ARYAN ANTISEMITISM

India’s foreign minister blasts George Soros as ‘old, rich, opinionated, and dangerous’ after billionaire says Adani debacle would weaken PM Modi

Prarthana Prakash
Tue, February 21, 2023 

Gautam Adani, once the third-richest man in the world, shed $58 billion of his wealth less than a week after an American financial research firm published a report accusing his India-based energy conglomerate of pulling the “largest con in corporate history” and shorted the Adani Group’s stocks.

Since then, Adani’s close ties with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have come under scrutiny, putting Modi in a difficult position. Some of the sharpest criticism has come from hedge fund tycoon and billionaire investor George Soros, who alleged that the Adani debacle would weaken Modi’s grasp on India, paving the way for a “democratic revival.”

Now, a senior government minister has replied to push back on the criticism—and on Soros, as a foreign investor, in particular.

Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar slammed Soros’s remarks at an energy conference in Sydney on Saturday, dismissing his views on the country and the effects of Modi’s curious ties with Adani.

“He is old, rich, opinionated, and dangerous,” Jaishankar said of Soros. “What happens is, when such people and such views and such organizations—they actually invest resources in shaping narratives.”

Soros’s comments about Modi and Adani came at a security conference in Munich last week, where he accused Modi of not being a “democrat” even while being the leader of a democratic country like India. He also talked about how Modi has been tight-lipped about Adani’s meltdown, which could undermine his power at the government level and ultimately lead to “much-needed institutional reform.”

“Modi and business tycoon Adani are close allies; their fate is intertwined. Adani Enterprises tried to raise funds in the stock market, but he failed,” Soros said.

When asked about Soros’s prediction that Modi’s role would weaken in India, Jaishankar said that people like Soros believed that their definition and views are above everything else, reflecting a typical “Euro-Atlantic view” where Western countries are the dominant powers.

“People like him think an election is good if the person we want to see wins. If the election throws out a different outcome, we actually will say it’s a flawed democracy,” Jaishankar said.

Representatives from India’s Ministry of External Affairs did not immediately return Fortune’s request for comment. George Soros could not be immediately reached for comment.

Not the only one to push back

Jaishankar isn’t the only one who pushed back against Soros. The former finance minister of India tweeted that he did not agree with most of what Soros says, in the past and in the current instance of a so-called democratic revival.

Even members of the opposition party in India have rejected the connection between Modi, Adani, and the dawn of institutional reform in India. The general secretary of the Indian National Congress, Jairam Ramesh, tweeted: “Whether the PM-linked Adani scam sparks a democratic revival in India depends entirely on the Congress, Opposition parties & our electoral process. It has NOTHING to do with George Soros. Our Nehruvian legacy ensures people like Soros cannot determine our electoral outcomes.”



The Modi government has maintained its silence on Adani’s meltdown, despite cries at the parliamentary level to investigate Adani Group for its “brazen stock manipulation,” as the Hindenburg report alleged in January. Government ministers have maintained that Adani has “absolutely no connection” with them.

Modi and Adani are natives of the same state in the west of India, and Adani has supported Modi since his early days in power.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

How a grand attempt to improve airline travel backfired — and ended up turning flying into a total nightmare

Bartie Scott,Juliana Kaplan
Mon, February 20, 2023 

Shortsighted decisions that prioritized efficiency and price cuts over quality and comfort have made air travel and airline customer service a total mess.

Getty; Marianne Ayala/Insider

It all started with one dumb law

A plush hotel in New York's John F. Kennedy Airport seems to be haunted by the ghost of aviation's good times.

The TWA Hotel offers guests a luxurious stay, with 500 rooms, a rooftop pool, and a bar in an old retrofitted airplane. It also contains echoes of its past life as the TWA Flight Center, a hub for the now defunct Trans World Airlines. In TWA's heyday, airlines competed on experience, luring elite passengers with lavish meals and comfortable seats. Some of those golden-age amenities are present in the TWA Hotel, such as banks of pay phones and a luxe café built in the footprint of its dining predecessor.

But just across the tarmac, JFK's still working terminals stand as a stark contrast. This past year has been a nightmare for air travelers, featuring epic flight meltdowns, over a million mishandled bags, and a nationwide ground stop caused by outdated equipment at the Federal Aviation Administration. It's almost impossible to imagine a time when air travel was pleasant, much less enjoyable.

Aviation experts and industry groups say the story of air travel's service decline is one of priorities. Decades' worth of shortsighted decisions that prioritized efficiency and price cuts over quality and comfort came to a head during the pandemic, leaving millions of Americans trapped in a headache-inducing, feet-numbing flying purgatory with no signs of a long-term fix.

The trade-off

Johnny "Jet" DiScala, who visits more than 20 countries a year and runs a popular travel blog, could rattle off a dozen tips to make your next flight suck a little less. Unfortunately, he told Insider, there's not much to be done about one of his least favorite parts of flying: cramped legroom.

"When I started flying, legroom was, like, 39 inches," DiScala said, who started flying as a kid in the mid-1970s. "Now it's 28. That's criminal."

The Washington, DC, advocacy group Flyers Rights has estimated that seats in economy have lost roughly 8 inches of legroom since the early 2000s. And while butts still vary in size, airlines have taken away about 2 inches of seat width. When the FAA started accepting public comments in August as part of an effort to determine whether it should set a minimum seat size, it received more than 26,000 comments in 90 days, many from travelers complaining about shrinking legroom.

The shrinking seat is just one of many casualties of our modern flying experience. At the heart of these changes is a trade-off made some 50 years ago. Before the 1970s, flying was a rich person's game, and only a small set of Americans traveled by plane for leisure. But federal deregulation designed to open up competition among airlines and bring down prices to make flying more accessible changed that. A long-running survey by the industry group Airlines for America found that in 1971, only 21% of Americans said they'd taken a flight in the past year and just under 50% said they'd taken a flight in their lifetime. By 2019, just before the pandemic, 45% of Americans said they'd flown in the past year and almost 90% said they'd flown at least once in their lives.

DiScala says the mass access is well worth it.

"I think now is the golden age of travel," DiScala said. "Now, because of deregulation, there is more competition, and there's airlines like Spirit, there's low-fare carriers, which allow pretty much anyone to fly."

The shift did, however, have some unintended consequences. The effort to cut back on government rules opened up the airways to new companies, but it also set off a cost-cutting race to the bottom. The travel fiascos of the past year are just the latest results of this cost-cutting. Lost baggage, overbooked flights, outdated equipment, hidden fees, and disorganized staffing have fliers at their wits' end; consumer complaints about airline service have risen by 300% from pre-pandemic levels. And while these snafus cost passengers, they often have little recourse.

"US airline companies tend to be very, very focused on the bottom line," Janet Bednarek, a history professor at the University of Dayton who specializes in the airline industry, told Insider. "And if they compete, they want to compete on price, and that means they're not competing on service."

The law that changed it all

The idealized images of the "jet set" of the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s — dressed to impress, with a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other, enjoying impeccable service from the comfort of their cushy seat — were possible because the airlines were, as the industry blog Simple Flying put it, "guaranteed profits." The federal government dictated almost everything about air travel: how much airlines could charge for airfare, which routes they could fly, even their schedules. Many of these measures had been put in place to improve safety following some rattling accidents in the early days of commercial air travel.

But as planes got safer and airlines got the hang of moving millions of people through the air, some of the more stringent rules seemed less necessary. So in 1978, at the urging of the economist and "inflation czar" Alfred Kahn, President Jimmy Carter enacted the Airline Deregulation Act. The law was part of a suite of policies designed to fight decades-high inflation through deregulation. The thinking seemed simple: With fewer rules about who could operate and where, new businesses could spring up to take on sclerotic incumbents, forcing everyone to bring down prices and serve more people.

Before, only certain airlines could fly certain routes. And as Clifford Winston and Steven A. Morrison of Brookings noted, the regulators overseeing those routes and airlines often did not allow potential competitors in. With deregulation, a whole world of routes was opened to airlines. And as regulation eased, new airlines popped up, eager to service previously guarded routes and set competitive prices. Southwest Airlines, the villain of the latest travel season, was able to take advantage of this new lack of rules to expand from a local carrier to a nationwide juggernaut. Herb Kelleher, a cofounder of Southwest, once testified that the Airline Deregulation Act "literally made the Southwest Airlines of today and the other low fare carriers I speak for possible."

Some in the industry welcomed the idea of deregulation with open arms. In 1977, Richard J. Ferris, the president of United Airlines, said the soon-to-be-abolished regulations were "sowing the seeds of destruction" of quality airline service.

Daniel May, the president of Republic Airlines, said in testimony in 1983, as deregulation fully came into effect, that "because of deregulation, the domestic airlines are offering the public far more and better service than they could have expected under regulation."

But some airlines — including TWA — that had coasted on certainty and guaranteed profit margins were against deregulation, arguing that the competition would make fliers' lives worse and throw the industry into a bottom-line-focused fight for survival.

"The view of airline deregulation from the cockpit is that it is a cruel hoax on taxpayers, on vast numbers of air travelers, on the stockholders of airlines," Henry Duffy, the president of the Air Line Pilots Association, said in a 1983 Senate hearing on effects of the law. He said deregulation had "transformed a once profitable industry into one where bankruptcies, actual and threatened, dominate the news," adding that "quantity and quality of service have been drastically cut back."

As regulations eased, consumers felt relief. From 1976 to 1993, fares fell by a third — and deregulation accounted for 60% of that price drop, according to Winston and Morrison. From 2000 to 2004, they fell by 25%. The number of competitors in each market increased to 3.5 in 2005 from 2.2 in 1980, a report from the Government Accountability Office said. More people were flying.

As competition drove prices down, it was no longer feasible to hire live bands for in-flight entertainment or pay for other luxuries. The cost cutting didn't stop there: Squeezing seats closer together allowed companies to sell more tickets to help cover costs. Sometimes customers didn't show up for a flight, so airlines started to sell more tickets than available seats — if they overbooked, they could just pay off the unhappy customer they'd bumped and still come out ahead.

Many industry insiders eventually recognized the failed promises of deregulation."America's airline system has greatly deteriorated," Robert Crandall, a former American Airlines chairman, said in a 2008 speech. "Our airlines, once world leaders, are now laggards in every category, including fleet age, service quality, and international reputation." He added that "airline service, by any standard, has become unacceptable."

Ultimately, however, the next decades showed that safely flying an aluminum tube full of people 30,000 feet in the air is an expensive endeavor. And while more people were able to jump on a jet, the race to the bottom caused plenty of headaches for consumers and airlines alike. In 2001, American Airlines acquired TWA, which had filed for bankruptcy three times. Without those guaranteed profits from the pre-deregulation era, the groundwork was laid for today's woes.

A race to the bottom

Today, the promise of more competition has mostly fallen by the wayside. Just four companies — Delta, American, United, and Southwest — controlled 66% of the market in the US in 2021. And even as more Americans have started flying, the idea of dramatically cheaper flights seems to have faded: Airline-ticket prices are about 11 times what they were in 1969, while inflation has made overall prices about eight times what they were then. Jeffrey Price, a professor and aviation-security consultant, said that with few other options beyond air travel to get across the country, airlines essentially have a monopoly over long-distance transportation.

"We don't really have any other alternatives," such as a national high-speed rail system, Price said. "Leisure passengers are totally at the mercy of the airlines unless they really want to go get a recreational vehicle, and most people don't have that kind of time in their vacation days anymore to do that," he said.

At the same time, airlines are scrambling to hang on to any profits they can. Pay for pilots, airline workers, and airport employees has been slashed, contributing to a serious labor shortage. Plus, with an eye toward cost cutting, the industry has been slow to update its technology, as evidenced by the FAA systems outage on January 11 that affected more than 9,000 flights.

"The system is antiquated, doesn't have adequate backups, as we all saw, and needed to be upgraded 20 years ago, not six years from now," Price said.

That upgrading effort, known in the industry as Next Generation, has been in the works since 2003. Price said that while some of the delay is due to standard bureaucracy, the industry also doesn't have an incentive to pick up the pace if things are moving relatively smoothly.

"Shutting down the US airspace system has not been done since 9/11. Now we saw that it can be done because somebody put the wrong file in some folder or something," he said. "The system, it's way too fragile."

All this cost cutting is weighing on the customer experience. Those FAA comments from August? Well, they were predictably blunt.

"Well, where can I start? May I begin with an inner laugh? Take out all extra seats that the airline so greedily put in place," one commenter wrote. "The airlines are reacting like food vendors; they raise the price and cut down on the amount of food in the package and the quality."

Airlines have also cut down on how much food fliers get, offering measly bags of pretzels instead of the deluxe meals of 50 years ago. "Food and drink and all of that is weight, and weight equals more fuel needed to fly the plane," Bednarek, the history professor, said. "So anywhere that they can cut costs and make it less expensive for them to fly you so they can get more return off of the ticket price that you pay, that's what they're going to do."

But Airlines for America and the International Air Transport Association, which represent the major US airlines, have said they want to make sure the government remains focused on safety "and not comfort or convenience." So what's a squeezed passenger to do?

