Policy – Page 9

First Amendment doesn’t just protect human speech, chatbot maker argues

Artificial Intelligence, character technologies, Character.AI, chatbots, child safety online, First Amendment, free speech, generative ai, Policy, protected speech / 9u50fv / April 30, 2025

Do LLMs generate “pure speech”?

Feds could censor chatbots if their “speech” isn’t protected, Character.AI says.

Pushing to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that its chatbots caused a teen’s suicide, Character Technologies is arguing that chatbot outputs should be considered “pure speech” deserving of the highest degree of protection under the First Amendment.

In their motion to dismiss, the developers of Character.AI (C.AI) argued that it doesn’t matter who the speaker is—whether it’s a video game character spouting scripted dialogue, a foreign propagandist circulating misinformation, or a chatbot churning out AI-generated responses to prompting—courts protect listeners’ rights to access that speech. Accusing the mother of the departed teen, Megan Garcia, of attempting to “insert this Court into the conversations of millions of C.AI users” and supposedly endeavoring to “shut down” C.AI, the chatbot maker argued that the First Amendment bars all of her claims.

“The Court need not wrestle with the novel questions of who should be deemed the speaker of the allegedly harmful content here and whether that speaker has First Amendment rights,” Character Technologies argued, “because the First Amendment protects the public’s ‘right to receive information and ideas.'”

Warning that “imposing tort liability for one user’s alleged response to expressive content would be to ‘declare what the rest of the country can and cannot read, watch, and hear,'” the company urged the court to consider the supposed “chilling effect” that would have on “both on C.AI and the entire nascent generative AI industry.”

“‘Pure speech,’ such as the chat conversations at issue here, ‘is entitled to comprehensive protection under the First Amendment,'” Character Technologies argued in another court filing.

However, Garcia’s lawyers pointed out that even a video game character’s dialogue is written by a human, arguing that all of Character Technologies’ examples of protected “pure speech” are human speech. Although the First Amendment also protects non-human corporations’ speech, corporations are formed by humans, they noted. And unlike corporations, chatbots have no intention behind their outputs, her legal team argued, instead simply using a probabilistic approach to generate text. So they argue that the First Amendment does not apply.

Character Technologies argued in response that demonstrating C.AI’s expressive intent is not required, but if it were, “conversations with Characters feature such intent” because chatbots are designed to “be expressive and engaging,” and users help design and prompt those characters.

“Users layer their own expressive intent into each conversation by choosing which Characters to talk to and what messages to send and can also edit Characters’ messages and direct Characters to generate different responses,” the chatbot maker argued.

In her response opposing the motion to dismiss, Garcia urged the court to decline what her legal team characterized as Character Technologies’ invitation to “radically expand First Amendment protections from expressions of human volition to an unpredictable, non-determinative system where humans can’t even examine many of the mathematical functions creating outputs, let alone control them.”

To support Garcia’s case, they cited a 40-year-old ruling where the Eleventh Circuit ruled that a talking cat called “Blackie” could not be “considered a person” and was deemed a “non-human entity” despite possessing an “exceptional speech-like ability.”

Garcia’s lawyers hope the judge will rule that “AI output is not speech at all,” or if it is speech, it “falls within an exception to the First Amendment”—perhaps deemed offensive to minors who the chatbot maker knew were using the service or possibly resulting in a novel finding that manipulative speech isn’t protected. If either argument is accepted, the chatbot makers’ attempt to invoke “listeners’ rights cannot save it,” they suggested.

However, Character Technologies disputes that any recognized exception to the First Amendment’s protections is applicable in the case, noting that Garcia’s team is not arguing that her son’s chats with bots were “obscene” or incited violence. Rather, the chatbot maker argued, Garcia is asking the court to “be the first to hold that ‘manipulative expression’ is unprotected by the First Amendment because a ‘disparity in power and information between speakers and listeners… frustrat[es] listeners’ rights.'”

Now, a US court is being asked to clarify if chatbot outputs are protected speech. At a hearing Monday, a US district judge in Florida, Anne Conway, did not rule from the bench, Garcia’s legal team told Ars. Asking few questions of either side, the judge is expected to issue an opinion on the motion to dismiss within the next few weeks, or possibly months.

For Garcia and her family, who appeared at the hearing, the idea that AI “has more rights than humans” felt dehumanizing, Garcia’s legal team said.

“Pandering” to Trump administration to dodge guardrails

According to Character Technologies, the court potentially agreeing with Garcia that “that AI-generated speech is categorically unprotected” would have “far-reaching consequences.”

At perhaps the furthest extreme, they’ve warned Conway that without a First Amendment barrier, “the government could pass a law prohibiting AI from ‘offering prohibited accounts of history’ or ‘making negative statements about the nation’s leaders,’ as China has considered doing.” And the First Amendment specifically prohibits the government from controlling the flow of ideas in society, they noted, angling to make chatbot output protections seem crucial in today’s political climate.

Meetali Jain, Garcia’s attorney and founder of the Tech Justice Law Project, told Ars that this kind of legal challenge is new in the generative AI space, where copyright battles have dominated courtroom debates.

“This is the first time that I’ve seen not just the issue of the First Amendment being applied to gen AI but also the First Amendment being applied in this way,” Jain said.

In their court filing, Jain’s team noted that Character Technologies is not arguing that the First Amendment shielded the rights of Garcia’s son, Sewell Setzer, to receive allegedly harmful speech. Instead, their argument is “effectively juxtaposing the listeners’ rights of their millions of users against this one user who was aggrieved. So it’s kind of like the hypothetical users versus the real user who’s in court.”

Jain told Ars that Garcia’s team tried to convince the judge that the argument that it doesn’t matter who the speaker is, even when the speaker isn’t human, is reckless since it seems to be “implying” that “AI is a sentient being and has its own rights.”

Additionally, Jain suggested that Character Technologies’ argument that outputs must be shielded to avoid government censorship seems to be “pandering” to the Trump administration’s fears that China may try to influence American politics through social media algorithms like TikTok’s or powerful open source AI models like DeepSeek.

“That suggests that there can be no sort of imposition of guardrails on AI, lest we either lose on the national security front or because of these vague hypothetical under-theorized First Amendment concerns,” Jain told Ars.

At a press briefing Tuesday, Jain confirmed that the judge clearly understood that “our position was that the First Amendment protects speech, not words.”

“LLMs do not think and feel as humans do,” Jain said, citing University of Colorado law school researchers who supported their complaint. “Rather, they generate text through statistical methods based on patterns found in their training data. And so our position was that there is a distinction to make between words and speech, and that it’s really only the latter that is deserving of First Amendment protection.”

Jain alleged that Character Technologies is angling to create a legal environment where all chatbot outputs are protected against liability claims so that C.AI can operate “without any sort of constraints or guardrails.”

It’s notable, she suggested, that the chatbot maker updated its safety features following the death of Garcia’s son, Sewell Setzer. A C.AI blog mourned the “tragic loss of one of our users” and noted updates, included changes “to reduce the likelihood of encountering sensitive or suggestive content,” improved detection and intervention in harmful chat sessions, and “a revised disclaimer on every chat to remind users that the AI is not a real person.”

Although Character Technologies argues that it’s common to update safety practices over time, Garcia’s team alleged these updates show that C.AI could have made a safer product and chose not to.

Expert warns against giving AI products rights

Character Technologies has also argued that C.AI is not a “product” as Florida law defines it. That has striking industry implications, according to Camille Carlton, a policy director for the Center for Humane Technology who is serving as a technical expert on the case.

At the press briefing, Carlton suggested that “by invoking these First Amendment protections over speech without really specifying whose speech is being protected, Character.AI’s defense has really laid the groundwork for a world in which LLM outputs are protected speech and for a world in which AI products could have other protected rights in the same way that humans do.”

Since chatbot outputs seemingly don’t have Section 230 protections—Jain noted it was somewhat surprising that Character Technologies did not raise this defense—the chatbot maker may be attempting to secure the First Amendment as a shield instead, Carlton suggested.

“It’s a move that they’re incentivized to take because it would reduce their own accountability and their own responsibility,” Carlton said.

Jain expects that whatever Conway decides, the losing side will appeal. However, if Conway denies the motion, then discovery can begin, perhaps allowing Garcia the clearest view yet into the allegedly harmful chats she believes manipulated her son into feeling completely disconnected from the real world.

If courts grant AI products across the board such rights, Carlton warned, troubled parents like Garcia may have no recourse for potentially dangerous outputs.

“This issue could fundamentally reshape how the law approaches AI free speech and corporate accountability,” Carlton said. “And I think the bottom line from our perspective—and from what we’re seeing in terms of the trends in Character.AI and the broader trends from these AI labs—is that we need to double down on the fact that these are products. They’re not people.”

Character Technologies declined Ars’ request to comment.

If you or someone you know is feeling suicidal or in distress, please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline number, 1-800-273-TALK (8255), which will put you in touch with a local crisis center.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

First Amendment doesn’t just protect human speech, chatbot maker argues Read More »

Redditor accidentally reinvents discarded ’90s tool to escape today’s age gates

age checks, age gates, age-verification laws, Artificial Intelligence, biometrics, digital id, face scans, Features, online child safety, Online Privacy, Policy, pornhub / DJ Henderson / April 30, 2025

The ’90s called. They want their flawed age verification methods back.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Back in the mid-1990s, when The Net was among the top box office draws and Americans were just starting to flock online in droves, kids had to swipe their parents’ credit cards or find a fraudulent number online to access adult content on the web. But today’s kids—even in states with the strictest age verification laws—know they can just use Google.

Last month, a study analyzing the relative popularity of Google search terms found that age verification laws shift users’ search behavior. It’s impossible to tell if the shift represents young users attempting to circumvent the child-focused law or adult users who aren’t the actual target of the laws. But overall, enforcement causes nearly half of users to stop searching for popular adult sites complying with laws and instead search for a noncompliant rival (48 percent) or virtual private network (VPN) services (34 percent), which are used to mask a location and circumvent age checks on preferred sites, the study found.

“Individuals adapt primarily by moving to content providers that do not require age verification,” the study concluded.

Although the Google Trends data prevented researchers from analyzing trends by particular age groups, the findings help confirm critics’ fears that age verification laws “may be ineffective, potentially compromise user privacy, and could drive users toward less regulated, potentially more dangerous platforms,” the study said.

The authors warn that lawmakers are not relying enough on evidence-backed policy evaluations to truly understand the consequences of circumvention strategies before passing laws. Internet law expert Eric Goldman recently warned in an analysis of age-estimation tech available today that this situation creates a world in which some kids are likely to be harmed by the laws designed to protect them.

Goldman told Ars that all of the age check methods carry the same privacy and security flaws, concluding that technology alone can’t solve this age-old societal problem. And logic-defying laws that push for them could end up “dramatically” reshaping the Internet, he warned.

Zeve Sanderson, a co-author of the Google Trends study, told Ars that “if you’re a policymaker, in addition to being potentially nervous about the more dangerous content, it’s also about just benefiting a noncompliant firm.”

“You don’t want to create a regulatory environment where noncompliance is incentivized or they benefit in some way,” Sanderson said.

Sanderson’s study pointed out that search data is only part of the picture. Some users may be using VPNs and accessing adult sites through direct URLs rather than through search. Others may rely on social media to find adult content, a 2025 conference paper noted, “easily” bypassing age checks on the largest platforms. VPNs remain the most popular circumvention method, a 2024 article in the International Journal of Law, Ethics, and Technology confirmed, “and yet they tend to be ignored or overlooked by statutes despite their popularity.”

While kids are ducking age gates and likely putting their sensitive data at greater risk, adult backlash may be peaking over the red wave of age-gating laws already blocking adults from visiting popular porn sites in several states.

Some states started controversially requiring checking IDs to access adult content, which prompted Pornhub owner Aylo to swiftly block access to its sites in certain states. Pornhub instead advocates for device-based age verification, which it claims is a safer choice.

Aylo’s campaign has seemingly won over some states that either explicitly recommend device-based age checks or allow platforms to adopt whatever age check method they deem “reasonable.” Other methods could include app store-based age checks, algorithmic age estimation (based on a user’s web activity), face scans, or even tools that guess users’ ages based on hand movements.

On Reddit, adults have spent the past year debating the least intrusive age verification methods, as it appears inevitable that adult content will stay locked down, and they dread a future where more and more adult sites might ask for IDs. Additionally, critics have warned that showing an ID magnifies the risk of users publicly exposing their sexual preferences if a data breach or leak occurs.

To avoid that fate, at least one Redditor has attempted to reinvent the earliest age verification method, promoting a resurgence of credit card-based age checks that society discarded as unconstitutional in the early 2000s.

Under those systems, an entire industry of age verification companies emerged, selling passcodes to access adult sites for a supposedly nominal fee. The logic was simple: Only adults could buy credit cards, so only adults could buy passcodes with credit cards.

If “a person buys, for a nominal fee, a randomly generated passcode not connected to them in any way” to access adult sites, one Redditor suggested about three months ago, “there won’t be any way to tie the individual to that passcode.”

“This could satisfy the requirement to keep stuff out of minors’ hands,” the Redditor wrote in a thread asking how any site featuring sexual imagery could hypothetically comply with US laws. “Maybe?”

Several users rushed to educate the Redditor about the history of age checks. Those grasping for purely technology-based solutions today could be propping up the next industry flourishing from flawed laws, they said.

And, of course, since ’90s kids easily ducked those age gates, too, history shows why investing millions to build the latest and greatest age verification systems probably remains a fool’s errand after all these years.

The cringey early history of age checks

The earliest age verification systems were born out of Congress’s “first attempt to outlaw pornography online,” the LA Times reported. That attempt culminated in the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Although the law was largely overturned a year later, the million-dollar age verification industry was already entrenched, partly due to its intriguing business model. These companies didn’t charge adult sites any fee to add age check systems—which required little technical expertise to implement—and instead shared a big chunk of their revenue with porn sites that opted in. Some sites got 50 percent of revenues, estimated in the millions, simply for adding the functionality.

