Nilay Patel

NetChoice’s Clement brings up the idea that the government can regulate content on broadcast radio and television because wireless spectrum is a scarce public resource — an idea that came out of Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC in 1969. There’s no similar rationale that allows the government to regulate speech on the internet, and Red Lion hasn’t been reconsidered. (I recently talked about Red Lion with Barack Obama on Decoder — he told me that government needed to find a new hook to enforce content moderation rules.)

Just... this is a cry for help, right? Someone go over there and check on them.

The WSJ’s Joanna Stern reports on The Shotline, which uses AI from a company called ElevenLabs to recreate the voices of kids murdered in school shootings and have them call elected officials. Take some time with this one; there are infinite layers here.

Some things are universal.

The longer the TikTok / UMG battle drags on, the more I think UMG’s leverage increases. Talked about it on Today, Explained with my pal Sean Rameswaram — and Cory Doctorow also joined this episode, so it’s a fun one.

The NYT has a profile of Father Paolo Benati, the “self-professed geek” leading the Vatican’s thinking about AI. A good piece but this jumped out: