For a moment, it looked like the tech world’s powerbrokers had pulled it off. Buried deep in a Republican infrastructure and tax package was a sleeper provision — the so-called AI moratorium — that would have blocked states from passing their own AI laws for up to a decade. It was an audacious move: centralize control over one of the most consequential technologies in history, bypass 50 state legislatures, and hand the reins to a small circle of federal agencies and especially to tech industry insiders.
But then it collapsed.
The Senate voted 99–1 to strike the moratorium. Governors rebelled. Attorneys general sounded the alarm. Artists, parents, workers, and privacy advocates from across the political spectrum said “no.” Even hardline conservatives like Ted Cruz eventually reversed course when it came down to the final vote. The message to Big Tech or the famous “Little Tech” was clear: the states still matter — and America’s tech elite ignore that at their peril. (“Little Tech” is the latest rhetorical deflection promoted by Big Tech aka propaganda.)
The old Google crowd pushed the moratorium–their fingerprints were obvious. Having gotten fabulously rich off of their two favorites: The DMCA farce and the Section 230 shakedown. But there’s increasing speculation that White House AI Czar and Silicon Valley Viceroy David Sacks, PayPal alum and vocal MAGA-world player, was calling the ball. If true, that makes this defeat even more revealing.
Sacks represents something of a new breed of power-hungry tech-right influencer — part of the emerging “Red Tech” movement that claims to reject woke capitalism and coastal elitism but still wants experts to shape national policy from Silicon Valley, a chapter straight out of Philip Dru: Administrator. Sacks is tied to figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and a growing network of Trump-aligned venture capitalists. But even that alignment couldn’t save the moratorium.
Why? Because the core problem wasn’t left vs. right. It was top vs. bottom.
In 1964, Ronald Reagan’s classic speech called A Time for Choosing warned about “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol” deciding what’s best for everyone else. That warning still rings true — except now the “capitol” might just be a server farm in Menlo Park or a podcast studio in LA.
The AI moratorium was an attempt to govern by preemption and fiat, not by consent. And the backlash wasn’t partisan. It came from red states and blue ones alike — places where elected leaders still think they have the right to protect their citizens from unregulated surveillance, deepfakes, data scraping, and economic disruption.
So yes, the defeat of the moratorium was a blow to Google’s strategy of soft-power dominance. But it was also a shot across the bow for David Sacks and the would-be masters of tech populism. You can’t have populism without the people.
If Sacks and his cohort want to play a long game in AI policy, they’ll have to do more than drop ideas into the policy laundry of think tank white papers and Beltway briefings. They’ll need to win public trust, respect state sovereignty, and remember that governing by sneaky safe harbors is no substitute for legitimacy.
The moratorium failed because it presumed America could be governed like a tech startup — from the top, at speed, with no dissent. Turns out the country is still under the impression they have something to say about how they are governed, especially by Big Tech.
Tag: AI policy
Steve’s Not Here–Why AI Platforms Are Still Acting Like Pirate Bay
In 2006, I wrote “Why Not Sell MP3s?” — a simple question pointing to an industry in denial. The dominant listening format was the MP3 file, yet labels were still trying to sell CDs or hide digital files behind brittle DRM. It seems kind of incredible in retrospect, but believe me it happened. Many cycles were burned on that conversation. Fans had moved on. The business hadn’t.
Then came Steve Jobs.
At the launch of the iTunes Store — and I say this as someone who sat in the third row — Jobs gave one of the most brilliant product presentations I’ve ever seen. He didn’t bulldoze the industry. He waited for permission, but only after crafting an offer so compelling it was as if the labels should be paying him to get in. He brought artists on board first. He made it cool, tactile, intuitive. He made it inevitable.
That’s not what’s happening in AI.
Incantor: DRM for the Input Layer
Incantor is trying to be the clean-data solution for AI — a system that wraps content in enforceable rights metadata, licenses its use for training and inference, and tracks compliance. It’s DRM, yes — but applied to training inputs instead of music downloads.
It may be imperfect, but at least it acknowledges that rights exist.
What’s more troubling is the contrast between Incantor’s attempt to create structure and the behavior of the major AI platforms, which have taken a very different route.
AI Platforms = Pirate Bay in a Suit
Today’s generative AI platforms — the big ones — aren’t behaving like Apple. They’re behaving like The Pirate Bay with a pitch deck.
– They ingest anything they can crawl.
– They claim “public availability” as a legal shield.
– They ignore licensing unless forced by litigation or regulation.
– They posture as infrastructure, while vacuuming up the cultural labor of others.
These aren’t scrappy hackers. They’re trillion-dollar companies acting like scraping is a birthright. Where Jobs sat down with artists and made the economics work, the platforms today are doing everything they can to avoid having that conversation.
This isn’t just indifference — it’s design. The entire business model depends on skipping the licensing step and then retrofitting legal justifications later. They’re not building an ecosystem. They’re strip-mining someone else’s.
What Incantor Is — and Isn’t
Incantor isn’t Steve Jobs. It doesn’t control the hardware, the model, the platform, or the user experience. It can’t walk into the room and command the majors to listen with elegance. But what it is trying to do is reintroduce some form of accountability — to build a path for data that isn’t scraped, stolen, or in legal limbo.
That’s not an iTunes power move. It’s a cleanup job. And it won’t work unless the AI companies stop pretending they’re search engines and start acting like publishers, licensees, and creative partners.
What the MP3 Era Actually Taught Us
The MP3 era didn’t end because DRM won. It ended because someone found a way to make the business model and the user experience better — not just legal, but elegant. Jobs didn’t force the industry to change. He gave them a deal they couldn’t refuse.
Today, there’s no Steve Jobs. No artists on stage at AI conferences. No tactile beauty. Just cold infrastructure, vague promises, and a scramble to monetize other people’s work before the lawsuits catch up. Let’s face it–when it comes to Elon, Sam, or Zuck, would you buy a used Mac from that man?
If artists and AI platforms were in one of those old “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” commercials, you wouldn’t need to be told which is which. One side is creative, curious, collaborative. The other is corporate, defensive, and vaguely annoyed that you even asked the question.
Until that changes, platforms like Incantor will struggle to matter — and the AI industry will continue to look less like iTunes, and more like Pirate Bay with an enterprise sales team.
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