The age check business was apparently so lucrative that in 2000, one adult site, which was sued for distributing pornographic images of children, pushed fans to buy subscriptions to its preferred service as a way of helping to fund its defense, Wired reported. “Please buy an Adult Check ID, and show your support to fight this injustice!” the site urged users. (The age check service promptly denied any association with the site.)

In a sense, the age check industry incentivized adult sites’ growth, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney told the LA Times in 1999. In turn, that fueled further growth in the age verification industry.

Some services made their link to adult sites obvious, like Porno Press, which charged a one-time fee of $9.95 to access affiliated adult sites, a Congressional filing noted. But many others tried to mask the link, opting for names like PayCom Billing Services, Inc. or CCBill, as Forbes reported, perhaps enticing more customers by drawing less attention on a credit card statement. Other firms had names like Adult Check, Mancheck, and Adult Sights, Wired reported.

Of these firms, the biggest and most successful was Adult Check. At its peak popularity in 2001, the service boasted 4 million customers willing to pay “for the privilege of ogling 400,000 sex sites,” Forbes reported.

At the head of the company was Laith P. Alsarraf, the CEO of the Adult Check service provider Cybernet Ventures.

Alsarraf testified to Congress several times, becoming a go-to expert witness for lawmakers behind the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Like the version of the CDA that prompted it, this act was ultimately deemed unconstitutional. And some judges and top law enforcement officers defended Alsarraf’s business model with Adult Check in court—insisting that it didn’t impact adult speech and “at most” posed a “modest burden” that was “outweighed by the government’s compelling interest in shielding minors” from adult content.

But his apparent conflicts of interest also drew criticism. One judge warned in 1999 that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted.

Summing up the seeming conflict, Ann Beeson, an ACLU lawyer, told the LA Times, “the government wants to shut down porn on the Net. And yet their main witness is this guy who makes his money urging more and more people to access porn on the Net.”

’90s kids dodged Adult Check age gates

Adult Check’s subscription costs varied, but the service predictably got more expensive as its popularity spiked. In 1999, customers could snag a “lifetime membership” for $76.95 or else fork over $30 every two years or $20 annually, the LA Times reported. Those were good deals compared to the significantly higher costs documented in the 2001 Forbes report, which noted a three-month package was available for $20, or users could pay $20 monthly to access supposedly premium content.

Among Adult Check’s customers were apparently some savvy kids who snuck through the cracks in the system. In various threads debating today’s laws, several Redditors have claimed that they used Adult Check as minors in the ’90s, either admitting to stealing a parent’s credit card or sharing age-authenticated passcodes with friends.

“Adult Check? I remember signing up for that in the mid-late 90s,” one commenter wrote in a thread asking if anyone would ever show ID to access porn. “Possibly a minor friend of mine paid for half the fee so he could use it too.”

“Those years were a strange time,” the commenter continued. “We’d go see tech-suspense-horror-thrillers like The Net and Disclosure where the protagonist has to fight to reclaim their lives from cyberantagonists, only to come home to send our personal information along with a credit card payment so we could look at porn.”

“LOL. I remember paying for the lifetime package, thinking I’d use it for decades,” another commenter responded. “Doh…”

Adult Check thrived even without age check laws

Sanderson’s study noted that today, minors’ “first exposure [to adult content] typically occurs between ages 11–13,” which is “substantially earlier than pre-Internet estimates.” Kids seeking out adult content may be in a period of heightened risk-taking or lack self-control, while others may be exposed without ever seeking it out. Some studies suggest that kids who are more likely to seek out adult content could struggle with lower self-esteem, emotional problems, body image concerns, or depressive symptoms. These potential negative associations with adolescent exposure to porn have long been the basis for lawmakers’ fight to keep the content away from kids—and even the biggest publishers today, like Pornhub, agree that it’s a worthy goal.

After parents got wise to ’90s kids dodging age gates, pressure predictably mounted on Adult Check to solve the problem, despite Adult Check consistently admitting that its system wasn’t foolproof. Alsarraf claimed that Adult Check developed “proprietary” technology to detect when kids were using credit cards or when multiple kids were attempting to use the same passcode at the same time from different IP addresses. He also claimed that Adult Check could detect stolen credit cards, bogus card numbers, card numbers “posted on the Internet,” and other fraud.

Meanwhile, the LA Times noted, Cybernet Ventures pulled in an estimated $50 million in 1999, ensuring that the CEO could splurge on a $690,000 house in Pasadena and a $100,000 Hummer. Although Adult Check was believed to be his most profitable venture at that time, Alsarraf told the LA Times that he wasn’t really invested in COPA passing.

“I know Adult Check will flourish,” Alsarraf said, “with or without the law.”

And he was apparently right. By 2001, subscriptions banked an estimated $320 million.

After the CDA and COPA were blocked, “many website owners continue to use Adult Check as a responsible approach to content accessibility,” Alsarraf testified.

While adult sites were likely just in it for the paychecks—which reportedly were dependably delivered—he positioned this ongoing growth as fueled by sites voluntarily turning to Adult Check to protect kids and free speech. “Adult Check allows a free flow of ideas and constitutionally protected speech to course through the Internet without censorship and unreasonable intrusion,” Alsarraf said.

“The Adult Check system is the least restrictive, least intrusive method of restricting access to content that requires minimal cost, and no parental technical expertise and intervention: It does not judge content, does not inhibit free speech, and it does not prevent access to any ideas, word, thoughts, or expressions,” Alsarraf testified.

Britney Spears aided Adult Check’s downfall

Adult Check’s downfall ultimately came in part thanks to Britney Spears, Wired reported in 2002. Spears went from Mickey Mouse Club child star to the “Princess of Pop” at 16 years old with her hit “Baby One More Time” in 1999, the same year that Adult Check rose to prominence.

Today, Spears is well-known for her activism, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she was one of the earliest victims of fake online porn.

Spears submitted documents in a lawsuit raised by the publisher of a porn magazine called Perfect 10. The publisher accused Adult Check of enabling the infringement of its content featured on the age check provider’s partner sites, and Spears’ documents helped prove that Adult Check was also linking to “non-existent nude photos,” allegedly in violation of unfair competition laws. The case was an early test of online liability, and Adult Check seemingly learned the hard way that the courts weren’t on its side.

That suit prompted an injunction blocking Adult Check from partnering with sites promoting supposedly illicit photos of “models and celebrities,” which it said was no big deal because it only comprised about 6 percent of its business.

However, after losing the lawsuit in 2004, Adult Check’s reputation took a hit, and it fell out of the pop lexicon. Although Cybernet Ventures continued to exist, Adult Check screening was dropped from sites, as it was no longer considered the gold standard in age verification. Perhaps more importantly, it was no longer required by law.

But although millions validated Adult Check for years, not everybody in the ’90s bought into Adult Check’s claims that it was protecting kids from porn. Some critics said it only provided a veneer of online safety without meaningfully impacting kids. Most of the country—more than 250 million US residents—never subscribed.

