Communications Law Commons^™

Ships Passing In The Night: The Communications Act And The Convergence On Broadband, Stuart Minor Benjamin

Faculty Scholarship

The Communications Act of 1934 and its amendments (the “Act”), and the regulations implementing them, have been enormously important to traditional telephony, broadcasting, and multichannel video. Meanwhile, the internet is barely mentioned in the Act. It thus might seem reasonable to conclude that the Act stands as a colossus and that the argument for overhauling it has grown much stronger as the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (the “1996 Act”) becomes ever more outdated. In this Article I suggest otherwise. Specifically, I make three claims—one descriptive, one a bit speculative, and one normative. The descriptive claim is that significant portions of …

Responding To Mass, Computer-Generated, And Malattributed Comments, Steven J. Balla, Reeve Bull, Bridget C.E. Dooling, Emily Hammond, Michael A. Livermore, Michael Herz, Beth Simone Noveck

Articles

A number of technological and political forces have transformed the once staid and insider dominated notice-and-comment process into a forum for large scale, sometimes messy, participation in regulatory decisionmaking. It is not unheard of for agencies to receive millions of comments on rulemakings; often these comments are received as part of organized mass comment campaigns. In some rulemakings, questions have been raised about whether public comments were submitted under false names, or were automatically generated by computer “bot” programs. In this Article, we examine whether and to what extent such submissions are problematic and make recommendations for how rulemaking agencies …

The Everyday First Amendment, Leonard M. Niehoff, Thomas Sullivan

Articles

On June 26 and June 27, 2019, some twenty contenders for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States participated in two evenings of political debate. The outsized group included Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who was struggling to gain traction with voters. Shortly after the debate, while many viewers were conducting online searches to learn more about the candidates, Google temporarily suspended her campaign’s advertising account.

Google claimed that the interruption occurred because an automated system flagged unusual activity on the account. But Gabbard did not accept this explanation; she believed that Google deliberately had tried to undermine …

Representation Without Elections: Civil Society Participation As A Remedy For The Democratic Deficits Of Online Speech Governance, Brenda Dvoskin

Scholarship@WashULaw

Giant social media companies wield oversized power over what gets communicated online. Yet, it remains unclear how to hold that power accountable to the public. In democracies, governments are limited in how much they can regulate speech directly, creating an obstacle for efforts to make online speech governance more democratic. Corporations are touting civil society consultations to try to regain trust in how they write their rules. Scholars and lawmakers, too, are looking to mandate increased reliance on civil society participation as a means to democratize private governance without involving governmental bodies.

These proposals often make two assumptions. One is …

From The Golden Gate To London: Bridging The Gap Between Data Privacy And The Right Of Publicity, Kristin Kuraishi

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Currently, there is no global standard or recognition for the right of publicity. Even within the United States, the recognition, scope, and protections vary by state. As the world becomes increasingly reliant on social media for news, information, communication, and recommendations, micro-influencers and non-celebrities require a way to control their developed and curated name, image, and likeness from unauthorized commercial uses by others. Advertising is occurring more frequently online, and brands recognize the power that micro-influencers have on commerce. Some countries, like the United Kingdom, do not recognize the right of publicity, potentially leaving many individuals without recourse for the …

Media Consolidation & Political Polarization: Reviewing The National Television Ownership Rule, Mary R. Hornak

Fordham Law Review

Local television plays an important role in the democratic society. The medium is viewed as being trustworthy, and it is accessible and uniquely situated to report on matters of local interest. Among other roles, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates firms’ ownership interests in the media through regulations that permit a certain degree of consolidation at both the local and national levels. Since 1996, Congress has mandated that the FCC regularly review broadcast media ownership regulations. Originally, this requirement mandated biennial review. In 2004, however, Congress revised the mandate, requiring review on a quadrennial basis and excluding from such review …

Cacophony Or Concerto?: Analyzing The Applicability Of The Wiretap Act’S Party Exception For Duplicate Get Requests, David Koenig

Fordham Law Review

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“Wiretap Act”) prohibits the intentional interception of an electronic communication. However, “parties to a communication” can intercept a communication without Wiretap Act liability. Parties include the intended recipients of a communication. When internet users navigate the internet, they communicate with websites using GET requests. The users’ GET requests call out to websites and websites respond by providing the websites’ content to the users. During this process, websites receive user data. This data can include information about the website visited, the search terms used to locate the website, and referral data identifying the last web page …

Market Power And Switching Costs: An Empirical Study Of Online Networking Market, Shin-Ru Cheng

University of Cincinnati Law Review

In recent years, states have launched several antitrust investigations targeting digital platforms. A major difficulty in these investigations is demonstrating the extent of a digital platform’s market power. Market power is defined as the control of the output or the price without the loss of business to competitors. As will be explored in this Article, market power is a critical component in an antitrust analysis. On several occasions, courts have adopted the switching costs approach in their analysis of market power. According to this approach, market power may be inferred when the costs of switching from one supplier to another …