"People could stop flying," Bednarek said. And some people are: Business travel, which provides airlines their greatest profit margin, has especially struggled to recover from the pandemic. Congress has also taken steps to try and improve the flying experience and give customers more power, like mandating an aviation consumer advocate at the Department of Transportation, but they largely rely on individual travelers to change their behavior.

Perhaps it's time for travelers to reconsider whether the trade-off the government made on their behalf is working. Yes, more people are flying — but sometimes you're paying to get booted off a plane, get stuck in an airport, or scour the globe for your luggage. It might be worth it to pay a little more than to pay for nothing at all. Just take a stroll through the halls of the TWA Hotel, where there's ample legroom at the bar in a vintage plane, and you might get a little nostalgic for flights —and regulations — gone by.

Bartie Scott is a senior economy editor at Insider.

Juliana Kaplan is a senior labor and inequality reporter on Insider's economy team.

FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE
The pandemic has irreversibly changed America’s health care system. Here’s why we will all be feeling the consequences of delayed care for years to come



Elazer R. Edelman, Mike Mussallem
Tue, February 21, 2023 

The consequences of the latest wave of flu and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) cases coupled with the ongoing spread of COVID-19 variants are starting to play out for those with long-standing medical conditions who are waiting even longer for nonemergency procedures and doctors’ visits or deferring care altogether to avoid overcrowded facilities.

This is not just an issue in the United States. In the U.K., more than 7 million people are currently on elective surgery waitlists after years of pandemic-related disruptions.

It’s an all-too-familiar tale for those of us in health care who witnessed firsthand the devastating toll of postponed checkups and procedures as hospitals conserved resources for the pressing pandemic response. A procedure’s urgency was often left to interpretation—and indefinite cancellations proved catastrophic for many.

The backlog of deferred treatment and resulting long-term health consequences, including a significant decline in overall life expectancy, will continue to impact public health for years, if not decades, much like the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which attacked a fifth of the world's population and continued to affect public health for years.

Now is the time to thoughtfully and strategically reevaluate our policy approach to nonemergent medical care and surgical procedures amid health crises. We know that there are consequences to making profound policy decisions—especially in health care—and therefore we must learn and directly confront them, to better serve the ongoing needs of our patients.

The downstream effects of deprioritizing “elective” care

It is important to understand that elective is not the same as optional. More than 90% of surgeries are considered elective, which means these are nonemergency procedures that can be scheduled in advance. Though sometimes labeled “nonessential,” these measures that range from organ transplants to cancer operations are often vital to people’s health and well-being.

We didn’t need the pandemic to tell us that delaying care can lead to dire consequences for patients. Elective surgery delays can be detrimental in both preventive and curative care, allowing disease progression or leading to premature death. In 2020, Mayo Clinic warned that halting colon cancer procedures for more than four months would result in over 30,000 fatalities, while a study from The BMJ found that an eight-week delay in breast cancer treatment increased the risk of death by 17%. After a 12-week delay, mortality rates jumped to 26%.

Research on treatment disruption for patients with aortic stenosis, a narrowing of the heart valve opening that can be deadly if not treated quickly, also showed dire outcomes. One study published in JAMA found that nearly three months after elective procedures were halted amid COVID, more than 30% of aortic stenosis patients who deferred care required emergency transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) or died.

A compounding workforce crisis

As demand for medical care amid the pandemic increased exponentially, supply simply could not keep up. Hospitals were triaging extreme patient volumes while navigating unprecedented staffing and resource shortages, adding to the cyclical set of issues straining a less-than-robust system.

A lack of funding and resources, along with rising anxiety, depression, and burnout, contributed to a mass exodus of frontline workers. More than half-a-million health care and social service employees left the industry each month in 2022 and more than a third of nurses say they’re planning to quit soon. The American Hospital Association penned a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and declared the shortages “a national emergency.” Staffing needs are as urgent as ever, with 16 million working-age Americans still struggling with long COVID-19, resulting in around $170 billion in lost wages annually. These staggering shortages and rising backlogs continue to limit the number of nonemergent procedures that can be performed.

Rethinking pandemic preparedness

Pandemics are disruptive, not only because of their direct assault on individual health but also due to the ripple effects of the policy decisions they necessitate. As we navigate the aftermath and substantial costs of COVID-19 along with this new onslaught of respiratory illnesses, it is more important than ever to reflect on the unintended consequences of restrictions imposed on health care operations. These include recalibrating to clear backlogs as quickly as possible and ensuring access to crucial, often lifesaving procedures.

As part of the health care ecosystem, we have a responsibility to patients, medical workers, and ourselves to rethink how we prioritize resources and evaluate the holistic impacts of policy on public health in response to a crisis.

Innovation is driven by evidence and the same should be true for our health care policies. It is incumbent upon us to identify timely real-world evidence to elucidate the effects of policy changes so they can be adaptive and agile enough to provide access to critical interventions and procedures. Only then can we ensure continuous care for all patients throughout the next wave—and pandemics yet to come.

Elazer R. Edelman, M.D., Ph.D., is professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of medical engineering and science at MIT. Mike Mussallem is the chairman and CEO of Edwards Lifesciences.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Democratic governors form alliance on abortion rights

- New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham speaks during a conference, Jan. 25, 2023, at the State Capitol in Santa Fe, N.M. Democratic governors in 20 states are launching a network intended to strengthen abortion access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court nixing a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy.

 (Javier Gallegos/Santa Fe New Mexican via AP, File)

BILL BARROW and GEOFF MULVIHILL
Tue, February 21, 2023 at 5:50 AM MST·4 min read

Democratic governors in 20 states are launching a network intended to strengthen abortion access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision nixing a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy and instead shifting regulatory powers over the procedure to state governments.

Organizers, led by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, described the Reproductive Freedom Alliance as a way for governors and their staffs to share best practices and affirm abortion rights for the approximately 170 million Americans who live in the consortium’s footprint — and even ensuring services for the remainder of U.S. residents who live in states with more restrictive laws.

“We can all coalesce,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in an interview ahead of a Tuesday announcement. She added that the court’s Dobbs decision that ended a national right to abortion “horrified” and put pressure on governors to act. “This is leveraging our strengths ... to have more of a national voice.”

That includes, organizers said, sharing model statutory language and executive orders protecting abortion access, ways to protect abortion providers from prosecution, strategies to maximize federal financing for reproductive health care such as birth control, and support for manufacturers of abortion medication and contraceptives that face potential new restrictions from conservatives.

Lujan Grisham noted the launch comes as a federal court in Texas considers a challenge to the nationwide availability of medication abortion, which now accounts for the majority of abortions in the U.S.

In a statement, Newsom called the effort, which he and his aides spent months organizing, “a moral obligation” and a “firewall” to protect “fundamental rights.”

The group includes executives of heavily Democratic states like California, where voters overwhelmingly approve of abortion rights, but also involves every presidential battleground state led by a Democrat, including Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Tony Evers of Wisconsin.

The alliance has secured its initial funding from the California Wellness Foundation and the Rosenberg Foundation, not-for-profits that often steer money to public health efforts focused on disadvantaged communities.

While the organization is billed as national and nonpartisan, the makeup underscores that abortion access since Dobbs has settled essentially into two Americas that broadly track the platforms of the nation’s two major parties. That means greater access in states controlled by Democrats, tighter restrictions or practically outright bans in those controlled by Republicans.

For example, 22 Democratic-run states have weighed in on the Texas challenge to medical abortions that was filed by many of the same litigant states that worked together to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. A similar contingent of Republican-led states has filed briefs in the Texas case urging a judge to reverse a decades-old approval by the Food and Drug Administration of medical abortions.

Still, Newsom aides said the group would welcome Republicans, though they declined to name any GOP executives that Newsom or other Democratic governors might be recruiting to the consortium. Indeed, a handful of Republican governors support abortion rights broadly.

Lujan Grisham mentioned New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who has sent mixed messages on the issue. Sununu signed a state budget in 2021 that included a ban on abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy but also said after the Dobbs decision that abortion would remain legal in his state. He endorsed candidates in the November elections who favored further restrictions but also supports adding exemptions to the current law for victims of rape and incest.

Lujan Grisham acknowledged that the alliance cannot make national policy or even impose policy across state lines. But she said there’s practical value in having executives and their staffs have a formal framework to communicate.

She noted that New Mexico lawmakers now are considering how to affirm abortion access with a statute, even though she and others believe the state’s constitution already establishes the right.

“The problem is everyone keeps challenging those constitutional interpretations,” she said. “We’re going to codify equality on abortion rights, reproductive rights and care in as narrow as possible way.” New Mexico’s process, she said, could become a model for other similarly situated states.

Governors’ offices in the alliance also have started working with advocacy groups that back abortion access.

Jeanné Lewis, the interim CEO of Faith in Public Life, a progressive multistate faith-based organization, said having states work together to ensure abortion access is essential as states and federal lawmakers continue to consider bans and deeper restrictions.

“It is important for governors to be in conversations now about shared solutions across state lines,” she said.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Foundation of America, said states should be working together to protect abortion access, especially given the pending Texas case.

—-

Barrow reported from Atlanta. Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Associated Press reporter Holly Ramer contributed from Concord, New Hampshire.

Kyocera’s president says Biden’s chip controls will tank Chinese manufacturing: ‘Producing in China and exporting abroad is no longer viable’


Nicholas Gordon
Tue, February 21, 2023 

The president of a major producer in the chip supply chain thinks companies will soon stop relying on China to manufacture their products, thanks to new rules from the U.S.

“The business model of producing in China and exporting abroad is no longer viable,” Hideo Tanimoto, president of Kyocera, told the Financial Times, though he added that manufacturing for the Chinese domestic market would still be possible. He pointed to worsening relations between Washington and Beijing: “Obviously with all that’s happening between the U.S. and China, it’s difficult to export from China to some regions.”

Newly passed regulations are a problem for Japan-based Kyocera, which has 70% market share of the ceramic components in the tools used to make chips. Tanimoto blamed U.S. controls, at least in part, for the company’s decision to slash its forecasted full-year operating profit by 31%.

Last October, the Biden administration imposed tough export controls on China, limiting the sale of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to the country’s chip industry.

Earlier this year, Japan and the Netherlands—whose companies manufacture the equipment needed for the most advanced chips—are also moving to bar exports of this technology to Chinese companies.

Tanimoto noted to the Financial Times that Japanese companies are being “asked not to ship their non-cutting-edge tools,” implying that even lower-end technology are running afoul of geopolitical strife.

In its recent earnings reports, the company also blamed a drop in demand for smartphones and inflation for its downward revisions to income. Kyocera reported $846 million in operating profit in the most recent quarter, a 3.9% decrease from the year before.

Companies are considering moving manufacturing out of China, in part to diversify their supply chains after Beijing’s COVID-zero policies disrupted manufacturing. Costs are also increasing, with Tanimoto noting to the Financial Times that Chinese wages have gone up. Apple and Foxconn have recently expanded production of consumer electronics in both India and Vietnam.

Still, despite rhetoric around decoupling, trade between China and the U.S. hit a record high in 2022, with the U.S. importing $536.8 billion worth of Chinese products.
Controls on China

Biden’s new chip controls are dragging down China’s semiconductor industry. Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC), China’s largest manufacturer of memory chips, has cut its orders for some chipmaking equipment by up to 70%, according to the South China Morning Post.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s largest chip foundry, admitted earlier this month that one of its newest factories will start operations later than anticipated. The company cited the difficulty of getting advanced equipment.

Both SMIC and YMTC are on the U.S.’s Entity List. U.S. companies can’t sell certain advanced technologies to companies on the list without a license from the U.S. government.

Beijing, for now, has yet to impose retaliatory measures on the U.S. Officials are considering export controls on advanced technologies used to create advanced solar wafers. China produces 97% of these components.

Instead, Chinese officials are ramping up funding for advanced technologies, with Guangzhou on Monday announcing a new $29 billion fund toward investments in semiconductors, renewable energy, and other high-tech industries.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

THE ONION GOES TO COURT

The Supreme Court lets police officers avoid being sued after they arrested an Ohio man for making fun of cops on Facebook

Grace Eliza Goodwin,Ashley Collman
Tue, February 21, 2023 

Stock photo.SimonSkafar/Getty Images

An Ohio man sued his local police department after they arrested him for mocking cops online.

The Supreme Court declined to take up his case, effectively allowing the police officers to avoid the lawsuit.

The Onion submitted a briefing defending Anthony Novak, who had created a Facebook page parodying police.

The Supreme Court has declined to take up the case of an Ohio man who said police officers violated his constitutional rights after they arrested him for making fun of the police department on Facebook.

Back in 2016, police arrested Anthony Novak for a satirical Facebook page he had created posing as his local police department in Parma, Ohio — his page had the same name, profile picture, and cover photo as the police department's official page, according to SCOTUSblog.

The posts on Novak's page, which was only live for 12 hours, mocked the police department. In one post, he announced a new hiring initiative "strongly encouraging minorities not to apply," according to SCOTUSblog.

Another post warned local residents not to offer food, shelter, or money to homeless people, NBC News reported.

The police department charged Novak under Ohio state law with disrupting police operations, and jailed him for four days, though he was later acquitted at trial, according to NBC News.