“I never used Adult Check,” one Redditor said in a thread pondering whether age gate laws might increase the risks of government surveillance. “My recollection was that it was an untrustworthy scam and unneeded barrier for the theater of legitimacy.”

Alsarraf keeps a lower profile these days and did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

The rise and fall of Adult Check may have prevented more legally viable age verification systems from gaining traction. The ACLU argued that its popularity trampled the momentum of the “least restrictive” method for age checks available in the ’90s, a system called the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS).

Based on rating and filtering technology, PICS allowed content providers or third-party interest groups to create private rating systems so that “individual users can then choose the rating system that best reflects their own values, and any material that offends them will be blocked from their homes.”

However, like all age check systems, PICS was also criticized as being imperfect. Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig called it “the devil” because “it allows censorship at any point on the chain of distribution” of online content.

Although the age verification technology has changed, today’s lawmakers are stuck in the same debate decades later, with no perfect solutions in sight.

SCOTUS to rule on constitutionality of age gate laws

This summer, the Supreme Court will decide whether a Texas law blocking minors’ access to porn is constitutional. The decision could either stunt the momentum or strengthen the backbone of nearly 20 laws in red states across the country seeking to age-gate the Internet.

For privacy advocates opposing the laws, the SCOTUS ruling feels like a sink-or-swim moment for age gates, depending on which way the court swings. And it will come just as blue states like Colorado have recently begun pushing for age gates, too. Meanwhile, other laws increasingly seek to safeguard kids’ privacy and prevent social media addiction by also requiring age checks.

Since the 1990s, the US has debated how to best keep kids away from harmful content without trampling adults’ First Amendment rights. And while cruder credit card-based systems like Adult Check are no longer seen as viable, it’s clear that for lawmakers today, technology is still viewed as both the problem and the solution.

While lawmakers claim that the latest technology makes it easier than ever to access porn, advancements like digital IDs, device-based age checks, or app store age checks seem to signal salvation, making it easier to digitally verify user ages. And some artificial intelligence solutions have likely made lawmakers’ dreams of age-gating the Internet appear even more within reach.

Critics have condemned age gates as unconstitutionally limiting adults’ access to legal speech, at the furthest extreme accusing conservatives of seeking to censor all adult content online or expand government surveillance by tracking people’s sexual identity. (Goldman noted that “Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 and President Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, admitted that he favored age authentication mandates as a ‘back door’ way to censor pornography.”)

Ultimately, SCOTUS could end up deciding if any kind of age gate is ever appropriate. The court could perhaps rule that strict scrutiny, which requires a narrowly tailored solution to serve a compelling government interest, must be applied, potentially ruling out all of lawmakers’ suggested strategies. Or the court could decide that strict scrutiny applies but age checks are narrowly tailored. Or it could go the other way and rule that strict scrutiny does not apply, so all state lawmakers need to show is that their basis for requiring age verification is rationally connected to their interest in blocking minors from adult content.

Age verification remains flawed, experts say

If there’s anything the ’90s can teach lawmakers about age gates, it’s that creating an age verification industry dependent on adult sites will only incentivize the creation of more adult sites that benefit from the new rules. Back then, when age verification systems increased sites’ revenues, compliant sites were rewarded, but in today’s climate, it’s the noncompliant sites that stand to profit by not authenticating ages.

Sanderson’s study noted that Louisiana “was the only state that implemented age verification in a manner that plausibly preserved a user’s anonymity while verifying age,” which is why Pornhub didn’t block the state over its age verification law. But other states that Pornhub blocked passed copycat laws that “tended to be stricter, either requiring uploads of an individual’s government identification,” methods requiring providing other sensitive data, “or even presenting biometric data such as face scanning,” the study noted.

The technology continues evolving as the debate rages on. Some of the most popular platforms and biggest tech companies have been testing new age estimation methods this year. Notably, Discord is testing out face scans in the United Kingdom and Australia, and both Meta and Google are testing technology to supposedly detect kids lying about their ages online.

But a solution has not yet been found as parents and their lawyers circle social media companies they believe are harming their kids. In fact, the unreliability of the tech remains an issue for Meta, which is perhaps the most motivated to find a fix, having long faced immense pressure to improve child safety on its platforms. Earlier this year, Meta had to yank its age detection tool after the “measure didn’t work as well as we’d hoped and inadvertently locked out some parents and guardians who shared devices with their teens,” the company said.

On April 21, Meta announced that it started testing the tech in the US, suggesting the flaws were fixed, but Meta did not directly respond to Ars’ request to comment in more detail on updates.

Two years ago, Ash Johnson, a senior policy manager at the nonpartisan nonprofit think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), urged Congress to “support more research and testing of age verification technology,” saying that the government’s last empirical evaluation was in 2014. She noted then that “the technology is not perfect, and some children will break the rules, eventually slipping through the safeguards,” but that lawmakers need to understand the trade-offs of advocating for different tech solutions or else risk infringing user privacy.

More research is needed, Johnson told Ars, while Sanderson’s study suggested that regulators should also conduct circumvention research or be stuck with laws that have a “limited effectiveness as a standalone policy tool.”

For example, while AI solutions are increasingly more accurate—and in one Facebook survey overwhelmingly more popular with users, Goldman’s analysis noted—the tech still struggles to differentiate between a 17- or 18-year-old, for example.

Like Aylo, ITIF recommends device-based age authentication as the least restrictive method, Johnson told Ars. Perhaps the biggest issue with that option, though, is that kids may have an easy time accessing adult content on devices shared with parents, Goldman noted.

Not sharing Johnson’s optimism, Goldman wrote that “there is no ‘preferred’ or ‘ideal’ way to do online age authentication.” Even a perfect system that accurately authenticates age every time would be flawed, he suggested.

“Rather, they each fall on a spectrum of ‘dangerous in one way’ to ‘dangerous in a different way,'” he wrote, concluding that “every solution has serious privacy, accuracy, or security problems.”

Kids at “grave risk” from uninformed laws

As a “burgeoning” age verification industry swells, Goldman wants to see more earnest efforts from lawmakers to “develop a wider and more thoughtful toolkit of online child safety measures.” They could start, he suggested, by consistently defining minors in laws so it’s clear who is being regulated and what access is being restricted. They could then provide education to parents and minors to help them navigate online harms.

Without such careful consideration, Goldman predicts a dystopian future prompted by age verification laws. If SCOTUS endorses them, users could become so accustomed to age gates that they start entering sensitive information into various web platforms without a second thought. Even the government knows that would be a disaster, Goldman said.

“Governments around the world want people to think twice before sharing sensitive biometric information due to the information’s immutability if stolen,” Goldman wrote. “Mandatory age authentication teaches them the opposite lesson.”

Goldman recommends that lawmakers start seeking an information-based solution to age verification problems rather than depending on tech to save the day.

“Treating the online age authentication challenges as purely technological encourages the unsupportable belief that its problems can be solved if technologists ‘nerd harder,'” Goldman wrote. “This reductionist thinking is a categorical error. Age authentication is fundamentally an information problem, not a technology problem. Technology can help improve information accuracy and quality, but it cannot unilaterally solve information challenges.”

