…Big Tech companies with their legions of DC lobbyists have been on a crusade to weaken the International Trade Commission (ITC), a little-known, independent, nonpartisan federal agency tasked with protecting the United States from imports that violate U.S. laws, including U.S. patent laws. These companies are now at it again, lobbying for a bill that was recently re-introduced in Congress: the Advancing America’s Interests Act (AAIA).

The AAIA would severely restrict the ITC’s ability to block imports manufactured in China that violate U.S. patents. The bill’s title, of course, is classic Washington Orwellian double-speak —this legislation would significantly undermine American innovators and U.S. interests.

A dirty little secret about Big Tech companies is that they profit handsomely from taking the patented ideas of other American innovators. They incorporate these inventions into their products and then they refuse to pay the innovators who created them. It’s called “predatory infringement.” Two recent lawsuits by American startups, Sonos v. Google and Masimo v. Apple, highlight this practice and reveal the tip of the massive IP piracy iceberg by Big Tech companies.

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If we allow patent-infringing products to be imported, we undermine the legal engine that has driven the U.S. innovation economy for over two centuries: the patent system. American inventors and the venture capitalists and investors who fund them need to know that their patents will be enforced, even when infringed by a large, powerful tech company.

In their campaign to close the doors at the ITC to American innovators, Big Tech companies and their backers have promoted arguments again and again that so-called “patent trolls” are using the ITC to hurt U.S. companies. It’s self-serving, false rhetoric that aids their predatory infringement.

In fact, there is no evidence that the ITC is over-run by “patent trolls.”

The argument for masking children, or obliging them to be vaccinated against a pathogen that is less likely to kill them than many others in normal circulation, should have stopped at the level of logic rather than continuing into a debate over its ethical and political implications. Neither masks nor vaccines can reliably prevent children from passing Sars-CoV-2 onto others, and I worry for the unvaccinated grandparent in a multi-generational household who believes themselves to be protected because their grandchild is attending school with an unpleasant (and environmentally unfriendly) piece of material on their face. I remain convinced that many people (including my cousins in India) have lost their lives labouring under this misapprehension.

There is now ample observational data to suggest that mask mandates do not work, and the few formal trials that have been conducted show no credible effect.

The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11’s flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist’s emphasis on the dimensions of reason’s power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is.