New APPS

(story via Julia Angwin) You might remember that Amazon solemnly swore to Congress that they did not artificially elevate their own products in search results.  Except that they do.  Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin of The Markup used a machine learning algorithm to predict product placement in search results:

“We found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive could predict in seven out of every 10 cases whether Amazon would place it first in search results. These listings are not visibly marked as “sponsored” and they are part of a grid that Amazon identifies as “search results” in the site’s source code.”

Nothing else was anywhere close to as predictive.  Amazon products routinely get rated higher than better rated and better-selling competitors.  And it isn’t just for obvious Amazon products like “Amazon Basics.”  It turns out that a lot of products turn out to be Amazon:

“Using public records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Amazon’s own statements, we identified more than 150 brands registered by or owned by Amazon. These include both brands with an obvious connection, such as Amazon Basics and Amazon Commercial, and those that are generally known to be owned by the company, including Kindle and Zappos. But they also include dozens more, such as Happy Belly, Daily Ritual, and Society New York, where the connection to the company is not obvious. Those are in addition to the estimated hundreds of third-party brands that are exclusive to the site.”

Consumers are (understandably) totally confused about who makes the products they see.  Actual independent sellers are terrified to complain, because they’re worried about retaliation from Amazon.  Those who want to elevate their products can of course pay (one of the companies listed in the article was paying $10,000 a month, another $40,000 – not small change!), though even that might not get them listed above the Amazon products.  All of this is, not surprisingly, a potential antitrust problem:

“Bill Baer, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice and former director of the Bureau of Competition at the FTC, said if consumers expect Amazon’s product search results to be neutral, but they are not, and the site is essentially a monopoly, that could be a violation of the FTC Act of 1914, which prohibits unfair competition and unfair or deceptive practices in commerce, or the U.S. Sherman Antirust Act, which prohibits monopolies from using their market power to harm competition.  If basically you’ve got somebody with market power that is restraining competition both in terms of site access or where things appear on the site,” he said, “that is potentially problematic.”

It’s also a problem because it suggests that Amazon executives lied to Congress.  Congress, you’ll recall, is completely dysfunctional and polarized on all topics except one: they all hate big tech.  Hence the “social good” part of the AI: the House Judiciary committee just sent a very threatening letter, which opens as follows:

“We write in response to recent, credible reporting that directly contradicts the sworn testimony and representations of Amazon’s top executives—including former CEO Jeffrey Bezos—to the Committee about their company’s business practices during our investigation last Congress. At best, this reporting confirms that Amazon’s representatives misled the Committee. At worst, it demonstrates that they may have lied to Congress in possible violation of federal criminal law.  In light of the serious nature of this matter, we are providing you with a final opportunity to provide exculpatory evidence to corroborate the prior testimony and statements on behalf of Amazon to the Committee. We strongly encourage you to make use of this opportunity to correct the record and provide the Committee with sworn, truthful, and accurate responses to this request as we consider whether a referral of this matter to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation is appropriate.”

This piece, on Facebook's behaving more like an autocratic, hostile state than a large company, is worth the read.  Here's an excerpt:

"Perhaps Americans have become so cynical that they have given up on defending their freedom from surveillance, manipulation, and exploitation. But if Russia or China were taking the exact same actions to undermine democracy [that FB is], Americans would surely feel differently. Seeing Facebook as a hostile foreign power could force people to acknowledge what they’re participating in, and what they’re giving up, when they log in. In the end it doesn’t really matter what Facebook is; it matters what Facebook is doing."

And what does that mean?  Now is a good time to ask.  The Court has let stand a 5^th Circuit decision upholding a Texas law that is plainly unconstitutional under current SCOTUS jurisprudence (it bans abortion at 6 weeks) and involves an enforcement mechanism that comes straight from Stalin’s playbook (it allows individuals to sue people they suspect of assisting a woman of obtaining an abortion).  This piece on Vox runs through how deeply perverse the Texas law in question in, how thoroughly Trump has corrupted the 5^th Circuit, and how alarming SCOTUS inaction is.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey – which, along with Roe is apparently being overruled in Texas without a hearing and without a reasoned opinion – the Court favorably cites earlier opinion to the effect that the Court is supposed to give reasons when it overturns its precedent:

"A basic change in the law upon a ground no firmer than a change in our membership invites the popular misconception that this institution is little different from the two political branches of the Government. No misconception could do more lasting injury to this Court and to the system of law which it is our abiding mission to serve"