Lawmakers could potentially minimize risks to kids by only verifying age when someone tries to access restricted content or “by compelling age authenticators to minimize their data collection” and “promptly delete any highly sensitive information” collected. That likely wouldn’t stop some vendors from collecting or retaining data anyway, Goldman suggested. But it could be a better standard to protect users of all ages from inevitable data breaches, since we know that “numerous authenticators have suffered major data security failures that put authenticated individuals at grave risk.”

“If the policy goal is to protect minors online because of their potential vulnerability, then forcing minors to constantly decide whether or not to share highly sensitive information with strangers online is a policy failure,” Goldman wrote. “Child safety online needs a whole-of-society response, not a delegate-and-pray approach.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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FCC urges courts to ignore 5th Circuit ruling that agency can’t issue fines

5th circuit, FCC, Policy / Kelly Newman / April 30, 2025

FCC fights the 5th Circuit

One court said FCC violated right to trial, but other courts haven’t ruled yet.

Credit: Getty Images | AaronP/Bauer-Griffin

The Federal Communications Commission is urging two federal appeals courts to disregard a 5th Circuit ruling that guts the agency’s ability to issue financial penalties.

On April 17, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit granted an AT&T request to wipe out a $57 million fine for selling customer location data without consent. The conservative 5th Circuit court said the FCC “acted as prosecutor, jury, and judge,” violating AT&T’s Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

The ruling wasn’t a major surprise. The 5th Circuit said it was guided by the Supreme Court’s June 2024 ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which held that “when the SEC seeks civil penalties against a defendant for securities fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitles the defendant to a jury trial.” After the Supreme Court’s Jarkesy ruling, FCC Republican Nathan Simington vowed to vote against any fine imposed by the commission until its legal powers are clear.

Before becoming the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr voted against the fine issued to AT&T and fines for similar privacy violations simultaneously levied against T-Mobile and Verizon. Carr repeatedly opposed Biden-era efforts to regulate telecom providers and is aiming to eliminate many of the FCC’s rules now that he is in charge. But Carr has also been aggressive in regulation of media, and he doesn’t want the FCC’s ability to issue penalties completely wiped out. The Carr FCC stated its position in new briefs submitted in separate lawsuits filed by T-Mobile and Verizon.

Verizon sued the FCC in the 2nd Circuit in an attempt to overturn its privacy fine, while T-Mobile and subsidiary Sprint sued in the District of Columbia Circuit. Verizon and T-Mobile reacted to the 5th Circuit ruling by urging the other courts to rule the same way, prompting responses from the FCC last week.

“The Fifth Circuit concluded that the FCC’s enforcement proceeding leading to a monetary forfeiture order violated AT&T’s Seventh Amendment rights. This Court shouldn’t follow that decision,” the FCC told the 2nd Circuit last week.

FCC loss has wide implications

Carr’s FCC argued that the agency’s “monetary forfeiture order proceedings pose no Seventh Amendment problem because Section 504(a) [of the Communications Act] affords carriers the opportunity to demand a de novo jury trial in federal district court before the government can recover any penalty. Verizon elected to forgo that opportunity and instead sought direct appellate review.” The FCC put forth the same argument in the T-Mobile case with a filing in the District of Columbia Circuit.

There would be a circuit split if either the 2nd Circuit or DC Circuit appeals court rules in the FCC’s favor, increasing the chances that the Supreme Court will take up the case and rule directly on the FCC’s enforcement authority.

Beyond punishing telecom carriers for privacy violations, an FCC loss could prevent the commission from fining robocallers. When Carr’s FCC proposed a $4.5 million fine for an allegedly illegal robocall scheme in February, Simington repeated his objection to the FCC issuing fines of any type.

“While the conduct described in this NAL [Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture] is particularly egregious and certainly worth enforcement action, I continue to believe that the Supreme Court’s decision in Jarkesy prevents me from voting, at this time, to approve this or any item purporting to impose a fine,” Simington said at the time.

5th Circuit reasoning

The 5th Circuit ruling against the FCC was issued by a panel of three judges appointed by Republican presidents. “Our analysis is governed by SEC v. Jarkesy. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Seventh Amendment prohibited the SEC from requiring respondents to defend themselves before an agency, rather than a jury, against civil penalties for alleged securities fraud,” the appeals court said.

The penalty issued by the FCC is not “remedial,” the court said. The fine was punitive and not simply “meant to compensate victims whose location data was compromised. So, like the penalties in Jarkesy, the civil penalties here are ‘a type of remedy at common law that could only be enforced in courts of law.'”

The FCC argued that its enforcement proceeding fell under the “public rights” exception, unlike the private rights that must be adjudicated in court. “The Commission argues its enforcement action falls within the public rights exception because it involves common carriers,” the 5th Circuit panel said. “Given that common carriers like AT&T are ‘affected with a public interest,’ the Commission contends Congress could assign adjudication of civil penalties against them to agencies instead of courts.”

The panel disagreed, saying that “the Commission’s proposal would blow a hole in what is meant to be a narrow exception to Article III” and “empower Congress to bypass Article III adjudication in countless matters.” The panel acknowledged that “federal agencies like the Commission have long had regulatory authority over common carriers, such as when setting rates or granting licenses,” but said this doesn’t mean that “any regulatory action concerning common carriers implicates the public rights exception.”

FCC hopes lie with other courts

The 5th Circuit panel also rejected the FCC’s contention that carriers are afforded the right to a trial after the FCC enforcement proceeding. The 5th Circuit said this applies only when a carrier fails to pay a penalty and is sued by the Department of Justice. “To begin with, by the time DOJ sues (if it does), the Commission would have already adjudged a carrier guilty of violating section 222 and levied fines… in this process, which was completely in-house, the Commission acted as prosecutor, jury, and judge,” the panel said.

An entity penalized by the FCC can also ask a court of appeals to overturn the fine, as AT&T did here. But in choosing this path, the company “forgoes a jury trial,” the 5th Circuit panel said.

While Verizon and T-Mobile hope the other appeals courts will rule the same way, the FCC maintains that the 5th Circuit got it wrong. In its filing to the 2nd Circuit, the FCC challenged the 5th Circuit’s view on whether a trial after the FCC issues a fine satisfies the right to a jury trial. Pointing to an 1899 Supreme Court ruling, the FCC said that “an initial tribunal can lawfully enter judgment without a full jury trial if the law permits a subsequent ‘trial [anew] by jury, at the request of either party, in the appellate court.'”

The FCC further said the 5th Circuit relied on a precedent that doesn’t exist in either the 2nd Circuit or District of Columbia Circuit.

