January 2023

As recently as fifteen years ago, I was often asked by many of my clients to help them benchmark their internet service provider (ISP) against their peers. By this, they wanted to know if they had the right number of employees for their customer base, if their revenues and expenses were in line with other similar ISPs, if they had too much expense from overheads, etc. It turns out that ISPs were not particularly comparable. They seemed to differ in most of the statistics that my clients wanted to understand.

So often when we think about 5G in the United States we talk about our phones. But if we do this right, our phones will be the least interesting thing about our 5G future. This is not about the small icon that appears—and sometimes disappears—in the upper right-hand corner of a mobile device. It is a whole lot bigger than that. We are talking about using 5G technology to lay the foundation for digital transformation around the globe. Because we are fast heading to a world where next-generation wireless networks connect everyone and everything around us.

Congress enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit interactive computer services to exercise editorial discretion when publishing third-party content, without facing liability. This case seeks to hold YouTube liable for publishing objectionable third-party content. Section 230 does not allow this. Petitioners try to work around this clear statutory prohibition by characterizing their theory of liability in different terms.