Novak then sued the department and the officers who arrested him, arguing that they violated his constitutional rights to free speech and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, according to SCOTUSblog.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that Novak couldn't sue the police because they had qualified immunity — a legal concept that protects police from facing civil lawsuits over their actions while in uniform.

Novak appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, even getting the satirical news site The Onion to write an amicus brief.

"The Sixth Circuit's ruling imperils an ancient form of discourse. The court's decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the balloon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true," lawyers for The Onion wrote in the outlet's amicus brief. "But some forms of comedy don't work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example. Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and by doing so demonstrate the target's illogic or absurdity."

But the Supreme Court on Tuesday decided not to take up Novak's case. The Supreme Court regularly takes on less than 1% of the case petitions it receives every year, according to News 5 Cleveland.

"The Supreme Court's decision not to consider Mr. Novak's plight reinforces a trend effectively blessing local government officials' abuses of the Constitution," one of Novak's attorneys, Subodh Chandra, said in a statement to Insider on Tuesday. "Now, in our region of the country at least, we must all think twice before we mock government officials because they can use the excuse that a handful of people are complaining to seize our possessions, jail us, and prosecute us. Officials can then deploy qualified immunity as a defense to any accountability, and federal courts won't even send a message to officials to not abuse rights in the future."

"We must abolish qualified immunity before we have no enforceable rights at all," Chandra added

Representatives for the Parma Police officers Novak sued and The Onion did not immediately return Insider's request for comment on the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the case on Tuesday.
Suing police officers is nearly impossible

The case highlights just how hard it is to sue police officers who violate the Constitution in the line of duty.

In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled that people can sue police officers who violate their constitutional rights, a decision which set off concerns that no one would want to be a police officer anymore and that departments would be rendered useless.

In 1967, the Supreme Court came up with the idea of "qualified immunity," which protects officers from being sued for violating the Constitution if they were acting in "good faith." That decision was further strengthened by the Supreme Court in 1982, when the court ruled that "good faith" was too much of a burden for officers to prove and that they should be given immunity so long as they didn't violate "clearly established law."

In recent years there has been an effort in the US to end qualified immunity protections for police officers. The George Floyd Justice in Police Act was passed by the House in 2020 and included a section restricting qualified immunity for police officers. But the bill failed in the Senate.

U.S. Supreme Court spurns challenge to Arkansas law against contractors boycotting Israel

Andrew Chung
Tue, February 21, 2023 
By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to revive a newspaper's challenge on free speech grounds to an Arkansas law requiring state government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel, a policy the publication's lawyers called a threat to a constitutionally protected form of collective protest.

The justices turned away an appeal by the Arkansas Times, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, of a lower court's ruling dismissing its lawsuit that claimed that the measure punishes participation in political boycotts based on the viewpoint expressed in violation of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

The Arkansas law, passed in 2017, requires public contracts to include a certification that the contractor is not engaged in a "boycott" Israel, which includes "actions that are intended to limit commercial relations" with Israel or "Israeli-controlled territories." It applies to contracts worth at least $1,000.

More than half of U.S. states have similar laws barring contractors that refuse to do business with Israel, including as part of the international "boycott, divestment and sanctions" movement that seeks to pressure Israel economically over its treatment of the Palestinians including Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Israel has called such boycotts discriminatory and anti-Semitic.

The Arkansas Times sued in 2018 after it was informed that in order to run advertisements for the University of Arkansas Pulaski Technical College, an institution with which it had advertising contracts for years, it would have to sign the certification.

The paper had not participated in a boycott against Israel but refused to sign because it said the measure required taking a political position in return for advertising.

A full slate of 10 judges on the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year dismissed the challenge, upholding the law as one that does not violate the First Amendment because it affects only commercial conduct, not expression.

"It does not ban Arkansas Times from publicly criticizing Israel, or even protesting the statute itself. It only prohibits economic decisions that discriminate against Israel," the 8th Circuit concluded.

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the ACLU argued that the state's actions were prohibited under an important 1982 Supreme Court free speech ruling called NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. In that decision, the court decided that nonviolent boycott activity is constitutionally protected in a case involving a lawsuit by white-owned businesses in Mississippi to recover losses stemming from a 1966 racial-justice boycott.

The ACLU said boycotts are an "enduring part of the fabric of American public discourse," citing as examples 18th century Revolutionary War era boycotts of British goods, the Montgomery bus boycott challenging racial segregation in the 1950s and more recently boycotts of companies that support abortion provider Planned Parenthood and boycotts of companies that support the National Rifle Association gun rights lobby.

Allowing the Arkansas law to stand would strike a serious blow to American freedoms of expression and assembly by "empowering policymakers to suppress political boycotts that express disfavored messages," the ACLU said.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

U.S. Supreme Court snubs Wikipedia bid to challenge NSA surveillance


Tue, February 21, 2023 at 7:43 AM MST·2 min read
By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a bid by the operator of the popular Wikipedia internet encyclopedia to resurrect its lawsuit against the National Security Agency challenging mass online surveillance.

Turning away the Wikimedia Foundation's appeal, the justices left in place a lower court's dismissal of the lawsuit based on the government's assertion of what is called the state secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that can shut down litigation if disclosure of certain information would damage U.S. national security.

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Wikimedia Foundation sued in 2015 challenging the legality of the NSA's "Upstream" surveillance of foreign targets through the "suspicionless" collection and searching of internet traffic on data transmission lines flowing into and out of the United States.

The NSA, part of the Defense Department, is the agency responsible for U.S. cryptographic and communications intelligence and security. The U.S. government has said the NSA's surveillance targeting is authorized by a 2008 amendment to a federal law called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Upstream's existence was revealed in 2013 leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who later fled to Russia and has been granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin.

The lawsuit cast the "surveillance dragnet" as an unlawful invasion of Americans' privacy that violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Wikimedia compared the interception by the NSA of its communications to the "seizing and searching the patron records of the largest library in the world."

The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 upheld a federal judge's dismissal of the case, concluding that the NSA properly invoked the states secrets privilege - meaning the litigation cannot proceed - because disclosing details about the surveillance could harm U.S. intelligence operations.

The ACLU's lawyers had urged the justices to hear the case, stating: "Although this mass surveillance of Americans' private communications raises grave constitutional questions, its lawfulness has yet to be considered by any ordinary court, civil or criminal, in the more than 20 years of its operation."

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

How Two US Supreme Court Cases Could Completely Change the Internet

Solcyre Burga
Sun, February 19, 2023 

On a laptop screen you can see the logo of Youtube.

The future of the federal law that protects online platforms from liability for content uploaded on their site is up in the air as the Supreme Court is set to hear two cases that could change the internet this week.

