Louisiana federal judge says “hands off”

One day after a Louisiana federal judge set limits on the Biden administration’s communications with tech firms, the State Department canceled its regular meeting Wednesday with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats, according to a person at the company. The move came hours before Biden’s Department of Justice filed a notice that it will appeal the ruling.

Here is the longer story.  It seems unlikely the Louisiana decision will stand, but I would apply some game theory and look at this from a different angle.  Let’s assume the Louisiana judge could prevent the federal government from communicating with the major social media companies.  The social media companies still would have to work very hard to please the federal government, given the seriousness of the regulatory stakes.  In fact, lack of communication could make the social media companies try all that much harder, since they would not know if they were meeting the standards of the federal government.

The actual solution here is not to alter the degree of communication, but rather to have the federal government surrender so many of its arbitrary regulatory powers over American business, most of all with the major tech companies.