“The Fifth Circuit also relied on circuit precedent holding that ‘[i]n a section 504 trial, a defendant cannot challenge a forfeiture order’s legal conclusions,'” the FCC also said. “This Court, however, has never adopted such a limitation, and the Fifth Circuit’s premise is in doubt. Regardless, the proper approach would be to challenge any such limitation in the trial court and seek to strike the limitation—not to vacate the forfeiture order.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

FCC urges courts to ignore 5th Circuit ruling that agency can’t issue fines Read More »

Trump’s National Climate Assessment: No funding and all authors cut loose

climate assessment, climate change, Law, Policy, Science, trump administration / Shannon Garcia / April 29, 2025

As part of the Global Change Research Act of 1990, Congress mandated that every four years, the government must produce a National Climate Assessment. This document is intended to provide an overview of the changing state of our knowledge about the process itself and its impact on our environment. Past versions have been comprehensive and involved the work of hundreds of scientists, all coordinated by the US’s Global Change Research Program.

It’s not clear what the next report will look like. Two weeks after cutting funding for the organization that coordinates the report’s production, the Trump administration has apparently informed all the authors working on it that their services are no longer needed.

The National Climate Assessment has typically been like a somewhat smaller-scale version of the IPCC reports, with a greater focus on impacts in the US. It is a very detailed look at the state of climate science, the impacts warming is having on the US, and our efforts to limit warming and deal with those impacts. Various agencies and local governments have used it to help plan for the expected impacts of our warming climate.

But past versions have also been caught up in politics. The first Trump administration inherited a report that was nearly complete; it chose to rush the report out on the Friday after Thanksgiving, hoping it would be largely ignored. The administration did not start work on the subsequent report; as a result, the Biden administration produced a typically detailed report, but it was done slightly behind schedule.

Biden’s team also started preparing the next report (the sixth in the series), which, by law, would need to be completed by 2028. As a result, the second Trump administration inherited a process that was well underway. But in early April, the government canceled contracts with an outside consulting firm that coordinates with the Global Change Research Program and provides temporary staffing to complete the report. This raised questions about whether the report could be completed within its legally mandated timeline.

Trump’s National Climate Assessment: No funding and all authors cut loose Read More »

Massive power outage in Spain, Portugal leaves millions in dark

outage, Policy, Portugal, power, power outage, spain / Shannon Garcia / April 28, 2025

National grid operators in Spain and Portugal confirm that a massive electrical blackout has hit the Iberian Peninsula today, starting just a couple of minutes after 12: 30 pm Central European Summer Time (10: 30 am UTC, or about 6: 30 am US Eastern Daylight Time). The outage appears to have resulted in near-total loss of electricity in Spain, Portugal, the Principality of Andorra, and at least some portions of southwest France.

The impacts are widespread and pervasive; in major cities like Madrid, trains are not running, airports are unable to operate, and businesses and schools have closed. Citizens are still able to use cellular networks to communicate so far (most cell towers and network operations centers have battery or generator backup systems).

Image of a line graph showing electricity demand dropping to almost nothing. — Electrical demand curve from Red Eléctrica site showing the outage. Credit: Red Eléctrica

Bloomberg energy reporter Akshat Rathi posted on Bluesky that Spanish grid operator Red Electrica claims the outage is due to “grid oscillation,” a phenomenon that occurs when the system is unable to suppress oscillations that normally happen as sources and load enter and leave the system. Rathi quotes Bloomberg cybersecurity reporter Ryan Gallagher, noting that a cyber attack has been ruled out, and the fault is likely technical:

Initial investigations into the cause of the outages suggest a technical fault rather than a cyberattack, according to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). “For the moment the investigation seems to point to a technical/cable issue,” said a spokesperson for the agency in an emailed statement. “Nevertheless, ENISA is closely monitoring the situation and we are in contact with the relevant authorities at national and EU level.”

Ars spoke directly to a reader named Tiago Carvalho, currently in Lisbon, Portugal. According to Carvalho, banks and supermarkets in Lisbon have been closed for hours, with a small number of shops and restaurants remaining open and accepting only cash. Tourists in Lisboa are still walking around enjoying the sunny weather, but locals are doing what they can to stock up, anticipating three or more days without power. Carvalho says only his 5G data connection is functional; when reached via Discord, he described the conditions like this:

Massive power outage in Spain, Portugal leaves millions in dark Read More »

Mike Lindell’s lawyers used AI to write brief—judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

Artificial Intelligence, mike lindell, mypillow, Policy / Kelly Newman / April 26, 2025

A lawyer representing MyPillow and its CEO Mike Lindell in a defamation case admitted using artificial intelligence in a brief that has nearly 30 defective citations, including misquotes and citations to fictional cases, a federal judge said.

“[T]he Court identified nearly thirty defective citations in the Opposition. These defects include but are not limited to misquotes of cited cases; misrepresentations of principles of law associated with cited cases, including discussions of legal principles that simply do not appear within such decisions; misstatements regarding whether case law originated from a binding authority such as the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; misattributions of case law to this District; and most egregiously, citation of cases that do not exist,” US District Judge Nina Wang wrote in an order to show cause Wednesday.

Wang ordered attorneys Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster to show cause as to why the court should not sanction the defendants, law firm, and individual attorneys. Kachouroff and DeMaster also have to explain why they should not be referred to disciplinary proceedings for violations of the rules of professional conduct.

Kachouroff and DeMaster, who are defending Lindell against a lawsuit filed by former Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer, both signed the February 25 brief with the defective citations. Kachouroff, representing defendants as lead counsel, admitted using AI to write the brief at an April 21 hearing, the judge wrote. The case is in the US District Court for the District of Colorado.

“Time and time again, when Mr. Kachouroff was asked for an explanation of why citations to legal authorities were inaccurate, he declined to offer any explanation, or suggested that it was a ‘draft pleading,'” Wang wrote. “Not until this Court asked Mr. Kachouroff directly whether the Opposition was the product of generative artificial intelligence did Mr. Kachouroff admit that he did, in fact, use generative artificial intelligence.”

Mike Lindell’s lawyers used AI to write brief—judge finds nearly 30 mistakes Read More »

Comcast president bemoans broadband customer losses: “We are not winning”

Comcast, Policy / DJ Henderson / April 25, 2025

Comcast executives apparently realized something that customers have known and complained about for years: The Internet provider’s prices aren’t transparent enough and rise too frequently.

This might not have mattered much to cable executives as long as the total number of subscribers met their targets. But after reporting a net loss of 183,000 residential broadband customers in Q1 2025, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh said the company isn’t “winning in the marketplace” during an earnings call today. The Q1 2025 customer loss was over three times larger than the net loss in Q1 2024.

While customers often have few viable options for broadband and the availability of alternatives varies widely by location, Comcast faces competition from fiber and fixed wireless ISPs.

“In this intensely competitive environment, we are not winning in the marketplace in a way that is commensurate with the strength of the network and connectivity products that I just described,” Cavanagh said. “[Cable division CEO] Dave [Watson] and his team have worked hard to understand the reasons for this disconnect and have identified two primary causes. One is price transparency and predictability and the other is the level of ease of doing business with us. The good news is that both are fixable and we are already underway with execution plans to address these challenges.”

The 183,000-subscriber loss lowered Comcast’s residential Internet subscribers to 29.19 million. Comcast also reported a first-quarter drop of 17,000 business broadband subscribers, lowering that category’s total to 2.45 million.

