Update. It's over. #Musk lost.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/elon-musk-loses-big-in-court-x-boycott-perfectly-legal/

"On Thursday, #ElonMusk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated #antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over #Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council."

#Boycotts #SocialMedia #X #USLaw #USPol #USPolitics

Cases in point:

1. Only Colorado bill SB26-051 has exemptions for intra-business apps if being used by employees of the business.

1. Louisiana bill HB977 requires the 'providers' of covered application stores to collect age data, connect minor to parent accounts, and send various notifications from upstream projects to users and their parents. Colorado and Illinois bill HB5511 place the requirements on the 'providers' of operating systems, instead. (Hello, #Debian Developers! You both 'control' a 'covered application store' per LA and 'develop' the operating system software on 'computers' and 'devices' per IL/CO.)

1. Louisiana explicitly requires that store providers maintain information about parent accounts in the accounts database. Colorado and Illinois do not.

1. Only New York bill 2025-S8102 rules out just asking the user for xyr age and trusting it ('user self-reporting of age').

1. Only Colorado has data exemptions for H.E. institutions.

#AgeVerification #USLaw #Unix

@raymierussell

It's actually quite difficult to fix the laws, with the right legalese, so that they don't overreach like this beyond what clearly the people who wrote them wanted to target.

I've thought through several possibilities.

It's difficult to make exceptions based upon age. Write an exception for operating systems first published before 1999, for example, and that lets the current Microsoft Windows, and its Microsoft Store, off the hook. Windows NT 3.1 was published in 1993.

Write an exception based upon operating system last update date, akin to the exception based upon application last update dates that's already there, and you catch out everyone who has (say) patched a ROM in an emulator.

https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116268137012358487

@morgant @ShadowInTheVoid
#USLaw #retrocomputing #AgeVerification

@raymierussell
[…Continued]

One can tell from the fact that in v1.0 these were 'App Store Accountability Acts' and from the several published legislative histories, that the Microsoft/Google/Apple App Store systems were the targets. However, as written the legislation covers any operating system on any general purpose computer that 'downloads' applications from an 'application store'.

By my reading, loading things from cassette tape onto a Speccy (or other such) won't meet the definition of 'covered application store' by dint of it not being publicly available.

Closed source ROM from the 1980s might meet the 'available technology' exemption bar; but only 2 of 5 states have that.

Fast forward a few years to BBSes, FTP, Usenet binaries, & BitTorrent; and the definition will encompass you. As it does the BSDs and Linux-based operating systems with ports/packages systems.

https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116156019252249071

@morgant @ShadowInTheVoid

#USLaw #AgeVerification #ZXSpectrum #retrocomputing #Unix