Blogiversary: What Will This Blog Look Like in 10 Years? (Part 10 of 10)

This is my 10th and final blog post in my series celebrating my 20 year blogiversary. Sadly, the series (and maybe the blog) will end on a depressing note. You might want to grab some tissues before digging in.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the blog’s future. I recognize that looking forward is an inherently optimistic act, because it assumes there is a future for our world, our country, the Internet, and me. To reach that conclusion, we must disregard many possible cataclysmic scenarios. For example, I’m assuming that in 10 years: the earth will still be habitable; there will still be an Internet worth blogging about; the censors will have not taken away my ability to blog; and I will not be jailed or executed for my acts of resistance or being Jewish. I hope all of these assumptions will be true in 2035, but there are no guarantees.

Subject to those caveats, my thoughts about the 10-year future of the blog.

I’ll Still Be Here. Blogging is a core part of my professional identity. I don’t see that changing for the rest of my career. So long as the Internet is still generating Internet Law, and so long as I have the legal and technical ability to comment on new Internet Law developments, I’ll be blogging about it.

Will I Still Have the Fighting Spirit? But will 66-year-old Eric be as feisty as I’ve historically been? This is a complex question.

Unquestionably, I was a little more freewheeling with my blogging in my 30s. Maturity and the barrage of legal threats I’ve received over the years have smoothed out some of my rougher edges. I’ll still speak truth to power and name names when necessary, but I don’t go looking for fights or intentionally stirring up trouble.

At the same time, as I’ve gotten more job security and more gray hairs, I’ve run out of fucks to give. I may be one of the few remaining OG from the 1990s still fighting for freedom of speech and innovation on the Internet, but I will keep doing so until my last breath.

And yet…I feel worn down. It is exhausting enough fighting for the Internet’s future, especially against the anti-empirical partisan attacks that I, as an academic, can’t meaningfully counter with rigorous academic approaches. For example, pretty much every U.S. regulator is prepared to slice up Section 230 for the wrong reasons. Any effort to rebut their underinformed criticisms through logic or facts stands no chance.

On top of all that, some of my efforts to protect the Internet are being redirected into the fight for our republic against those who are actively seeking to turn it into an autocracy.

The erosion of the rule of law has prompted me to question everything about the scope of my blogging. It seems silly to chronicle the finer details of Internet Law if all law, including Internet Law, becomes Calvinball. In other words, this blog has always assumed a baseline adherence to the rule of law. If that baseline degrades or goes away, what am I blogging about? (For more on this, see Techdirt’s post, “Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not).“).

The TikTok ban provides a good example of why I’m questioning everything about my blog in the Calvinball era of Internet Law. Congress’ statutory ban was misguided and counterproductive; the Supreme Court accepted Congress’ national security pretext way too credulously; Biden and Trump both disregarded the law; and Congress shrugged its shoulders at the administration’s dereliction. How am I supposed to teach my students about the meaning of any national security exception to the First Amendment in light of these developments?

AND THEN, we got even more damning proof that the TikTok ban’s national security justification was a farce. In the Trump 2.0 era, the U.S. Government clearly poses a far greater and more immediate threat to its citizens’ data security than any foreign government. (Some examples of the Trump 2.0 national security threats: E.g., DOGE’s data heists that Trump admits is because “we don’t have very good security in this country;” the Director of National Intelligence reluctantly admits that the US is compiling massive dossiers on its citizens for undisclosed purposes; immigration officials are mining social media to find reasons to deport people without due process for their lawful and constititionally protected speech; and the war boys freely banter about classified and highly sensitive Houthi attack plans on Signal, using vulnerable devices and looping a reporter into the conversation). Any national security threat from TikTok seems de minimis by comparison. In other words, the most important “national security” calls are coming from inside the house, not from China, and our government is the most important threat vector we all need to worry about.

The TikTok ban feels like such a jump-the-shark moment for Internet Law. If there is no legitimate justification for the TikTok ban, and if our government institutions are disregarding a law the Supreme Court has declared constitutional, what exactly is the “law” of TikTok I should be covering on this blog or teaching to my Internet Law students?

In light of the underlying across-the-board erosion of the rule of law, there’s a lot to worry about before I even get to the Calvinball era of Interent Law. I still care passionately about the Internet, but my supply of rage and opposition may have a lifetime cap. How much will be left in my tank 10 years from now?

The Comment Section Will Be Turned Off. We are almost at the end of the user-generated content era. The regulators have already doomed it, and the upcoming crop of Internet Laws over the next couple of years will be the coup de grâce. We’ve already seen the Internet shrink dramatically in response to recent regulatory interventions, such as the UK Online Safety bill. The UGC shrinkage will keep accelerating.

My blog is a UGC site in two ways. First, I am UGC to my blog host (another shoutout to Justia for their wonderful support over the years) and the host’s vendors, like AWS (which has received repeated complaints about my blog specifically). Will Justia and AWS still tolerate my content if their legal protections fade? If not, can I find replacement vendors?

I also am a UGC site in that I permit readers to post comments. I value my readers’ comments, but I don’t want to take legal responsibility for them. Without Section 230, and in the face of a tsunami of new state laws imposing onerous obligations on UGC sites, I will be burdened with increasing legal risks and obligations for allowing readers to comment. Rather than navigate that gauntlet, I’ll turn off comments entirely. Within 10 years, that outcome seems inevitable. [Note: This blog didn’t have any comment function from 2006 to 2013. “What’s past is prologue.”]

The Ads Will Be Turned Off. I rolled out Google AdSense for the blog in 2005, shortly after the blog launch. The money was OK, but mostly I wanted first-hand experience in the advertising ecosystem to improve my knowledge of the field.

Twenty years later, I’m still in the AdSense program, but barely. Over time, Google has had difficulty monetizing blogs like mine, so the program’s economics have collapsed. Google’s ads became more intrusive to boost Google’s revenues, but this didn’t trickle down to me. At the peak, I used to earn over $600 per year. That number drifted down to about $300/yr, when I finally turned off Google’s ability to create new ad slots on my page (which interfered with readers’ experiences, and I repeatedly got complaints about advertiser sketchiness). Now that I only have limited ad slots on each page, I make like 30 cents a day, or about $100 per year. Barely enough to get a single meal of burger and fries (and alcohol) at the Newark airport.

Worse, this de minimis ad revenue increases my legal risk. So long as I have any ads, a plaintiff or regulator can assert that I run a “commercial” website that subjects me to heightened legal obligations or reduced legal defenses. For example, my blog might have a degraded fair use position due to its purported commerciality (it shouldn’t, but the judge decides). With so little revenue at stake, those risks aren’t worth it.

I trust you detect a theme: despite my overall privilege as a tenured law professor, my blog is extremely vulnerable to regulatory risks. Comments and ads might both go offline due to those risks; and my blog itself could be tossed into the void by my blog host or its vendors. This is a microcosm of the broader threats facing the blogger ecosystem and all UGC ecosystems.

What Topics Will Be Left to Discuss? What will Internet Law look like in 10 years? I assume Section 230 will be long-gone by then, so every lawsuit over UGC will become a protracted First Amendment lawsuit. I’ll blog those cases, and that litigation genre could still be going strong in 2035.

Otherwise, I think we’ll still see standard e-commerce legal developments in 2035, even if online marketplaces are gone by then. My syllabus and this blog already cover many of these topics: contract formation, trespass to chattels, copyright, trademark, privacy. In 2035, I will also probably be talking more about AI, assuming it isn’t also extinct due to overregulation. I imagine I also will be sharing war stories about the “glory days,” explaining the Internet Law problems we’d once solved and the Internet benefits we’ve lost over the years. Just like their bafflement about how telephones used to work, the younger generations will have no idea about what the Internet was like for their elders.

Assuming everything goes well enough that we can still have the conversation, I’ll revisit this post in 2035 and see what I got right and wrong. I hope you’ll still be along for the ride then. Thank you for reading this blog now and, I hope, into our indefinite and uncertain future.

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Coverage of the 20 year blogiversary:

Part 1: Celebrating the Blog’s 20th Blogiversary
Part 2: How Has the Blog Changed Over the Past 20 Years?
Part 3: Who Reads the Blog, and Why?
Part 4: Readers’ Favorite Topics, Posts, and Memes
Part 5: How the Blog Helps Readers
Part 6: Jess Miers Reflects on the Blogiversary
Part 7: Ethan Ackerman Reflects on the Blogiversary
Part 8: Guest Bloggers of the Technology & Marketing Law Blog
Part 9: How Information Consumption Habits Have Changed Over the Years
Part 10: What Will This Blog Look Like in 10 Years?

Coverage of the 10 year blogiversary:

Part 1: Happy 10th Blogiversary!
Part 2: The Blog’s Impact
Part 3: The Blogosphere’s Evolution
Part 4: Changes in Internet and IP Law
Bonus: A Video Interview About the Blog