Comcast’s stock price fell 3.7 percent today even though its overall profit beat analyst expectations and domestic broadband revenue rose 1.7 percent year over year to $6.56 billion—a sign that Comcast is extracting more money from customers on average. “Analysts peppered Comcast executives with questions on Thursday regarding its Xfinity-branded broadband and mobile, and how the company will pivot the business,” CNBC wrote.

“We are simplifying our pricing”

Cavanagh said that Comcast plans to make changes in marketing and operations “with the highest urgency.” This means that “we are simplifying our pricing construct to make our price-to-value proposition clearer to consumers across all broadband segments,” he said.

Comcast last week announced a five-year price guarantee for broadband customers who sign up for a new package. Comcast said customers will get a “simple monthly price starting as low as $55 per month,” without having to enter a contract, giving them “freedom and flexibility to cancel at any time without penalty.” The five-year guarantee also comes with one year of Xfinity Mobile at no charge, Comcast said.

Comcast president bemoans broadband customer losses: “We are not winning” Read More »

Trump orders Ed Dept to make AI a national priority while plotting agency’s death

AI, Artificial Intelligence, department of education, Donald Trump, education, Policy / Shannon Garcia / April 25, 2025

Trump pushes for industry involvement

It seems clear that Trump’s executive order was a reaction to China’s announcement about AI education reforms last week, as Reuters reported. Elsewhere, Singapore and Estonia have laid out their AI education initiatives, Forbes reported, indicating that AI education is increasingly considered critical to any nation’s success.

Trump’s vision for the US requires training teachers and students about what AI is and what it can do. He offers no new appropriations to fund the initiative; instead, he directs a new AI Education Task Force to find existing funding to cover both research into how to implement AI in education and the resources needed to deliver on the executive order’s promises.

Although AI advocates applauded Trump’s initiative, the executive order’s vagueness makes it uncertain how AI education tools will be assessed as Trump pushes for AI to be integrated into “all subject areas.” Possibly using AI in certain educational contexts could disrupt learning by confabulating misinformation, a concern that the Biden administration had in its more cautious approach to AI education initiatives.

Trump also seems to push for much more private sector involvement than Biden did.

The order recommended that education institutions collaborate with industry partners and other organizations to “collaboratively develop online resources focused on teaching K–12 students foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills.” These partnerships will be announced on a “rolling basis,” the order said. It also pushed students and teachers to partner with industry for the Presidential AI Challenge to foster collaboration.

For Trump’s AI education plan to work, he will seemingly need the DOE to stay intact. However, so far, Trump has not acknowledged this tension. In March, he ordered the DOE to dissolve, with power returned to states to ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

Were that to happen, at least 27 states and Puerto Rico—which EdWeek reported have already laid out their own AI education guidelines—might push back, using their power to control federal education funding to pursue their own AI education priorities and potentially messing with Trump’s plan.

Trump orders Ed Dept to make AI a national priority while plotting agency’s death Read More »

FCC Democrat slams chairman for aiding Trump’s “campaign of censorship”

FCC, fcc news distortion, First Amendment, Policy / 9u50fv / April 24, 2025

The first event is scheduled for Thursday and will be hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology. The events will be open to the public and livestreamed when possible, and feature various speakers on free speech, media, and telecommunications issues.

With Democrat Geoffrey Starks planning to leave the commission soon, Republicans will gain a 2–1 majority, and Gomez is set to be the only Democrat on the FCC for at least a while. Carr is meanwhile pursuing news distortion investigations into CBS and ABC, and he has threatened Comcast with a similar probe into its subsidiary NBC.

Gomez’s press release criticized Carr for these and other actions. “From investigating broadcasters for editorial decisions in their newsrooms, to harassing private companies for their fair hiring practices, to threatening tech companies that respond to consumer demand for fact-checking tools, the FCC’s actions have focused on weaponizing the agency’s authority to silence critics,” Gomez’s office said.

Gomez previously criticized Carr for reviving news distortion complaints that were dismissed shortly before Trump’s inauguration. “We cannot allow our licensing authority to be weaponized to curtail freedom of the press,” she said at the time.

FCC Democrat slams chairman for aiding Trump’s “campaign of censorship” Read More »

AI secretly helped write California bar exam, sparking uproar

AI, AI ethics, AI law, machine learning, Policy / 9u50fv / April 24, 2025

On Monday, the State Bar of California revealed that it used AI to develop a portion of multiple-choice questions on its February 2025 bar exam, causing outrage among law school faculty and test takers. The admission comes after weeks of complaints about technical problems and irregularities during the exam administration, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The State Bar disclosed that its psychometrician (a person or organization skilled in administrating psychological tests), ACS Ventures, created 23 of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions with AI assistance. Another 48 questions came from a first-year law student exam, while Kaplan Exam Services developed the remaining 100 questions.

The State Bar defended its practices, telling the LA Times that all questions underwent review by content validation panels and subject matter experts before the exam. “The ACS questions were developed with the assistance of AI and subsequently reviewed by content validation panels and a subject matter expert in advance of the exam,” wrote State Bar Executive Director Leah Wilson in a press release.

According to the LA Times, the revelation has drawn strong criticism from several legal education experts. “The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined,” said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “I’m almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”

Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who specializes in bar exam preparation, called it “a staggering admission.” She pointed out that the same company that drafted AI-generated questions also evaluated and approved them for use on the exam.

State bar defends AI-assisted questions amid criticism

Alex Chan, chair of the State Bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners, noted that the California Supreme Court had urged the State Bar to explore “new technologies, such as artificial intelligence” to improve testing reliability and cost-effectiveness.

AI secretly helped write California bar exam, sparking uproar Read More »

Taxes and fees not included: T-Mobile’s latest price lock is nearly meaningless

Policy, T-Mobile, t-mobile plans, t-mobile price guarantee / Kelly Newman / April 23, 2025

“Price” is locked, but fees aren’t

T-Mobile makes 5-year price guarantee after refusing to honor lifetime price lock.

A T-Mobile store on April 3, 2020, in Zutphen, Netherlands.

T-Mobile is making another long-term price guarantee, but wireless users will rightfully be skeptical since T-Mobile refused to honor a previously offered lifetime price lock and continues to fight a lawsuit filed by customers who were harmed by that broken promise. Moreover, the new plans that come with a price guarantee will have extra fees that can be raised at any time.

T-Mobile today announced new plans with more hotspot data and a five-year price guarantee, saying that “T-Mobile and Metro customers can rest assured that the price of their talk, text and data stays the same for five whole years, from the time they sign up.” The promise applies to the T-Mobile “Experience More” and “Experience Beyond” plans that will be offered starting tomorrow. The plans cost $85 or $100 for a single line after the autopay discount, which requires a debit card or bank account.

The price-lock promise also applies to four new Metro by T-Mobile plans that launch on Thursday. T-Mobile’s announcement came three weeks after Verizon announced a three-year price lock.

If the promise sounds familiar, it’s because T-Mobile made lifetime price guarantees in 2015 and 2017.

