Khan and Gensler Should Be Fired
Dear Oh Dear, Oh Dear.
What a shambles. Lina Khan's FTC failed in its bid to prevent Microsoft from acquiring Activision, according to a court ruling. And the SEC lost its case, stating that XRP (Ripple) is a security.
Republicans are calling for Khan's head, and the entire crypto industry is now mocking the SEC.
The reputation of America's institutions is already at an all-time low following the Supreme Courts' assault on long-standing abortion rights and President Biden's super-low standing with the electorate.
Now add the FTC and SEC to that very long list.
This is what happens when institutions are on the wrong side of history. Clearly, big tech does not represent an existential threat to civilization or even to economic well-being. The FTC is run by a graduate student with a paper to her name. She looks increasingly out of her depth.
And she shows no sign of learning from her errors. Earlier today (Thursday), her organization announced they will appeal the court decision concerning Microsoft and Activision and also announced proceedings to investigate OpenAI - a startup.
She is running an agency focused on overreach. Attempting to stretch the law to cover things that it does not.
She really has to go and be replaced with an innovation-focused tenant of the chair. Regulation for innovation is what is needed.
It seems impossible, but Gary Gensler, SEC Chair, is even worse than Khan. After years of litigation, seeking to prove that Ripple's XRP token is a security, today, the company prevailed against the SEC in a widely applauded summary judgment. Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO, is throwing a big party (I want an invite).
The SEC's loss is good news for Coinbase and Binance, also under attack by the SEC.
In all these cases, we see a regulatory body seeking to use its power to preserve the status quo. And this is well after the new technologies are proving to have value to humanity. The SEC has not attempted to define a role for digital money or digital stores of value. Its only goal has been to stop it. And the only tool for that has been the securities laws. Congratulations to XRP and Brad Garlinghouse. Your persistence has paid huge dividends. No surprise, the price of XRP, now trading again on Coinbase, has accelerated today, peaking at 93¢ before settling back to 74¢.
Gensler should be gone. And his replacement should answer a different question. How can we modernize the money system? How can tokenizing assets help wealth creation? How can we globalize the economic benefits of innovation? And more in that vein.
Turning the page, what about Threads? My favorite article this week is Rebecca Jennings Threads won't kill Twitter if it's boring. I literally have not logged in to Threads since last week's newsletter because there was no reason to.
On the other hand, I am constantly on Twitter.
Her take nails it:
Logging onto Threads is like logging on to the internet roughly a decade ago. I have now seen two strangers share their "hot take" that actually, pineapple on pizza is good, a sentiment copied and pasted from all the world's most boring Hinge profiles. There's a lot of Fuck Jerry-type meme accounts posting, like, Wolf of Wall Street gifs; multinational corporations throwing up brand-safe drivel; motivational hustle bros begging for a smidgen of Mark Zuckerberg's attention (and, hilariously, Zuckerberg trying to pitch himself on Hot Ones). Threads is Twitter for people who are scared of Twitter or, as the writer Sarah Hagi tweeted, people who still post the "It's gonna be May" meme on April 30. Like basically every app these days, it also forces you to look at content from people you don't follow, so when I logged on this morning I was faced with the horror of seeing Ellen DeGeneres's weak attempt at rebuilding her awful reputation and former NFT shiller Gary Vee posting about "positivity" on my timeline. Consumed all together, the dominant tone seems to be an attempt at replicating the Obama-era internet.
Threads is for losers......(sorry to all my friends on it - You are the exception).
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