From a company perspective, I hear a whole lot of stories of slightly or fully conflicting or redundant obligations in overlapping laws; or busy-work to no apparent purpose. This is not quantitative, but anecdotally... I have never heard that degree of frustration about any other jurisdiction.

It is SO sad.

Almost! But the US order just said the Canadian court order was not enforceable here. But no one was trying to enforce it here -- Canada can enforce just fine domestically.

The U.S. order would only matter for their comity analysis if it *prohibited* Google from complying with CA's order.

wtf

I do think there is a genuine rats nest of regs and cleaning house is way overdue. This just seems… surprisingly blunt? Not surgical? But the laws weren’t very surgical either, so I’m not sure which side to be on.

I say “should” bc you never know from the initial coverage or characterization what the facts of the case really are. But whatever they are, this looks pretty ugly.

h/t @gateklons.bsky.social

5/5

So, weirdly, if the Texas and Florida must-carry laws had been upheld here, Musk might have had the “hard conflict” needed to create a genuine new legal question in Canada…

But as it is the Take It Down Act, which Trump vocally supported, *should* align US law with Canada on this. 4/

In Canada’s S Ct case, Equustek, the Ct saw very little speech interest in the dispute about widget sales.

The rule there was roughly “if another country would force you to leave this up, then maybe we won’t order a global takedown”. But Google couldn’t show ∃ such a “hard conflict” of laws. 3/

So this is setting up a high profile dispute in which almost everyone will (I think??) sympathize w the victim.

But also it can fuel the administration’s anti-trans rhetoric, fit in with the “foreign censorship” story that Musk and Trump both love, and exacerbate US-Canada tensions.

2/

oooh thx for the heads up. i can’t believe he chose Canada to pick this fight in!

good analogy!

they might all be too big not to

I assume you are right. The evilness of Spotify is just on the long list of things that has not yet been a high enough priority to investigate and think about hard enough to be confident of my conclusions.

They used to put a ton of backing into protecting users in those ways. Pockets of that persist, but not at the top.

Well, for starters I litigated against government censorship and surveillance demands.

no idea...

Wait if that's actually the list then they are SMAGA.

I almost want Spotify to be evil so that can be the acronym.

This is President Reagan's FCC chair, among others, signing on to extremely strong condemnation. Here's a taste: