David Pierce

This week, we saw one of the most egregious assaults on the First Amendment by this FCC to date.

The White House called publicly for the silencing of a vocal critic and the FCC answered the call.

The agency's media bureau directed Disney's eight ABC-owned stations to file early license renewals ahead of schedule, some of which are nearly five years before they would otherwise come due.

It has been a day.

Right at the end, we're emergency podcasting.

I am very surprised it happened today.

Like very, very surprised it happened today.

Apple just turned 50.

Tim Cook did a raft of interviews during that time in which he said he was not leaving anytime soon.

Which is technically true.

Yeah, I mean, the role of executive chairman, guy who gets yelled at by Congress and by foreign governments, is like a storied Silicon Valley role.

The immediate comparison I would make is to Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google.

He was the adult supervision for Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Larry Page became the CEO.

Eric kicked himself upstairs to do politics.

And in particular, run around and get yelled at by Europeans.

So this is a pretty standard arrangement.

Again, it's just the timing that really gets me because it's, A, sort of out of nowhere on a Monday evening.

It's not like a Friday news dump.

There was no rumble that it was going to happen.