Tag: police state

Ex-Officers Kept Access To Flock Cameras Long After Leaving The Police, Including A Former Georgia Investigator

A former investigator with the Effingham County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia kept using the Flock nationwide license plate camera system for five years after he left his job as an investigator, and used it to search for his wife’s plate, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Andrae Wright, a former investigator for the Effingham County Sheriff’s Office, left the office in 2021, but logged into the Flock system to search for a license plate bearing his wife’s middle name more than 60 times over a five-year span, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation statements and audit records. Some of the searches were conducted while Wright was trying to gain permanent custody of the couple’s teenage daughter, the Post learned. Wright and his wife divorced this year. He was arrested in July and charged with stalking his wife, using information from Flock “for the purpose of harassing and intimidating her,” according to his warrant. Wright did not return a call for comment for the Post’s story. The sheriff’s office said it had not regularly reviewed account access and plans to begin audits.

The Post investigation identified 11 cases of unauthorized use of Flock license plate readers, a network of at least 120,000 cameras nationwide. In 4 of the cases, police officers continued to use the system after they left their jobs or while they were on suspension from their jobs. In 6 additional cases, logins or access were shared with officers from other police departments.

The Post also reported on a case out of Fulton County, where an investigation was launched into the actions of a former police officer over suspected Flock license plate searches after she had left her employment with the department. The department shared its Flock subscription with the sheriff’s office, and no one notified the sheriff’s office to revoke her access when she resigned from her job. “They didn’t remove the employee,” Police Chief Wade Yates told the paper. “I’ll take the heat for that.”

In Cobb County, the sheriff’s office cut its Flock accounts from some 200 users to about 50, and only those 50 are now considered to be authorized to use the system. The review found that a number of employees had been given login information to the system for no work-related purpose, and the review found no apparent misuse.

The Post revealed the worst case of abuse of the system in a story about Indianapolis. A police recruit named Matthew Binford used a senior police officer’s account to enter the plate of his estranged wife on the Flock system over 1,000 times in one year, according to a court affidavit obtained by the paper. The senior officer had opened Flock on Binford’s laptop and left the session active, the affidavit stated, and Binford kept access for more than two years. Binford and four other current and former Indianapolis police officers were charged last month, after a Post inquiry prompted a department-wide audit. He declined to comment.

Three former Flock employees told the Post that the company has pushed back against additional security measures. Two of them said leadership had concerns that additional security would negatively impact sales to law enforcement agencies. While Flock’s contracts stipulate that accounts be created using official agency email addresses, the company acknowledged that it began to actively enforce this only recently. Multi-factor authentication was made the default setting in 2024, though agencies could opt out, and was made mandatory in August of this year. In the wake of the Post’s findings, Flock said it is working with customers to remove personal email addresses and other forms of shared login credentials from Flock accounts. As of next year, users will have to log back in every 12 hours. Company spokesman Paris Lewbel said Flock acts when it identifies security weaknesses or policy violations. The company declined to comment on individual cases, however.

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Our Failed Constitution

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” ~ Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

The U.S. Constitution was ratified to create and to restrain the government. It established boundaries beyond which the government may not venture, even when it invokes national security, public order, economic necessity, emergency or the will of a popular majority. Its purpose is not to make government more powerful but to keep the government off the people’s backs.

By that measure, the American Constitution is a failure. Formally, the document physically survives, its ceremonies continue, and politicians swear their oaths to abide it. Yet functionally, the government it was designed to restrain has accumulated vast and totalitarian powers that its authors would never recognize.

Power grows, concentrates and perpetuates itself, while liberty contracts. Every emergency supplies a justification for new authority. Every temporary restriction threatens to become permanent. Every president discovers powers that his predecessors claimed but that the Constitution never authorized. And every generation is told that the latest surrender of freedom is necessary to preserve freedom itself.

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 criminalized criticisms of government officials. Newspaper editors and political opponents faced prosecution. The government that had declared independence from a distant king was punishing Americans for criticizing their own elected officials.

The contradiction was extraordinary. The First Amendment had been adopted precisely to prevent the federal government from suppressing political expression; and it was ratified by some of the same human beings who later voted to undermine it. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison resisted these measures, recognizing that a government that could legally determine which political opinions may be expressed will eventually confuse criticism with sedition. And so it did.

During the Civil War, the Lincoln administration suspended habeas corpus, imposed military dictatorships which arrested civilians, and directed armies to kill civilians. In Ex Parte Milligan (1866), the Supreme Court invalidated Lincoln’s arrests without trial and affirmed a principle that ought to be self-evident: Neither Congress nor the president can simply replace constitutional government with personal or unaccountable authority.

But that did not stop Woodrow Wilson from arresting those who verbally opposed the draft or Congress from establishing the administrative state as a fourth and unaccountable branch of government or FDR from arresting Japanese-Americans for being Japanese-Americans.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created the Federal Reserve System, a central banking institution with authority over monetary conditions. It triggered unlimited money creation, and the eventual abandonment of gold convertibility in 1933 and the end of the dollar’s international gold convertibility in 1971.

The Federal Reserve today creates money whenever it wants, and its monetary expansion weakens the purchasing power of money and transfers costs onto future generations.

The National Security Act of 1947 created the CIA and established the national security state as the fifth branch of government, truly unaccountable. The United States had emerged from World War II with unprecedented military power and global ambitions. Rather than return to a posture of restraint, Washington established over 850 worldwide permanent military and intelligence institutions designed for a world of perpetual confrontation and American domination.

The CIA was created to collect intelligence, not to serve as the president’s personal army. Nevertheless, its history of secret interventions, covert actions, murders, tortures and even domestic operations conducted beyond ordinary public scrutiny raises a fundamental constitutional question: Who controls the government when the government acts in secret?

The national security state also perpetuates itself. Agencies justify their budgets through threats; military establishments seek new missions; presidents discover that secret operations are politically easier than openly debated wars. What began as a response to a particular international crisis becomes a permanent structure of government. The republic that once warned against standing armies and foreign entanglements is now a failing empire that thrives on both.

The Patriot Act of 2001 extended this pattern into domestic surveillance. Enacted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it radically expanded surveillance authorities available to federal agencies, and it unleashed the federal government’s mass suspicionless and warrantless surveillance; today capturing every keystroke and conversation transmitted on fiber optic cables anywhere in the U.S.

Across these episodes, the pattern repeats itself. Government restricts speech in the name of stability, expands executive power in the name of war, weakens monetary discipline in the name of economic management, conducts secret operations in the name of security and broadens surveillance in the name of preventing terrorism. Each measure arrives with an explanation. Each emergency is declared exceptional. Yet the accumulated result is a government more powerful and a citizen less secure in his liberty. And none is countenanced by the Constitution.

Was Jefferson right that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants? His famous language arose from the revolutionary generation’s experience and its fear of concentrated power. It expressed a belief that liberty cannot survive without eternal vigilance and a continuous willingness to resist oppression.

The deeper question is whether the Constitution can preserve liberty when the people entrusted with enforcing it benefit from its erosion. The answer depends upon whether Americans treat government as their servant or their master.

In the long march of history, power tends to grow because those who possess it have incentives to retain it, while those who surrender their freedoms rarely recover them. All of these attacks on liberty were enacted or performed with popular support even though the Constitution was crafted to prevent Congress and the president from popularly or unpopularly impairing personal freedom.

If Americans fail to regard freedom as a birthright, the Constitution may survive as a historical document while the constitutional republic it created becomes a bankrupt failure.

The Constitution cannot save a people who have abandoned the principles from which it sprang. Ultimately, liberty survives only when the governed insist that the government remain within its constitutional limits. If it won’t, we must alter or abolish it.

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Germany plans to force social media platforms to fill 20% of algorithmic recommendations with ‘state-approved’ content

Germany’s federal states are proposing that social media platforms reserve at least 20 percent of algorithmic recommendations for content from a pool of approved media outlets deemed important for opinion diversity, according to a draft under public consultation. The proposed measure is already being slammed as a state-mandated propaganda effort that would force German citizens to view content friendly to the ruling establishment parties.

The measure is part of the second stage of a planned Digital Media State Treaty developed by the Broadcasting Commission of the Federal States. Under the draft, public broadcasters such as ARD, ZDF and Deutschland Radio would automatically qualify for certain offerings.

Meanwhile, private outlets would generally need to apply and demonstrate that they meet criteria including news and political reporting, information and educational content, documentaries, local or regional coverage, original journalistic production, editorial staffing and accessibility standards. Approvals would be decided by the 14 state media authorities.

In other words, the state wants to control what people are seeing in their feeds.

As the Berliner Zeitung reports, the media law involves “media quotas with an advantage for ARD and ZDF,” which are two state broadcasters that already have a massive advantage over private competitors. Both outlets, which are notoriously in favor of mass migration and known for their anti-AfD bias, and which employ virtually all left-wing journalists, are already known for not playing on a level playing field.

Austrian remigration activist Martin Sellner, along with other right-leaning accounts, already are warning about the new plans.

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Transphobia? Government renews demand to punish student for voicing truth on male and female genders

Government officials in Brazil, infuriated that an appeals court ruling there dismissed their claims of “transphobia” against a student, now are demanding that the case be reinstated.

The case involves Isadora Borges, a veterinary student who had been facing up to 10 years in prison for expressing biological facts on social media.

The case was dismissed when the facts went viral online, and commenters included Elon Musk, among others.

The appeals court then ruled that her comments simply stated biology and did not contain any “attack, threat, or hostility.”

“Nor did they incite violence, lacking the intentional element required in criminal law to sustain a conviction for so-called “transphobia,” the court said.

“It is terrifying to know that my case could reopen and that I may once again face time in prison, but it is important to me that I always speak the truth. Too many Brazilians have been criminalized or bullied into silence out of fear they will be punished for ‘transphobia’. When we say men cannot become women, we are not spreading hate or targeting anyone; we are stating a biological fact. I hope the court will uphold its previous decision and that my case will go on to stand for our right to speak freely,” Borges said in a statement released by ADF International.

Her legal counsel, Julio Pohl, said, “Earlier this year, the court rightfully found that Isadora did nothing unlawful by expressing her beliefs on X. By attempting to reopen this case, the state is showing once again that it will go to great lengths to silence speech it doesn’t like. Accusations of ‘transphobia’ are being rampantly used to censor and scare Brazilians into silence. Isadora’s case is one of many living proofs of this. Brazil’s ongoing crackdown on free speech must stop.”

Borges made two posts on X in 2020, “peacefully expressing her views on gender ideology. One comment stated that ‘transgender’ women ‘were obviously born male.’ Another stated: ‘A person who identifies as transgender retains their birth DNA. No surgery, synthetic hormone, or clothing change will change this fact … .'”

Soon, Erika Hilton, a self-described “transgender” claimed those statements constituted a crime.

The result was that prosecutors charged Borges with two counts of “transphobia.”

A Brazilian appeals court earlier had said there was no crime.

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Eleventh Circuit Lets Georgia Social Media Age Checks Proceed

A federal appeals court has given a green light to a controversial part of a Georgia law that requires social media platforms to verify the age of every user, and in the case of those under 16, obtain parental consent.

The ruling came on Thursday, October 15, from a panel composed of Judges Newsom, Luck and Tjoflat, with Judge Kevin Newsom writing the opinion.

The case now goes back to the district court, but the decision did not address whether the law is ultimately constitutional – only that NetChoice went about its lawsuit the wrong way and did not provide enough evidence to prove the law is not constitutional.

Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said, “While we are disappointed in the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling, the court notably did not hold that SB 351 is constitutional.”

On June 26, 2025, Judge Amy Totenberg of the Northern District of Georgia ruled that the law was too vague, that it was preempted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), and that it likely violated the First Amendment, and blocked it.

The law’s social media part requires platforms to “make commercially reasonable efforts to verify the age of account holders” and obtain a parent’s consent for anyone under 16. For those under 16, platforms can only use age and location for ad targeting.

According to the court’s own summary, the law “requires platforms within its ambit to verify the ages of all their users.”

If a platform does not verify, it must “apply the special conditions applied to minors under this chapter to all account holders.” The ways a platform can confirm a parent include “Collecting information related to the minor’s parent’s or guardian’s government issued identification or financial or payment card information.”

The attorney general can seek up to $2,500 for each violation.

There is also another section of the law that requires sites that are more than 33.33 percent “harmful to minors” to check every visitor’s age, including by submitting government-issued ID. This part of the law has been in force since July 1, 2025, and was not challenged by NetChoice.

The Eleventh Circuit panel found that NetChoice had standing to sue but did not meet the test set by the Supreme Court in Moody v. NetChoice to prove the law was unconstitutional in a facial challenge – that is, across the full range of its application. The group had to show that the law was unconstitutional across the board, and it did not.

“NetChoice hasn’t provided even a full list of its own members to which SB 351 applies,” Judge Newsom wrote.

“We’ve learned the facial-challenge lesson the hard way,” the ruling states. “We needn’t address the merits of its First Amendment claim,” it continues.

The panel also reversed the lower court’s ruling that said the law was too vague and that it was preempted by Section 230.

Attorney General Chris Carr said, “This is a major win for Georgia families and a huge blow to those who would stand in the way of commonsense solutions to protect our kids.”

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Mississippi AG Says Police Killing of One Year Old Kohen Wiley “Was Justified”

How can any sensible human being with a beating heart bring themselves to say that shooting and killing a one-year-old baby is in any way justifiable? Apparently as far as the state of Mississippi is concerned, it is.

Earlier this summer, officers of the Senatobia Police Department responding to a call of suspected shoplifting opened fire on a vehicle occupied by two adults and one infant. Two occupants suffered gunshot wounds, with a one year old boy, identified as Kohen Wiley, dying from his injuries and his mother suffering non life threatening wounds that required hospitalization.

The shooting sparked outrage in the community and across the country, with protesters demanding justice for the slain infant. Justice, it seems, that will not come.

According to a statement released by the office of Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch on Monday:

Today, the Office of the Attorney General announced it has completed the review of a June 14, 2026 incident in Senatobia involving one officer with the Senatobia Police Department. In this incident, the Attorney General’s Office found the use of force was justified. Pursuant to Section 45-1-6 of the Mississippi Code, the review followed an investigation by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation.

The City of Senatobia would also release the following statement,

The Mississippi Attorney General’s Office has concluded its review of the June 14, 2026, officer-involved shooting in Senatobia, finding the use of force justified and declining prosecution. The state’s criminal case is now closed.

The City of Senatobia continues to extend its deepest sympathy to Kohen Wiley’s family and all those affected by this tragedy.

The shooting took place on June 14th of this year, in the parking lot of a Walmart in Tate County, Mississippi, about 40 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. As The Free Thought Project reported at the time, at approximately 2:00 PM officers of the Senatobia Police Department and Tate County Sheriff’s Department responded to a call of a potential shoplifter. Whereupon their arrival, reports allege the officers witnessed two women, the young boy’s mother Vellesiya Wiley, and Latoya Ferrell, carrying a package of diapers and one year old Kohen Wiley to their vehicle.

A statement from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation at the time alleges that as the vehicle fled the scene it swerved towards officers, prompting them to discharge their weapon. This claim, however, remains unverified. In the months since the shooting video footage of the incident either in the form of police body camera footage, or surveillance footage from the parking lot, has yet to be released to the public.

Notably, neither woman has been charged with a crime in the months since the shooting.

The officer responsible for the death of the child was identified as 32 year old Sgt. Hunter Foster of the Senatobia Police Department. He will face no criminal charges.

According to reports from Mississippi Today, Sgt. Foster has a known history of misconduct, including using racist rhetoric towards his co-workers.

Additionally, court records show that in 2019 Foster, then employed by the Southaven Mississippi Police Department, was involved in an excessive use of force incident in which Foster later falsified police reports, exaggerating the threat of a vehicle and falsely claiming that the driver attempted to swerve towards officers.

Foster, however, is far from the only “bad apple” employed at the Senatobia PD.

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A Culture of Death and State Sanctioned Murder: Why The Government Doesn’t Have The Right To Kill

A government that claims the authority to kill persons after they have been subdued, disarmed, tried, convicted and confined in prison has made a startling claim about the nature of political power. It claims not merely the authority to protect the innocent from violence, but the authority to inflict violence when no immediate threat exists.

It claims that the taking of human life, which it rightly condemns when committed by private individuals, somehow becomes morally permissible when committed by government agents. This is the fundamental contradiction of the death penalty: Government killing the helpless protects the living.

The Declaration of Independence offers a radically different understanding of government. All human beings possess natural rights, and governments are instituted to protect those rights. Government’s just powers derive solely from the consent of the governed. Government is not the owner of our lives. It is our creature, established to protect rights that precede its existence. Its authority is limited, and it cannot legitimately claim powers that the people whom it governs do not themselves possess.

Individuals possess a natural right to defend themselves against an unlawful attack. They may use necessary and proportionate force to repel an aggressor. Because the people possess that right, they can delegate it to the government, including to a military for defensive purposes. Government’s legitimate authority to wage defensive war is a moral and legal derivation of the people’s preexisting right of self-preservation.

But what right does an individual possess to kill a defeated enemy who has surrendered, is disarmed and locked in a jail cell? What right does a private person possess to execute a prisoner who no longer presents an immediate threat? None. The right of self-defense does not include the right to kill a helpless captive as retribution for a past offense.

And if the people do not possess that right, how can they delegate it to government? The principle is straightforward: Government cannot legitimately acquire, through the consent of the governed, a power that the governed themselves do not possess.

Confinement protects society. Execution reveals the state’s claim to omnipotence.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plans to have a convicted defendant executed publicly and livestream the killing represent a particularly repulsive vision of state power. If implemented, such a spectacle would not demonstrate the strength of American civilization. It would advertise its moral depravity. It would turn the deliberate destruction of a human being into political entertainment, with the machinery of government serving as producer and promoter.

There is something profoundly disturbing about officials who would turn a human death into a public performance. What lesson would such a livestream teach? That the state is entitled to kill, that its violence deserves an audience, and that adults and children should watch with approval as the life of a powerless, wheelchair-bound prisoner is extinguished by military sharpshooters? That the proper response to wrongdoing is not the restraint of power but the celebration of its most lethal expression?

This is a cruel and unusual descent into barbarism, a glorification of government killing and an invitation to cultivate a culture of fear and death. Civilization advances when it restrains violence, even in response to terrible crimes. Barbarism advances when violence becomes an instrument of public spectacle and collective gratification.

The military’s involvement makes the proposal still more grotesque. The Department of Defense exists to defend the country against external threats, not to transform the execution of prisoners into a propaganda production. The armed forces should not be reduced to stagehands for a political morality play in which the government celebrates its power over a captive’s life.

A free society should be especially suspicious when government seeks to dramatize its capacity to kill. The Framers understood that all government power must be confined and limited, not worshiped. Publicly celebrated executions would encourage the opposite attitude: Reverence for the state’s ability to destroy rather than respect for its obligation to protect.

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Prosecutors Seek Death Penalty for Mom Accused of Murdering Twins Who Died 8 Days After Vaccines

Idaho prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Andrea Shaw, a young mother charged with murdering her twin toddlers, dramatically raising the stakes in a criminal case that has drawn national attention.

In a notice filed late last week in Idaho’s Third Judicial District Court, Payette County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Ryon Sirucek identified four statutory aggravating factors that prosecutors intend to use to justify capital punishment if Shaw is convicted of first-degree murder.

Under a law that took effect in July 2026, firing squads are Idaho’s primary method of execution. The legislation followed a botched 2024 attempt to execute a 73-year-old man by lethal injection.

Prosecutors must prove at least one statutory aggravating circumstance before Shaw can be considered eligible for the death penalty. If Shaw is convicted, a jury would determine whether those circumstances exist.

According to the filing, prosecutors identified four aggravating circumstances: that Shaw allegedly committed two murders at the same time; that the murders were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, manifesting exceptional depravity”; that she exhibited “utter disregard for human life”; and that her conduct demonstrates a propensity to commit murder that would make her a continuing threat to society.

Shaw was indicted by a grand jury and arrested on June 30 for allegedly deliberately suffocating her twins, who died on May 1, 2025. Prosecutors allege Shaw killed the children while they were sharing a bed. Her trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 11, 2027.

Shaw, who pleaded not guilty, has consistently denied the allegations. She suggested that her twins’ deaths may have been caused by the vaccines they received at a routine doctor’s appointment just over a week before they died.

According to court documents filed by her defense, Shaw took the twins to the emergency room on April 24, 2025, the day after they received routine vaccinations, because they were lethargic and their lips had turned blue.

The treating emergency room physician diagnosed both children with a “post-immunization reaction,” the filing states.

The children remained ill in the days leading up to their deaths, and Shaw repeatedly sought medical advice.

Neither the police nor the prosecution have publicly outlined the evidence they believe supports their claim that Shaw deliberately killed her toddlers. The grand jury indictment is sealed and not publicly available, and the coroner reports have not been released.

Shaw’s bail was initially set at $2 million. A district judge in Payette County, Idaho, later revoked the bail, which is discretionary in capital cases.

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Supreme Court agrees to review a Reconstruction-era ban on distilling spirits in private homes

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider whether Congress had the constitutional authority to impose a ban on distilling spirits in private homes more than 150 years ago.