The first case, Gonzalez v. Google, which is set to be heard on Tuesday, argues that YouTube’s algorithm helped ISIS post videos and recruit members —making online platforms directly and secondarily liable for the 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people, including 23-year-old American college student Nohemi Gonzalez. Gonzalez’s parents and other deceased victims’ families are seeking damages related to the Anti-Terrorism Act.

Oral arguments for Twitter v. Taamneh—a case that makes similar arguments against Google, Twitter, and Facebook—centers around another ISIS terrorist attack that killed 29 people in Istanbul, Turkey, will be heard on Wednesday.

The cases will decide whether online platforms can be held liable for the targeted advertisements or algorithmic content spread on their platforms.

Tech companies argue that Section 230 protects them from these types of lawsuits because it grants them legal immunity from liability over third-party content that is posted on their platform. The case will decide whether platforms can be held liable for spreading harmful content to users through their algorithm.

Here’s what to know about Section 230.

What is Section 230?

Section 230, which passed in 1996, is a part of the Communications Decency Act.

The law explicitly states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” meaning online platforms are not responsible for the content a user may post.

The law allows tech companies to moderate or remove content that is considered egregious. Section 230, however, does not protect sites that violate federal criminal law, or intellectual property law. It also does not protect platforms that create illegal or harmful content.

Because popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube rely on user-generated content, many people have credited Section 230 for the creation of the internet we now know and love.

As the scale of online platforms has drastically increased over time, with up to 368 million monthly active users on Twitter alone, experts argue that Section 230 helps protect companies that struggle to keep up with the amount of content posted on their platforms from being sued over what users say or do.

What are these cases about?

The Gonzalez family first filed a suit in 2016, alleging that because Google, which owns YouTube, matches and suggests content to users based on their views, the platform recommended ISIS’s content to users, and enabled them to find other videos and accounts owned by ISIS.

Plaintiffs also argued that Google placed paid advertisements on ISIS videos, which meant they shared ad revenue with the terrorist organization. The lawsuit argues that this means that Google has not taken enough action to ensure ISIS remains off the platform. Because of this, the plaintiffs allege that these tech companies are directly liable for “committing acts of international terrorism” and secondarily liable for “conspiring with, and aiding and abetting, ISIS’s acts of international terrorism.”

A federal district court in California dismissed the complaint, saying that Google could not be held responsible for content that was produced by ISIS. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th circuit sided with the district court, but in October, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

In an opposition brief filed to the Supreme Court, Google maintained that a review of the case was not warranted because websites like YouTube could not be held liable as the “publisher or speaker” of the content users created. They add that Google does not have the capacity to screen “all third-party content for illegal or tortious material” and that the company was concerned that “the threat of liability could prompt sweeping restrictions on online activity.”

Major tech companies like Twitter and Meta, which have expressed their support for Google in the case, say that recommendations based on their algorithms allow them to “organize, rank, and display” user content in a way that enhances a user’s experience on the platforms and called the ability to do so “indispensable.”

What is the future of Section 230?

If the court decides in Gonzalez’s favor, the lawsuit will set a precedent for holding tech companies liable for targeted ads or recommendations.

The effects this could have on the internet are not entirely known, though many warn that tech companies would face a host of lawsuits. Corporate giants like Yelp, Reddit, Microsoft, Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook, say that searches for jobs and restaurants could be restricted if platforms can be sued over what users post, according to the Associated Press. And other review sites could even be held liable for defamation if a particular restaurant received bad ratings.

Even dating sites, like Tinder and Match, called Section 230 essential to user experience on the app as they hope to continue providing match recommendations “without having to fear overwhelming litigation,” according to CBS.

How do legislators feel about Section 230?

Conservatives have long criticized Section 230, alleging that it allows social media platforms to censor right-leaning content.

This scrutiny was applied towards platforms like Twitter, which came under fire after it removed a story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter executives later called the action a mistake in a House committee hearing, but many conservatives have claimed this as evidence of bias. Lawmakers also criticized social platforms ban of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars page from their sites in 2018.

Former President Donald Trump made calls to repeal the law, even prompting the Justice Department to release proposed amendments to Section 230 in 2020.

“I’ll just cut to the chase, Big Tech is out to get conservatives,” said Rep. Jim Jordan in a House Judiciary Committee hearing in July 2020. “That’s not a hunch, that’s not a suspicion, that’s a fact.”

Democrats have similarly argued against Section 230, saying that it prevents platforms from being held liable for hate speech and misinformation spread on their sites.

In July 2021, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ray Lujan introduced a bill that would remove tech companies’ immunity from lawsuits if their algorithms promoted health misinformation.

The White House later called on Congress to revoke Section 230 during a September “listening session” about tech companies’ accountability. And in January, President Joe Biden released an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, asking for bipartisan legislation that would hold tech companies accountable.

“The American tech industry is the most innovative in the world…But like many Americans, I’m concerned about how some in the industry collect, share and exploit our most personal data, deepen extremism and polarization in our country, tilt our economy’s playing field, violate the civil rights of women and minorities, and even put our children at risk,” Biden wrote.

Justices — From Alito to Jackson — Are ‘Confused’ by Internet Legal Shield Case



Emily Birnbaum
Tue, February 21, 2023 

(Bloomberg) -- US Supreme Court justices across the political spectrum — from Samuel Alito to Ketanji Brown Jackson — uttered the words “I’m confused” during the early part of arguments over upending the internet’s foundational law.

The justices are “not the nine greatest experts on the internet,” said Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday during oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, a case that centers on whether YouTube should be held liable for the videos that its algorithms recommend to users.

Kagan’s remarks, which were met with laughter, came as she expressed skepticism about the arguments from Eric Schnapper, the lawyer representing the family of a US citizen killed by Islamic State in a 2015 Paris attack, which contends Alphabet Inc.’s Google should be held liable for software algorithms that recommended terrorist videos to YouTube users.

The justices early in the day seemed at times confused and frustrated by Schnapper’s arguments, saying that they were unsure why YouTube in this case would not be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 statute that allows social media platforms to avoid most lawsuits over the content posted on their platforms. The arguments offered a very early glimpse into where the justices might land, although the court often changes its skeptical tone throughout oral arguments.

The Gonzalez family has argued that YouTube should face lawsuits over whether it aided and abetted terrorism by proactively recommending Islamic State videos.

“I’m afraid I’m completely confused by whatever argument you’re making at the present time,” said Alito.

“I guess I’m thoroughly confused,” Jackson said at another point.

Most of the justices at some point said they did not understand Schnapper’s arguments, contending that the conduct at issue — YouTube recommending videos — is likely protected by Section 230.

Even Justice Clarence Thomas, who has stated previously that he believes it’s time to revisit Section 230, questioned whether it made sense to hold YouTube accountable for its algorithms even though the company applied them “neutrally” to all kinds of videos, ranging from Islamic State videos to videos about cooking.

