposes Our Judicial System to Foreign Exploitation

Now that Congress has come to its senses about a forced divestiture plan to uncouple TikTok from the Chinese Communist Party, we’d be remiss not to explore other examples of how powers such as China influence American institutions. Let’s look at our justice system. In a handful of local court cases around the country, a Shenzhen-based firm has been clandestinely funding intellectual property lawsuits to help upend a major…

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The Fed’s Transaction Fee Cap Will Cost Consumers More Than They Realize

Could your free checking accounts, rewards, and cash-back programs be axed by the Federal Reserve? Late last year, the Federal Reserve proposed a rule to lower the cap on transaction fees businesses pay to financial institutions on every debit card swipe, also known as “interchange fees.” These are the small fees that banks and credit unions charge merchants for using their payment rails to get paid. As…

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Climate lawyers could control the future of American energy, not consumers

When we think of American energy, we conjure up images of oil drillers, refineries, pipelines, and end products we put into our cars or the plastic products we use daily. There are millions of jobs and billions of products sourced from energy production that make our society abundant and wealthy. That’s especially true today under President Joe Biden, as production of both oil and gas…

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Forcing TikTok’s divestiture from the CCP is both reasonable and necessary

Washington, D.C. – Yesterday, a bipartisan group of US House legislators introduced a bill that would force ByteDance Ltd. to sell its US version of TikTok or face massive fines and federal investigations. This would have big ramifications for the video-sharing app, which is estimated to have over 150 million users in the US. In practice, HR7521 designates the popular social media application TikTok as a “foreign adversary controlled application,”…

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Kibbe on Liberty: Congress Is Using Kids to Impose Online Censorship

While I was in Washington, D.C., I spoke to freedom maximalist and “Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff” author Matt Kibbe about online privacy and the Internet, the Kids Online Safety Act, Bitcoin and its enemies, central bank digital currencies, and the weaponization of the FTC. It was published on the Kibbe On Liberty RSS podcast feed and YouTube page. Won’t someone please…

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Movement on Indiana’s anti-CBDC legislation | WIBC 93.1

I joined Stephen Kent on WIBC 93.1 to break down the case for a bill blocking the use of CBDC’s in Indiana. Sen. Eric Koch introduced Senate Bill 180 (SB180) to prohibit state agencies from accepting payments made with a central bank digital currency for any service, tax, license, permit, fee, information, or other amount due the governmental body. It would also bar government agencies…

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‘Green bubble’ texts on iMessage are not the FCC’s problem to solve  

When iPhone users see a green bubble pop up in their text messages, it has a way of dulling the experience. Emoji reactions, Facetime video calls, or even high-quality images over WiFi are immediately broken once a green-bubbled Android user slides into a group thread.  This is the reality of Apple’s iMessage protocol, the default messaging app for its users. These consumers enjoy end-to-end encryption,…

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