FTC Removes Posts Critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI Companies
wired.com
wired.com
In fact, the headline kind of underplays the significance -- everything in that time period was deleted! Including posts critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI Companies, among everything else that was deleted.
>The posts in question are public and available here: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog
The deleted posts in question are not available there, because they were deleted. Blog jumps from December 2020 to March 2025.
This one thing is, all by itself, worthy of impeachment and prison sentences for the people who abetted it. Add it to the list, and don't downplay even the small ones. If we're going to come out the other side of this every one of these violations matters and will need to be accounted for.
Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both
A different section allows prison terms of up to 10 years, but only if the "market value" of that data is high enough. I'm not sure if this data actually has a market value, but it is still a legal requirement to preserve.
It’s not perfect, or enough, but we should stand up for the rule of law rather than trying to score Internet points by cynically conceding it.
America is in a terrifying end-game for democracy
The whirlwind we face today is an inevitable outcome from the consequences of those choices.
There are specific components required by a rule of law which are not met. It was conceded by past generations that still hold political power today as a cohort.
Edit: Do feel free to not believe me and in doing so dig into the details and prove me wrong.
A "rule by law" is the system that lacks the components required by a "rule of law". This former is the same as any totalitarian or fascist state.
Given the time horizon of case resolution, when you can find more than 3 instances of failures relating to the judicial branch within a few years, in each court, where the components are not true, then its failed. 3 is sufficient to be statistically significant within a short time horizon.
Not a pleasant thought, but neither is burying your head in the sand thinking it will be better that you not see something, while at the same time choosing to become meat for the hungry lion that you didn't want to see.
unless you have some specifics and produce them, this is classic FUD
The thing can be standing with a knee on their neck and they'd still be clueless.
You'll find a lot of material if you go looking with the right questions. Why don't you start with looking at what happened with George Floyd.
If they're archived offline, then no, not necessarily. But they'd be on the hook for being able to reply to a FOIA request in a timely manner, and I'd bet dollars to donuts they didn't even try to verify if backups were made.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250122132931/https://www.ftc.g...
It's not about just reading them, it's about being sure they're not trying to erase public information that they should have.
It won't work, but at least you could say you tried to apply the law. That's worth something.
What is that worth?
Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool... as if the way one fell down mattered.
Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.
Do or do not. There is no try.
"How Joel Kaplan became Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted political fixer" - https://www.ft.com/content/7a68fd7b-cae3-48ea-83bc-777731013...
What's happening isn't just business as usual, it's unusual. The last president we had that openly defied the courts and the law was Andrew Jackson. And even he wasn't so brazen.
What we are finding out is that rules don't mean anything without enforcement and the US had a particular unaddressed threat in a party that doesn't care about the law and an executive agency filled with sycophants.
What the Trump admin is doing was supposed to be resolved with impeachment and removal from office. Fat chance republicans will react accordingly.
At the same time, the document discusses how large tech companies influence politics, and can harm individuals.
> Conservative approaches to antitrust and consumer protection continue to trust markets, not government, to give people what they want and provide the prosperity and material resources Americans need for flourishing, productive, and meaningful lives.
> At the same time, conservatives cannot be blind to certain developments in the American economy that appear to make government–private sector collusion more likely, threaten vital democratic institutions, such as free speech, and threaten the happiness and mental well-being of many Americans, particularly children. Many, but not all, conservatives believe that these develop- ments may warrant the FTC’s making a careful recalibration of certain aspects of antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA...
Somewhere along the way ethics, morals, truth, and serving We the People was lost.
How much he cares about your opinion is directly proportional to the money you give and could give him. When competing with a billionaire, 0 -> $100,000 is basically meaningless.
The US needs California. California does not need the US.
If you're not being sarcastic, that's a really wild belief you have...and I'm really hoping it's not widespread.
That's long over. Whoever wins by 1% believes they have the mandate to only cater to their constituents (which is mostly wealthy donors)
I wish Obama acted like he had a mandate and just pushed through his agenda...
Instead we had BS like the parliamentarian saying "no you can't do that", and the Democrats would simply drop it.
Last time the Republicans had pushback from the parliamentarian they just replaced him with somebody that would do what they wanted.
Stop pretending this is a "both sides" issue.
That's a CYA if I've ever seen one.
They couldn't care less about government-private sector collusion. It's literally the dream of the tech Neo-feudalist crowd. Before the idea of "private property" came about in Enlightenment-era England, some guy owned everything, and the commoners labored for his enrichment. Since capitalism - at least as we've interpreted it in America - means consolidation of massively-capitalized corporations which control more numerous and diverse markets, that's kind of the endgame when one removes the ability of the government to stop such consolidation.
The question is, if nothing is done, who will it be?
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/24/kamala-harris-lina-...
Splitting Chrome off of Google and making it so that Firefox can't get search engine royalty payments is not going to lead to societally useful outcomes. And voters don't give a shit about it either. The FTC could have had much more impact if they were focused on, say, healthcare, health insurance, preventing private equity from owning (and closing) so many hospitals and chains and nursing homes, etc. They did some of that but it was very clear that big tech was the focus.
And I'm not against taking on big tech even a little bit, but you kind of have to have a plan for the desired outcomes, and it doesn't feel like there was much of one.
Which is by way of saying, the FTC and Chair Khan were not responsible for those.