Schnapper argued that Section 230 does not protect YouTube’s promotion of thumbnails, or clickable videos that feature snapshots from a video that YouTube is recommending.

“Algorithms are endemic to the internet,” said Kagan. “Does your position send us down the road such as 230 really can’t mean anything at all?”

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.

Supreme Court eager to steer clear of sweeping changes to internet in Section 230 dispute

John Fritze, USA TODAY
Tue, February 21, 2023 

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court seemed hesitant Tuesday to hand down a sweeping ruling that could change the way search engines and other websites recommend content to users but the justices struggled with how to address whether Big Tech can ever be held liable when those recommendations cause harm.

At issue in the case, Gonzalez v. Google, is a controversial law known as Section 230, which has been widely interpreted as shielding websites from lawsuits for user-generated content. The question for the court is whether recommendations – such as a suggestion for the next video to watch on YouTube – are covered under that law.

The family of a 23-year-old American killed in a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris sued Google, which owns YouTube, for promoting videos dealing with the Islamic State group. But several of the justices from both ends of the ideological spectrum seemed concerned about potentially holding companies liable for all such recommendations.

Guide: A look at the key cases pending at the Supreme Court

Background: Breaking down a Supreme Court case on Section 230

Thomas: As Supreme Court takes up Section 230, Thomas has made his thoughts clear

"These are not, like, the nine greatest experts on the internet," Associate Justice Elena Kagan quipped about her colleagues to the family's attorney during nearly three hours of oral argument, underscoring a broader point that such questions might be better left to Congress. "There's a lot of uncertainty about going the way you would have us go, in part just because of the difficulty of drawing lines in this area."

Even Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of how broadly lower courts have interpreted Section 230, seemed concerned about the potential implications of holding Big Tech liable for recommendations. If the algorithms are neutral, he said – if they're not attempting to promote radical videos – then how could they be aiding and abetting terrorism?

"If you're interested in cooking, you don't want thumbnails on light jazz. It's neutral in that sense," Thomas said. "I don't understand how a neutral suggestion about something that you've expressed interest in is aiding and abetting."

 

The Supreme Court on Jan. 10, 2023.

If the case blurs the 6-3 conservative-liberal divide on the Supreme Court there may be a good reason for it: The underlying issue itself has shuffled traditional partisan politics. Section 230 has drawn intense criticism from former President Donald Trump over accusations that social media companies throttled conservative views. But Many Democrats agree, for different reasons, that the nearly 30-year-old law needs an update.

Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch repeatedly zeroed in on one element of the decision in favor of Google by the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit: The idea that a "neutral" algorithm was likely to be within the law's liability shield. Gorsuch argued that test was unworkable and wasn't based in the statute's text and suggested the case could be sent back to the appeals court for further review.

That's one potential off ramp the Supreme Court could take to avoid the larger questions about Section 230. Another deals with a related case the court is scheduled to hear Wednesday: Whether Big Tech can be held liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act for "aiding and abetting" terrorism by promoting the videos at all – putting aside Section 230.

If the court decides online platforms cannot be held liable under that law, it would potentially put off for another casequestions about whether and when Section 230 applies to recommendations.

A decision in the Google case is expected by June.

Contributing: Jessica Guynn


Google tells US Supreme Court it is not legally responsible for internet posts

James Titcomb
Tue, February 21, 2023 




People wait in line outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC on February 21, 2023 as the justices hear arguments in two cases that test Section 230, the law that provides tech companies a legal shield over what their users post online.

Google could be forced to take responsibility for videos that YouTube recommends to its users if a landmark legal challenge against the internet giant succeeds in America’s top court.

The company on Tuesday defended itself in a Supreme Court hearing, the culmination of a years-long legal campaign from the family of a victim of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks who say that YouTube recommended extremist content to users.

Defeat for Google would threaten a legal shield that search engines and social networks have used for 27 years to avoid liability for illegal videos, messages and pictures on their services.

The Section 230 law broadly grants immunity to websites that host and manage content uploaded by users. However, the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old who was one of 129 people killed in the co-ordinated terrorist attacks in November 2015, argue that this shield is effectively forfeited when sites such as YouTube use algorithms that prioritise some posts and videos over others.

The family argues that Google should be liable for the videos it algorithm recommends to users, and that the site broke anti-terrorism laws by promoting Islamic State recruitment videos.

Since almost all major websites use some form of algorithm to manage the mountains of user-posted material, a ruling against Google could force internet companies to more tightly police their sites for violent or explicit content.

“If they do this indelicately, and say that the moment you promote that content in any way you lose all immunity, then I think this is going to blow up the internet,” said Michael Smith, a professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Google has repeatedly won in lower courts and sought to block the case from going to America’s highest court, but the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case last year.

On Wednesday a similar case is due to be heard against Twitter, brought by the family of Nawras Alassaf, who died in a 2017 terrorist attack in Istanbul.

The longstanding law known as Section 230 has been referred to as the “26 words that created the internet” and has been seen as a potential sticking point in negotiations over a post-Brexit US trade deal, conflicting with UK Government plans for tighter internet regulation.

The Republican-leaning Supreme Court, which last year made a series of controversial rulings on issues such as abortion and gun control, is expected to rule on the cases in the summer. Clarence Thomas, one member of the nine-strong court, has been a vocal critic of how internet companies have used the law to escape liability.

 Associate Justice Clarence Thomas joins other members of the Supreme Court as they pose for a new group portrait, at the Supreme Court building in Washington, Oct. 7, 2022. The Republican majority in the Georgia state senate voted on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023, to build a statue of Thomas on the state capitol grounds, despite Democratic opposition to honoring the longtime Supreme Court member and Georgia native. 

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

A group of 17 Republican Congressmen have submitted documents to the court calling for a stricter interpretation of the law, while tech companies have lined up to defend Google and warn that a decision against the company risks mass censorship of the internet.

Damian Collins, a Conservative MP and former chairman of the digital, culture, media and sport committee who has campaigned for stricter internet laws, said: “Whatever happens in America has an impact on the platform policy for companies that affects the whole world.

“If a company is going to be legally responsible, that's hugely significant in terms of recommended content on social media platforms, but potentially has wider implications for the way in which companies develop their products and the care they take to ensure there aren't unintended consequences.”

Mr Collins said efforts by US trade negotiators to impose Section 230-like laws in a trade deal had been “strongly resisted” in the UK.

President Joe Biden has said he wants to see the law reformed to force internet companies to take more responsibility for violent material.

Supreme Court for first time casts doubt on Section 230, the legal shield for Big Tech

David G. Savage
Mon, February 20, 2023

The Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, DC, is seen in October. 

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

Internet giants such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter owe much of their success to a legal shield erected by Congress in 1996.

Known as Section 230, it has been called the rule that launched Big Tech. Though it drew little attention at the time, the law is now seen as a pillar of the wide-open global internet we know today.

While newspapers and TV stations can be held liable for any false and malicious content they publish or broadcast, internet platforms are treated differently under Section 230.

Congress passed the special free-speech rule to protect the new world of online communication. It said: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

Law professor and author Jeff Kosseff called Section 230 “the 26 words that created the internet” because it allowed websites to develop freely as platforms for the words, photos and videos of others.

And it went unchallenged in the Supreme Court — until now.

This week, the justices will hear two cases that may finally pierce that legal shield and dramatically alter the rules of the game for the internet.

And they are expected to consider a third case later this year involving the 1st Amendment rights of internet companies amid state efforts to regulate them.

The case to be heard on Tuesday began with a California family's suit against Google and YouTube for allegedly aiding and abetting an act of international terrorism. Their daughter Nohemi Gonzalez was killed in Paris in November 2015 when Islamic State terrorists fired into a restaurant where the 23-year-old student was dining with two friends. It was part of an ISIS rampage in the city that killed 129 people.

Their lawsuit alleged that Google, which owns YouTube, had "knowingly permitted ISIS to post hundreds of radicalizing videos inciting violence and recruiting potential supporters to join the ISIS forces." Further, they alleged that YouTube "affirmatively recommended ISIS videos to users.”

At issue on Tuesday is only their second claim. Can YouTube be sued over the algorithms it created to direct users to similar content — in this case allegedly directing potential terrorists to other ISIS videos? Or does Section 230 protect them against such claims?

More than four dozen tech firms, internet scholars and free-speech advocates have filed friend-of-the-court briefs arguing that the internet companies should not be held liable for using computer programs that direct users to content they might find interesting.

"Recommendation algorithms are what make it possible to find the needles in humanity’s largest haystack," said Washington attorney Lisa S. Blatt, representing Google and YouTube. She warned that opening the door to lawsuits over algorithms "risks upending the modern internet."

A federal judge had dismissed the family's suit based on Section 230, and a divided 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision in 2021.

Until this term, the Supreme Court had refused to hear appeals involving the law. On several occasions, however, Justice Clarence Thomas called for "paring back the sweeping immunity courts have read into Section 230," particularly in cases where websites knew they were posting dangerous lies or criminal schemes.

Some prominent liberals, including Judges Marsha Berzon and Ronald Gould on the 9th Circuit Court, have also called for paring back the scope of Section 230.

They have been joined by advocates — both liberal and conservative — who portray the internet as a cesspool of disinformation and hate speech, a home for stalkers and fraudsters and a contributor to teen suicides and mass shootings. Critics also say social media companies get rich and keep viewers online by amplifying the most extreme claims and the angriest voices.

Google and other tech firms were surprised in October when the high court voted for the first time to hear a direct challenge to Section 230 and decide whether websites such as YouTube can be sued for their use of algorithms and targeted recommendations.

Their alarm grew in December when the Biden administration took the side of the plaintiffs in Gonzalez vs. Google and said YouTube could be sued for algorithms that "recommend" more videos to viewers.

Justice Department attorneys said the 9th Circuit Court made a mistake by throwing out the claim, and they argued for a new understanding of Section 230. They agreed websites are shielded from liability for displaying content provided by others, including ISIS videos, but said they were not shielded for "their own conduct" in recommending further videos for viewing.

"When YouTube presents a user with a video she did not ask to see, it implicitly tells the user that she will be interested in that content based on the video and account information and characteristics," they wrote in their filing.

Many experts in internet law said they were puzzled by the Supreme Court's decision to take up the case and troubled by what it might mean.

"The internet needs curation. We need to be able to find what we're looking for," said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. If websites cannot sort content based on algorithms, he said, "it would not be a functional internet."

Blatt, Google’s attorney, said, "YouTube does not 'recommend' videos in the sense of endorsing them, any more than Google Search endorses search results. YouTube displays videos that may be most relevant to users."

On Wednesday, the court will hear a related case but one focused only on whether Facebook, Google and Twitter may be sued for allegedly aiding international terrorists.

Congress in 2016 expanded the Antiterrorism Act to authorize lawsuits by victims or their survivors against anyone who "knowingly provided substantial assistance" to a person who committed an act of international terrorism.

The U.S. family of a Jordanian citizen who was killed in an ISIS attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul in 2017 sued Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, accusing them of aiding and abetting the murders. They said ISIS openly maintained accounts on all three social media platforms and used them to recruit members.

The 9th Circuit cleared this claim to proceed, but the Justice Department and the social media firms said that was a mistake. They said the suit should be tossed out because the plaintiffs could not show that the internet platforms provided "substantial assistance" to the terrorist who carried out the mass shooting.

It's not entirely clear why the court agreed to hear the second case, Twitter vs. Taamneh, but the justices may have decided they faced two questions: Can a social media site be sued for aiding terrorists? And if so, can it be held liable for directing viewers to ISIS videos?

It's unclear whether the justices will split along the usual ideological lines when it comes to the Section 230 debate, which has liberals and conservatives on both sides.

Still pending before the court may be an even larger question: Can the states regulate the internet and penalize social media companies for what they post or remove from their sites?

That clash began on a sharply partisan note. Republican leaders in Texas and Florida adopted laws two years ago that authorized fines and damage claims against Facebook, Twitter and other large social media sites if they "censor" or discriminate against conservatives. Upon signing the measure, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the law was intended as "protection against the Silicon Valley elites."

Before the laws could take effect, they were challenged on free speech grounds and put on hold based on the 1st Amendment, not Section 230.

The justices are almost certain to grant review of one or both laws because appellate court judges, both appointed by President Trump, were divided on a major constitutional question.

Judge Kevin Newsom of the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta blocked most of the Florida law from taking effect. The 1st Amendment "constrains government actors and protects private actors," he said. Social media sites are private companies, and "put simply, with minor exceptions, the government can't tell a private person or entity what to say or how to say it."

Shortly afterward, Judge Andrew Oldham of the 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans upheld the Texas law because the state sought to protect the free speech rights of Texans. A former counsel to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Oldham said it is a "rather odd inversion of the 1st Amendment" to say the social media platforms have a "right to muzzle speech. ... We reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling 1st Amendment right to censor what people say."

Last month, the Supreme Court asked the Justice Department to weigh in on the issue, and that will put off the cases until the fall.

If, as expected, the U.S. solicitor general's office submits its view on the issue by June, the justices are likely to schedule one or both cases for a hearing in the fall.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.