Taking Exception To Assessments Of American Exceptionalism: Why The United States Isn’T Such An Outlier On Free Speech, Evelyn Mary Aswad

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

One of the most significant challenges to human freedom in the digital age involves the sheer power of private companies over speech and the fact that power is untethered to existing free speech principles. Heated debates are ongoing about what standards social media companies should adopt to regulate speech on their platforms. Some have argued that global social media companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, should align their speech codes with the international human rights law standards of the United Nations (“U.N.”). Others have countered that U.S.-based companies should apply First Amendment standards. Much of this debate is premised on …

When Free Speech And Privacy Collide: Why Strict Scrutiny Is A Poor Fit For Nonconsensual Pornography Laws, Leah S. Murphy

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Deep Fakes: The Algorithms That Create And Detect Them And The National Security Risks They Pose, Nick Dunard

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

The dissemination of deep fakes for nefarious purposes poses significant national security risks to the United States, requiring an urgent development of technologies to detect their use and strategies to mitigate their effects. Deep fakes are images and videos created by or with the assistance of AI algorithms in which a person’s likeness, actions, or words have been replaced by someone else’s to deceive an audience. Often created with the help of generative adversarial networks, deep fakes can be used to blackmail, harass, exploit, and intimidate individuals and businesses; in large-scale disinformation campaigns, they can incite political tensions around the …

Fighting Chance: Conflicts Over Risk In Social Change Litigation, Gwendolyn Leachman

Cardozo Law Review

Drawing on a case study of marriage equality litigation, this Article examines how practice setting affects the construction of risk and the emergence of conflict in social change litigation. Although private law firms often work collaboratively with social movement organizations to pursue common goals, conflicts also emerge when movement groups oppose “risky” private litigation which could imperil the movement’s ongoing impact litigation strategies. How do attorneys in private firms and social movement organizations vary in their framing of risk in social change litigation? Under what conditions does that variation lead to conflict? The findings show that movement-based LGBT rights attorneys …

Personal Data Privacy And Protective Federal Legislation: An Exploration Of Constituent Position On The Need For Legislation To Control Data Reliant Organizations Collecting And Monetizing Internet-Obtained Personal Data, Giovanni De Meo

Dissertations

In the past twenty years, the business of online personal data collection has grown at the same rapid pace as the internet itself, fostering a multibillion-dollar personal data collection and commercialization industry. Unlike many other large industries, there has been no major federal legislation enacted to monitor or control the activities of organizations dealing in this flourishing industry. The combination of these factors together with the lack of prior research encouraged this research designed to understand how much voters know about this topic and whether there is interest in seeing legislation enacted to protect individual personal data privacy.

To address …

Shenanigans (Internet Takedown Edition), Eugene Volokh

Utah Law Review

Protecting one’s own reputation and livelihood—whether protecting it against lies, against opinions, or against the truth—is likely high on many people’s willing-to-lie-for lists. Making money is, too. Yet though I don’t think of myself as naïve on this score, the sheer magnitude and brazenness of these schemes surprised me. My sense is that it surprised many of my colleagues. Perhaps it surprised you. And this reminder of just how common fraud can be might help keep us alert to shenanigans in many other fields as well— and might help us design systems that deal better with such risks.

Application Of The Due Diligence Principle To Cyber Operations, Tomohiro Mikanagi

International Law Studies

The discreet use of proxies by States renders it difficult to prove attribution to States under the existing rules of attribution. On the other hand, the due diligence principle, if applicable, does not require attribution but can lead to the invocation of State responsibility for cyber operations emanating from the territory of other States. In the Corfu Channel judgment the ICJ recognized “every State’s obligation not to allow knowingly its territory to be used for acts contrary to the rights of other States,” and UN Member States agreed that existing international law applies to cyber operations. However, the UN Members …

Race In The Courthouse: Less Protection As More Equal Protection For Musical Works, Charles Cronin

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

No abstract provided.

Masthead

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

No abstract provided.

The Three Conundrums: Doctrinal, Theoretical, And Practical Confusion In The Law Of Sexually Explicit Speech, Kyla P. Garrett Wagner, P. Brooks Fuller

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

In First Amendment law, one rarely disputed notion is that sexually explicit speech is less valuable than so-called “core” forms of expression, such as political discourse. This study revives that dispute with a focus on the Supreme Court’s justifications for categorizing sexually explicit speech as “low-value” in the first place. The analysis reveals three conundrums plaguing the Court’s jurisprudence: categorizing restrictions on sexually explicit speech; interpreting the value and harms of sexually explicit speech; and assessing the evidence (or lack thereof) for restrictions on sexually explicit speech. This article explains how these conundrums should be resolved in sexually explicit speech …

Widening The Lens On Content Moderation, Jenna Ruddock, Justin Sherman

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

A “Journey” Through Band Agreements, Jordan M. Whitford

UC Law SF Communications and Entertainment Journal

No abstract provided.

How Should We Regulate The Internet? A Proposal, Natalie Petruzelli

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

With the invention of the internet providing newfangled methods of spreading information around the world, misinformation has also found home in these pathways, disrupting the general public’s ability to discern fact from fiction and creating divides in society. Regulation must be enacted to stop the effects of misinformation, but the efforts of technology companies and the general public have been insufficient thus far. Regulatory control of the internet and its content should be the responsibility of the government, based on their constitutional right to intervene under certain circumstances and the fact that previous efforts by other parties to mitigate misinformation …

Duality In Digital Discourse: The History And Future Of The American Public Forum, Nicholas Weaver

Honors Theses

From the onset of the republic, the liberty to speak freely and debate openly has stood guard and helped preserve all other American rights. While this concept has endured, the means by which it exists in society has changed immensely. As the public forum has evolved to fit the modern needs of the citizenry, political discourse has become less a defense against tyranny and more a chaotic space of conflicting opinions.

In the United States, privately-owned social media companies have grown at an unprecedented rate, yet lawmakers have been slow to exercise any authority to regulate these corporations. For public …

Regulation And The Geography Of Inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman, Christopher Serkin, Morgan Ricks

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We live in an era of widening geographic inequality. Around the country, the spread between economically and culturally thriving places and those that are struggling has been increasing. "Superstar" cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta continue to attract talent and grow, while the economies of other cities and rural areas are left behind. Troublingly, escalating geographic inequality in the United States has arrived hand in hand with serious economic, social, and political problems. Areas that are left behind have not only failed to keep up with their thriving peers; in many ways, they have stagnated and seen …

Deeply Fake, Deeply Disturbing, Deeply Constitutional: Why The First Amendment Likely Protects The Creation Of Pornographic Deepfakes, Bradley Waldstreicher

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fake News (& Deep Fakes) And Democratic Discourse, Russell L. Weaver

Journal of Technology Law & Policy

This Article explores the problems related to fake news, bots and deep fakes. In addition to discussing the problems that they pose for public debate, it examines whether society has effective ways to deal with these problems.

The Futility Of Regulating Social Media Content In A Global Media Environment, Rick G. Morris

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

Social media reaches more people on the planet than any prior form of media and transmits more information world-wide than ever before. It is an empowering factor in establishing and growing communities, but at the same time, creates havoc and disseminates pernicious and perhaps dangerous speech. And so it has been with the media from the beginning of time. Throughout the media’s history, efforts at regulation or control of media speech has been fraught with difficulty, ineffectiveness, discrimination, and failure. The use of technology can deceive the consumer of the information, and the social media companies as well. Both government …

Digital Gatekeepers, Thomas E. Kadri

Articles

If in William Blackstone's time we might have thought of a person's home as their castle, in Mark Zuckerberg's time we might say that their website is too.  Under cyber-trespass laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, courts have treated online platforms as digital gatekeepers--as property owners that may permit and restrict access to websites much like landowners may do with private land in the real world. If platforms withhold their consent through words or inference, cyber-trespass laws let them enforce their preferences about who may access their services and gather information from the internet. Concerned about reputations and …

How Far Are Fundamental, Basic Rights Morally Explicit In Constitutional Laws? (A Judicial, Constitutional Comparative Study), Eid Ah. Alhosban

UAEU Law Journal

The importance of the complimentary role of constitutionaljurisdiction in comparative constitutionalregimes is inherent in Basic, fundamental Rights and Public Freedoms and Liberties legislation. The acknowledgement of these rights morally is ambiguous in contemporary constitutionallaws.

This study deals with how far the aforementioned rights are morally explicit in constitutional laws.

Privileging Opinion, Denigrating Discourse: How The Law Of Defamation Incentivizes News Talk-Show Hyperbole, Clay Calvert

Pepperdine Law Review

This Article examines how defamation law promotes a culture of hyperbole and exaggeration on television news talk shows at the expense of more meaningful dialogue and discourse. The Article uses the 2020 federal court rulings in McDougal v. Fox News Network, LLC and Herring Networks, Inc. v. Maddow as analytical springboards to address this problem. In both cases, judges dismissed defamation claims stemming from comments made by well-known talk-show hosts—Fox News’s Tucker Carlson in McDougal and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in Herring Networks—on the ground that their remarks would not be understood by viewers as factual assertions. In concluding that Carlson’s …

Digital Fidelity And Friction, Ellen P. Goodman

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.