Plaintiffs challenging the prohibition on home distilling claim the 1868 law is an antiquated relic of Reconstruction-era politics. They argue that Congress overstepped its taxation powers when it enacted the home distilling ban as part of a tax reform measure designed to curb fraud by commercial distillers.

Government attorneys counter that Congress properly restricted where spirits can be distilled to prevent producers from evading federal excise taxes. They warn that lifting the ban would violate Supreme Court precedent and erode congressional powers.

Federal law makes home distilling a crime punishable by a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Separate challenges to the law divided two federal circuit courts, which issued conflicting decisions in April, only 11 days apart.

A three-judge panel from the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the federal ban in a case brought by John Ream, a brewpub owner from Newark, Ohio, who wants to distill whisky at home for his personal consumption.

A Fifth Circuit panel ruled in favor of different plaintiffs — members of the Texas-based Hobby Distillers Association — and concluded that statutory prohibitions on in-home distilling are outside the scope of Congress’ taxing power under the Constitution.

The Supreme Court agreed to review the Fifth Circuit decision, which was the Justice Department’s preference.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Robert Alt said they are “thrilled” that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

“Our country’s founders would be rolling over in their graves to learn that a pastime in which even George Washington partook, which is as American as apple pie and certainly a lot older, has quite absurdly been turned into a federal crime,” Alt said in a statement.

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Britain Wants To Punish Microsoft for Being Too Successful

Successful tech companies are being punished—for being successful.

Last week, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) proposed designating Microsoft as having strategic market status, which would give the government regulator enormous powers to regulate Microsoft and impose specific conduct requirements on product design. A consultation process has begun, with a decision on whether Microsoft will be given strategic market status expected in February 2027.

If the CMA decides to designate Microsoft as having strategic market status, it could intervene in product bundling (how Microsoft packages Teams, Word, Excel, and Copilot together), interoperability (whether Microsoft should make it easier for competing software and AI developers to integrate with its products), cloud licensing (whether Microsoft’s licensing arrangements disadvantage rival cloud providers), and customer switching (whether businesses face unreasonable barriers to leaving Microsoft’s ecosystem) in the United Kingdom.

Bizarrely, the CMA’s fundamental gripe with Microsoft is that it has made its software so interconnected, convenient, and commercially attractive to buy together that competitors struggle to persuade businesses to use anything else. For example, the CMA says that Microsoft offers customers “technology that is useful, secure, easy to deploy and manage, and available at an attractive overall price.” According to its own customer research, Microsoft is seen as “relatively good value for money,” and its bundles are “seen as more cost-effective than buying and managing separate licences.” Because commercial bundling “makes customers less likely to adopt products from alternative providers,” the CMA thinks it must intervene.

Microsoft is not the first tech giant to feel the CMA’s wrath for creating products people like. In 2025, the CMA decided Google had strategic market status in general search and search advertising, giving the regulator the power to impose legally binding requirements on how the company operates. Since then, the CMA has ordered Google to use government-mandated standards for ranking organic search results, provide competitors with tools to access users’ search data, and give publishers greater control over how their content is used in AI-powered search. (These requirements were imposed without finding that Google had violated competition law.)

“Products working well together at an attractive price used to be called a selling point,” but is now “attracting intervention pushed by an overzealous regulator,” Matthew Lesh, public policy fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a London-based free market think tank, tells Reason. Lesh is the co-author of Digital Overload, a 2023 report that warns against giving the CMA “extensive, discretionary powers” amounting to the regulator “telling some of the most successful and popular platforms on the planet how to run their businesses.”

Lesh argues that including Copilot, Microsoft’s AI chatbot, in the designation is “particularly outrageous.” Last year, when Google was designated as having strategic market status, the CMA excluded Gemini because the “AI assistant sector is relatively small, nascent, and highly dynamic.” Lesh argues that, with Google, the CMA acknowledged “uncertainty about the market’s development,” but now “proposes sweeping Microsoft’s workplace AI into a designation requiring an assessment looking at least five years ahead.”

“Five years ago, ChatGPT didn’t exist. Anyone confident about who will lead workplace AI in 2031 should be running a hedge fund, not a regulator,” he tells Reason.

While European countries have taken a far more interventionist approach to technology, the United States has, at least comparatively, celebrated competition and innovation. But American lawmakers are increasingly flirting with importing similar restrictions on Big Tech.

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