Laz, I wanna bring you in 'cause you were tweeting about a sort of free speech and, and what are your thoughts on, on some of this stuff?

I think you kinda touched on it, or you were, you were beginning to basically, that there is the element of like the First Amendment rights of open source software developers.

And then the other element is this like gatekeeping the internet, right? And that's kinda something I was kinda hinting towards in this newsletter because it...

for all practical purposes, it's really difficult to access the internet without an operating system as some sort of device, right? And this goes into what even Peter was kind of talking about, why it's so important to defend open source software, right? Because people need to be able to access information and to distribute information, and the internet is the place to do that right now.

And so when you start implementing kind of these gates, right now these are very soft gates with this like age indication, I'll say, I'll call it right now, and especially for open source software, well, now you start kind of adding these obstacles, right? And wherever that goes, you know, that could get worse or, or better, but for all practical purposes, that does kind of add a mechanism that dictates who can, I guess, access the internet based on a government-approved personal attribute.

And that, I think, starts getting a little bit concerning in a place in-- when the internet is meant to bring us all together and communicate information and do all these things, right?

So yeah, do you see those sort of issues as interconnected at all? And what are your thoughts on the fight against the open weight AI models?

Yeah.

I asked him also about how we should think about the functionality

of some speech.

Just because these computer instructions... someone can take them and use them for something, that doesn't change their degree of protection, right? And the fact that they can execute these functions quickly, the Supreme Court has never decided that certain information has lost its protections just because one is functional or that it can be used effectively or efficiently.

In fact, they say the opposite, right? If you look at Sorrel, specifically ResiMS Health, they were dealing with pharmaceuticals and prescriber identifying data, right? And Vermont had a law that said that this prescriber identifying data cannot be bought or sold for the use of pharmaceutical marketing.

However, it could be used for research purposes, which was kind of an interesting take.

And the court said, no, this data is information and said, yes, this is still protected.

It's information.

Here's Laz again on that