Adi Robertson

The advertising for “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” looks like peak AI-generated spectacle, promising “cartchy tuns,” “encherining entertainment,” and “a heart-pounding experience you’ve never experienced before” for £35 a ticket. The reality is... well, take a look. At least the kids are getting refunds.

Corbin Barthold at The Daily Beast has a good piece on Brett Kavanaugh’s role at yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments: the only one in the room (besides NetChoice’s own lawyer) treating government censorship as a unique and serious concern.

Kavanaugh called the states out for trying to turn the First Amendment upside down. “In your opening remarks,” he told Florida’s solicitor general, “you said the design of the First Amendment is to prevent ‘suppression of speech.’ And you left out…three words…, by the government.”

Amy Coney Barrett is bringing up the Hotel California clause yet again, and I’m actually grateful — she points out the plain language of the law seems to specifically say you can’t ban Texan users. Nielson says it’s a conditional rule. “If you choose to do business in Texas, then this provision kicks in,” but “if you don’t want to do business in Texas at all” you’re okay to geofence the state. “You can’t darn well discriminate” against Texas users if you operate in there, he says.

Barrett pushes back — what does that mean? “You have to have customers in Texas,” Nielson says, although he acknowledges a court hasn’t really defined the boundaries.

Or in his words, “intensely competitive” — which he says doesn’t change the fact they could be considered common carriers, so the existence of multiple social networks shouldn’t save those from regulation either. But there are basically three mobile networks in the country! It’s not an outright national monopoly, but it’s a pretty consolidated space.

Nielson says it’s not an accurate read of the law, but Roberts expresses apprehension about whether it would really be possible to pull out of the state in a way that satisfies its requirements. “I don’t see how they can wall off Texas,” he says.

Nielson suggests Facebook could geofence off everyone in the state and avoid selling Texas users’ data, which (he says) would make it possible to also reasonably ban Texas-based users from the site.

Amy Coney Barrett suggests HB 20’s scope is more limited than Florida’s equivalent law, saying it only covers the “classic social media sites” like Facebook, not platforms like Etsy. Nielson agrees with her, and weirdly nobody brings up Wikipedia — whose operators have expressed concern they’d be covered by the law.

Nielson is defending HB 20 now. A group of legal scholars, he points out, worry that striking down the Texas law could make tech company regulation in general impossible — although even they call the Texas law “dangerous.”

Clement mentioned what he calls a “Hotel California” provision of HB 20, which he interprets as a ban on companies pulling out of Texas if they can’t meet its legal burdens. Brown Jackson questions whether that’s a reasonable interpretation of the law; she seems less convinced it’s the right read.

You can read the rule itself below — check out the third “based on” section, citing geographic location.

A lot of today’s fight has been about metaphors, and Alito is questioning whether some of them make sense — a newspaper in NetChoice’s view, and a common carrier like a telegram company in the states.’ Clement points out that the court has regulated the internet specifically before in cases like Reno v. ACLU, which struck down most of the Communications Decency Act. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really clear up the metaphor question.