“Now, T-Mobile One customers keep their price until THEY decide to change it. T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan,” T-Mobile said in January 2017. When a similar promise was made in 2015, then-CEO John Legere said that “the Un-contract is our promise to individuals, families and businesses of all sizes, that—while your price may go down—it won’t go up.”

Taxes and fees not included

T-Mobile raised prices on the supposedly price-locked plans about a year ago, triggering a flood of complaints to the Federal Communications Commission and a class action lawsuit. There were also complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces laws against false advertising. But so far, T-Mobile hasn’t faced any punishment.

Besides the five-year price guarantee, there’s at least one more notable pricing detail. T-Mobile’s previous plans had “taxes and fees included,” meaning the advertised price was inclusive of taxes and fees. With the new Experience plans, taxes and fees will be in addition to the advertised price.

This will make the plans cost more initially than customers might expect, and it gives T-Mobile wiggle room to raise prices during the five years of the price guarantee since it could increase any fees that are tacked onto the new plans. The fine print in today’s press release describes taxes and fees as “exclusions” to the price guarantee.

“Fees” can refer to virtually anything that a carrier chooses to add to a bill and isn’t limited to the carrier’s actual costs from taxes or government mandates. For example, T-Mobile has a “Regulatory Programs and Telco Recovery Fee,” which it acknowledges “is not a government tax or imposed by the government; rather, the fee is collected and retained by T-Mobile to help recover certain costs we have already incurred and continue to incur.”

This can include the cost of complying with legal obligations, “charges imposed on us by other carriers for delivery of calls,” and the cost of leasing network facilities that are needed to provide service, T-Mobile says. In other words, T-Mobile charges a separate fee to cover the normal expenses incurred by any provider of telecommunications services.

The promise is thus that the base price of a service plan won’t change, but T-Mobile gives itself wide discretion to add or increase fees on customers’ monthly bills. “Guarantee means that we won’t change the price of talk, text, and 5G smartphone data on our network for at least 5 years while you are on an Experience plan,” T-Mobile said today. T-Mobile’s terms and conditions haven’t been updated, but the terms address price promises in general, saying that price locks do not include “add-on features, taxes, surcharges, fees, or charges for extra Features or Devices.”

T-Mobile Consumer Group President Jon Freier, who has been with T-Mobile for about two decades, seemed to recognize in an interview with Fierce that customers are likely to be wary of new promises. “One of the things that we’ve heard from customers is that the more definition that we can put in terms of timing around the guarantee, the more believable and useful that guarantee is,” he said. “So we chose to roll out with five years.” Freier asserted that “we are absolutely signing up for the guarantee for the next five years.”

Freier even mentioned the 2015 guarantee in a video announcement today, saying that T-Mobile is now “evolving this promise and expanding it across our portfolio.”

T-Mobile fights price lock lawsuit

There is a better chance that T-Mobile will keep the latest promise, since it is limited in scope and lasts only five years, while the lifetime price lock was supposed to last for as long as customers chose to keep their plans. The lifetime price lock did last for more than five years, after all. But T-Mobile has shown that when it breaks a promise, it is willing to accept the public backlash and fight users in court.

A class action lawsuit over the nullified lifetime price lock is still pending in US District Court for the District of New Jersey. T-Mobile is trying to force plaintiffs into arbitration, and the sides are proceeding with discovery on the matter of whether the named plaintiffs “executed valid opt-outs of Defendant’s arbitration agreement.”

A joint status update in March said that T-Mobile refused to produce all the documents that plaintiffs requested, arguing that the “burden of collecting these documents far outweighs their potential relevance to the allowed scope of discovery.”

T-Mobile tried to give itself a way out when it introduced the 2017 lifetime price lock. Although a press release issued then made the promise sound absolute, a separate FAQ essentially nullified the promise by saying that T-Mobile was only promising to pay a customer’s final bill “if we were to raise prices and you choose to leave.” Customers who tried to hold T-Mobile to the lifetime price promise were not mollified by that carveout, given that it was published on an entirely separate page and not part of the price-lock announcement.

While customers may find it difficult to fully trust T-Mobile’s new guarantee, they can at least take a look at the carveouts to get a sense of how solid the new pledge is. We already noted the taxes and fees caveat, which seems to be the biggest thing to watch out for. This category on its own makes it easy for T-Mobile to raise your bill without technically breaking its promise not to raise the price of “talk, text and data.”

Guarantee “worthless based on T-Mobile’s previous actions”

The new plans are not yet live on T-Mobile’s website, so it’s possible a more detailed breakdown of caveats could be revealed tomorrow when the plans are available. The website for T-Mobile’s separate Metro brand has a slightly more detailed description than the one in the press release. While details could differ between the main T-Mobile brand and Metro, the Metro page says:

5-year guarantee means we won’t change the price of talk, text, and 5G smartphone data on our network for at least 5 years while you are on an eligible plan. Guarantee also applies to price for data on wearable/tablet/mobile Internet lines added to your plan. Your guarantee starts when you activate or switch to an eligible plan and doesn’t restart if you add a line or change plans after that. Per-use charges, plan add-ons, third-party services, and network management practices aren’t included.

As you might expect, wireless users commenting on the T-Mobile subreddit were not impressed by the price promise. “Price guarantee is worthless based on T-Mobile’s previous actions. They might as well save the ink/electrons,” one user wrote.

Many users remarked on the removal of “taxes and fees included,” and the specific end date for the price lock that applies only to the base price. “This is them saying we are sorry we screwed consumers,” one person wrote. “Now we will be more transparent about when in the future we will increase your rates.”

Taxes and fees not included: T-Mobile’s latest price lock is nearly meaningless Read More »

FTC sues Uber over difficulty of canceling subscriptions, “false” claims

ftc, Policy, syndication, Uber / DJ Henderson / April 22, 2025

Several tech executives attended the president’s inauguration ceremony, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg have held meetings with the president at the White House in recent months.

Efforts to gain favour with the White House have not led to a softer stance on antitrust actions under Ferguson, who Trump named to lead the FTC and who has accused Big Tech of censorship. He has signalled that he will sustain the crackdown on the industry unleashed by his predecessor Lina Khan.

“The Trump-Vance FTC is fighting back on behalf of the American people,” Ferguson added, referring to US vice-president JD Vance.

Lawyers for the FTC in court filings said Uber falsely claimed users would save roughly $25 a month through the $9.99 service, but did not account for the cost of the subscription in its calculations.

They added that Uber made it difficult to cancel the service, requiring users to take at least a “dozen different actions and navigate a maze of at least seven screens, if they guess the right paths to use.”

Uber said: “Uber does not sign up or charge consumers without their consent, and cancellations can now be done anytime in-app and take most people 20 seconds or less.”

The FTC under former president Joe Biden’s administration brought a lawsuit against Amazon over its Prime subscription service. That case is due to be heard later this year in Seattle.

The FTC sued Uber during Trump’s first term over claims the ride-hailing app mishandled personal data and “exaggerated earnings” for prospective drivers. Uber settled both lawsuits and paid a $20 million settlement to provide refunds to affected drivers.

FTC sues Uber over difficulty of canceling subscriptions, “false” claims Read More »