The NO FAKES act has changed, and it's worse

Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.

Or the sort of thing bigger companies lobby for to make the entry barriers higher for small competition. Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.

But it sounds much worse than that: infrastructure for textbook tyranny.

Suppress speech of dissidents against the regime, take away their soapboxes and printing presses, demand that the dissident be identified and turned over to the regime, and put fear of sanctions into all who might be perceived by the regime as aiding dissidents through action or inaction.

This is true. Which is of a piece with EFF's general bent these days. They stopped caring about big issues of internet freedom long ago and are now just a parade of Big Tech Bad headlines.

And in an era where (1) Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information and (2) we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.

The tech privacy apocalypse is upon us. And the %!@#! EFF is still whining about Meta and ByteDance for its click stream, because like everyone else on the internet that's what they really care about.

Exactly. This is the big boy version of "even your petty backyard patio needs a PE stamp" type crap.

They were a genuine beacon of rationality and justice in the early internet. They're junk-tier blog spam now. And I find that upsetting, irrespective of the status of AI legislation.

They won't care to implement it. They'll follow the letter of the law, which means they'll aggressively block anything that gets (falsely) reported, but they certainly won't follow its spirit.

"Crony capitalism consists of but one principle: In-corporations who are protected by regulation, but not bound by it, alongside out-corporations who are bound by regulation, but not protected by it."

This philosophy is yours is bad for a number of reasons, but I’ll start with the fact that you have essentially constructed a loophole for arbitrarily bad laws to be passed. If you just rage yourself into not caring about bad laws because you’re mad at the people talking about them instead, then when will you ever oppose the bad laws, instead of “getting mad at randos online”? This quickly turns into cynicism and apathy in the face of unlimited cruelty and expansion of government power.

> we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.

The latter is the direct and consequential result of the former. Elon Musk is Big Tech, and he specifically engineered Trump's second electoral victory to get back at Gavin Newsom not letting him run the California Tesla factory at full tilt during COVID. He also turned Twitter into a 24/7 far-right slop machine.

Before that, under the latter half of the Jack Dorsey regime, Twitter was a 9-to-5 liberal slop machine. And before that it was so painfully "neutral" that it let all these far-right nutjobs get a foothold on the Internet to begin with. Remember Jack Dorsey rolling out the "world leaders" policy just to justify not enforcing the rules on Trump? Or Reddit vetoing moderators of far-right subs from shutting down their own hellholes? Big Tech's stewardship of public forums ranges from "asleep at the wheel" at best to "actively malicious and incompetent" at worst.

And this is downstream of the broader disintegration of the liberal coalition. The operation of a large enterprise involves many inherently illiberal acts, and thus the business half of that coalition no longer acts as liberals. In fact, I would argue they fell away decades ago. We didn't notice because the business class had distracted us with a culture war, specifically using their stewardship of social media to amplify opposition and division.

I have plenty of complaints about the EFF, but their lobbying against Big Tech is not part of them.

His sentiments are pressaged by others, including Adam Smith (1776):

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/>

Or some guy named Matthew, somewhat earlier:

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

<https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-12.htm>

(Regardless of my agreement with either you or ajross. "Get off the Internet for a while" reads close to "touch grass", which dang's specifically addressed: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40851991>.)

1. Have come to realise that Big Tech (including many substantial backers of the organisation, in the past if not presently) is itself a major threat and ...

2. That the problem is far more nuanced than early views (Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence> and Gilmore's "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It", see <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/> in particular) suggested. Absolute freedom turns out to not be freedom, for many, shades of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.

In point of fact, nonsense like "Big Tech Bad" became part of the general antiestablishment mania that got us into this mess! Google and Meta kept our stuff mostly private, it's the nuts we voted for who were the real threat, and we voted for them because the EFF and other thought leaders told us not to trust the people who turned out to have been the good guys.

And I've mostly had it. The EFF turns out to have been a click farm milking sincere but mostly irrelevant outrage into an engine for social destruction. No thanks.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982286>

This case is borderline, but I suspect mods would find it on the far side of that border. The original comment reads better without the swipe.

Matthew was a tax collector, this is literally expert advice, not just one of those religious metaphors.

I ... was well aware of the EFF for at least the latter half of that period, and this doesn't seem to correspond well with my recollection, though I suppose one could argue that Jackson Games cast AT&T as Big Evil Tech. The defendant in the case however was the US Secret Service, a federal government entity. The Church of Scientology was of course another notable early non-government focus.

But largely at least through 2000, and for much of the decade of the 2000s, EFF's principle focus was law and policy, not abusive tech giants. Rather than abandoning the former, the EFF seems now to consider both as significant concerns. Even key EFF staffers themselves (e.g., Doctorow, Cohn) acknowledge this shift.

(Not about Matthew's occupation but the meaning/interpretation of the verse.)

I haven't seen the EFF weigh in once on the legality or privacy concerns of a just-hired unvetted contractor walking around with the entire IRS on his MacBook, or of the trolling of law enforcement data that disappeared a thousand people into cages in some Salvadoran jungle.

Instead, the EFF seems more concerned with making sure we all buy iPhones instead of Pixels.

Spare me, basically. I know what I care about. The EFF doesn't represent my interests. Which sucks, because they used to.

Taking this a step further, it's logical to conclude that society itself is a constant war between rich people, who use their wealth (influence/power) to enlist the poor in their attacks on one another. Taking it another level, we could say that "society" itself is merely a side-effect of this war, in fact it is the current state-of-the-art weapon in this struggle. If something better than capitalistic society comes about (such as, most obviously, human-level AIs and robotics), the rich will not hesitate to abandon the society strategy.

I've quoted the passage, which describes the political balance and division between the optimates, populares, and equites, roughly the oligarchs, labour, and petit bourgousie, in this (now archived) Reddit post:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230607042525/https://old.reddi...>

The durability of such conflict makes me strongly suspect that this is innate to human polity, and Jones's description of the respective groups' political platforms, concerns, and ideologies strike me as both insightful and possibly innate.

I've mentioned this several times previously on HN:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

EFF and a coalition of privacy defenders have filed a lawsuit today asking a federal court to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing the private information of millions of Americans that is stored by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and to delete any data that has been collected or removed from databases thus far....

<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/eff-sues-doge-and-offi...>

"EFF Sues OPM, DOGE and Musk for Endangering the Privacy of Millions" (February 11, 2025)

(Concerns same action.)

"The Dangers of Consolidating All Government Information" (June 5, 2025)

The Trump administration has been heavily invested in consolidating all of the government’s information into a single searchable, or perhaps AI-queryable, super database. The compiling of all of this information is being done with the dubious justification of efficiency and modernization–however, in many cases, this information was originally siloed for important reasons: to protect your privacy, to prevent different branches of government from using sensitive data to punish or harass you, and to perserve the trust in and legitimacy of important civic institutions.

Just three of several DDG results at eff.org for 'doge "government efficiency"': <https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=site%3Aeff.org+doge+%22gove...> (there are numerous dupes, mostly of these three items best I can tell).

I hope this somewhat restores your faith in EFF, and if not, I'd appreciate hearing why, if you care to say.