Justice O’Connor adds:

“The root of American governmental power is revealed most clearly in the instance of the power conferred by the Constitution upon the Judiciary of the United States and specifically upon this Court. As Americans of each succeeding generation are rightly told, the Court cannot buy support for its decisions by spending money and, except to a minor degree, it cannot independently coerce obedience to its decrees. The Court's power lies, rather, in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people's acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation's law means and to declare what it demands.  The underlying substance of this legitimacy is of course the warrant for the Court's decisions in the Constitution and the lesser sources of legal principle on which the Court draws. That substance is expressed in the Court's opinions, and our contemporary understanding is such that a decision without principled justification would be no judicial act at all. But even when justification is furnished by apposite legal principle, something more is required. Because not every conscientious claim of principled justification will be accepted as such, the justification claimed must be beyond dispute. The Court must take care to speak and act in ways that allow people to accept its decisions on the terms the Court claims for them, as grounded truly in principle, not as compromises with social and political pressures having, as such, no bearing on the principled choices that the Court is obliged to make. Thus, the Court's legitimacy depends on making legally principled decisions under circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the Nation” (emphasis added)

O’Connor adds that if “the Court decides a case in such a way as to resolve the sort of intensely divisive controversy reflected in Roe” that “only the most convincing justification under accepted standards of precedent could suffice to demonstrate that a later decision overruling the first was anything but a surrender to political pressure, and an unjustified repudiation of the principle on which the Court staked its authority in the first instance.”

The Court’s so-called “shadow docket” – consequential decisions rendered in orders for cases not heard, as for example prioritizing religious claims over public health – has been on the rise over the last couple of years, and commentators have worried about the damage this does to the rule of law as an institution.  In the case of abortion, the Court has a case on the docket that would give it the opportunity to overturn Roe; it could have waited until then (and avoided the need to validate Texas’ enforcement mechanism).  You could argue that the Court didn’t “decide” anything last night, but it was faced with a clearly erroneous 5^th Circuit decision that it let stand.  I don’t see how last night’s failure to enjoin the Texas law doesn’t utterly gut its legitimacy in the sense articulated in Casey.  Texas just banned abortion, and SCOTUS offered no justification at all in letting the law stand.

Again, Casey: “to overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason to reexamine a watershed decision would subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question.”  Court legitimacy is important:

“It is true that diminished legitimacy may be restored, but only slowly. Unlike the political branches, a Court thus weakened could not seek to regain its position with a new mandate from the voters, and even if the Court could somehow go to the polls, the loss of its principled character could not be retrieved by the casting of so many votes. Like the character of an individual, the legitimacy of the Court must be earned over time. So, indeed, must be the character of a Nation of people who aspire to live according to the rule of law. Their belief in themselves as such a people is not readily separable from their understanding of the Court invested with the authority to decide their constitutional cases and speak before all others for their constitutional ideals. If the Court's legitimacy should be undermined, then, so would the country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals. The Court's concern with legitimacy is not for the sake of the Court, but for the sake of the Nation to which it is responsible.”

So much for Justice Roberts’ efforts to preserve the Court as an institution.

By Gordon Hull

Last time, I started to look at the details of the Supreme Court’s recent TransUnion decision, which ruled that a credit agency that wrongly labeled someone as a match for a terrorist watch list (using only first and last names, with no effort at verification.  Sorry “John Smith”…) could only be sued if that person could show that the credit agency also distributed this information to others.  So basically you have to lose a job opportunity or a mortgage approval, and then you can sue.  There is nothing you can do to pre-emptively force them to correct the problem.  Worse, this ruling is in defiance of explicit statutory language in the FCRA.  The opinion directly says that SCOTUS can override Congressional determination of when something is legally actionable, and (just to be contrary, I guess), it does so in the name of separation of powers.

So what are we to make of this? As the various critical theories will remind you, law is a form of power. One thing that’s happening here is the protection of the powerful from the weak. With some high profile exceptions (like Justice Gorsuch’s endorsement of LGBTQ rights), the Roberts court has fairly consistently sided with the powerful, like corrupt politicians and conservative dark money donors by whittling away at laws designed to rein them in. One limitation to that thesis is to argue, as Erwin Chemerinsky has, that “Throughout history the court has overwhelmingly favored corporate power over employees, consumers, and the public, and has favored government power over individuals’ rights.” While it’s tempting to leave it at that here, I think there’s more nuance to be had. So two points.

(more…)