Joshua Treetorn

The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest law enforcement organization in the United States with over 382,000 members, is opposing a key provision of the CLARITY Act. In a letter to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, FOP National President Patrick Yoes said the organization "strongly opposes" Section 604 of the bill, which would exempt non-controlling developers and providers from being classified as money transmitting businesses. The FOP argues this change would "strip prosecutors and law enforcement of the statutes used to track and take down criminals using digital assets to commit crimes" and would make it "even easier" for criminal organizations to profit from illegal activity. This is exactly the provision that matters most for open-source developers. The same section the FOP wants removed is the one that would protect developers from being prosecuted for what their users do with their software. Without it, building privacy tools, non-custodial wallets, or mixing software could make a developer criminally liable under money transmission laws, regardless of whether they ever touched a user's funds. The FOP says it supports the right to trade digital assets. It just wants to make sure law enforcement keeps the ability to prosecute the people who build the tools those assets move through. That distinction is the entire fight.

🚨 BREAKING: Alex Davies-Jones has resigned from Keir Starmer's Government

Kickstarter is now officially banning adult content

Anti-porn/anti-masturbation/anti-poly discourse is pro trad wife propaganda and you can’t convince me otherwise.

I think the big platforms are letting the small guys take the hits and the risks. They will get more aggressive if/when we get federal law reform. Reasonable, honestly. And fine by me and my buddies. More glory when we eventually win.

Two members of Congress have been quietly merging two separate site-blocking bills into one. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D) of California and Senator Thom Tillis (R) of North Carolina's bill would let copyright holders petition federal courts to order American internet service providers and DNS resolvers to block entire foreign domains. Comcast. Verizon. Spectrum. T-Mobile. Cloudflare. Google. OpenDNS. All of them, ordered to refuse to resolve a domain on the strength of a court order obtained by the MPA's lawyers. Once the law exists, any foreign domain a federal judge finds objectionable disappears from the address book of every American household that does not run its own resolver. This is what fourteen years of post-SOPA institutional memory loss looks like. In 2012, the Stop Online Piracy Act died on the floor of Congress because the public found out what was in it before it passed. Wikipedia went dark in protest. Reddit went dark. Google put a black censor bar across its homepage. The bill sponsors retreated. The lesson the entertainment industry took from that defeat was not that the public opposed internet censorship. The lesson was that public attention was the problem. So this time the bill has been drafted in private. There has been no blackout. There has been no consumer-facing campaign. The strategy is to negotiate the details quietly with the parties most able to refuse, and the public never finds out the law exists until they cannot reach a website. In early 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Cox Communications v. Sony Music that an ISP cannot be held liable for a billion dollars because some of its customers downloaded music. Justice Sotomayor, in a concurrence, complained that the ruling now permits ISPs to sell internet access to "every single infringer who wants one" without lifting a finger to prevent infringement. The publishers and the studios read that as a green light to ask Congress for the lever the courts no longer hand them. This is the lever they want. A federal court order. A list of foreign domains. ISPs and DNS resolvers compelled by law to block on receipt. The list of countries that already have laws like this includes the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, India, Brazil, and Russia. The MPA cites this as evidence that the United States is behind. In Spain, IP-level blocking ordered by the football league has knocked legitimate businesses offline because they happened to share a server with a blocked domain. In Italy, the Piracy Shield system has blocked Cloudflare entirely on multiple occasions. In the United Kingdom, blocking orders have been used to take down sites that were not piracy sites at all, on the basis that they linked to piracy sites. The collateral damage is the system working as designed. The blunter the instrument, the easier the enforcement. There is no version of this law that targets only the bad actors. Domains are not isolated. Hosting is shared. CDNs are shared. The address book is a single document. Once the law exists, the list of blocked domains will only grow, the criteria will only loosen, and the appeal process will only formalize what was already done. Anything that depends on resolving a foreign domain becomes contingent on the goodwill of a federal court and the lobbying budget of whoever wants the domain alive. Every shadow library, every IPTV mirror, every privacy-respecting service whose lawyers cannot match Disney's. All of them will be one petition away from disappearing from the address book of every household whose internet runs through Comcast. Most people do not run a VPN, do not configure a custom DNS, do not know what an IP address is. Most people get the internet their ISP serves them. The bill is written for those people. The bill assumes that if the road is closed at the resolver, the destination effectively does not exist. This bill will outlive its sponsors, its pretext, and the industries that bought it. Laws granting infrastructure-level censorship power do not get repealed. They get expanded. Every kill switch finds a hand.

Brave Search proved it's possible to build a fully independent and competitive search engine that competes with Google. "Google's advantage lies in distribution and monetization to pay for it. None of those levers are touched by this [EU DMA] proposed regulatory framework..." /1