I kinda agree with Sen. Grassley, although he doesn't seem to be articulating the issue very well.<p>Remember what happened in 2020: near the presidential election, you couldn't even DM the URL of the NY Post story to others. [1] That's blatant censorship, no matter the merits of the news story.<p>Given tech's extreme political bias [2], it is quite likely that something similar will happen again. Comparison to spam filtering seems to be the new pro-censorship talking point [3], so it's quite possible the thing itself will soon have some kind of political censorship built into it.<p>There is some evidence (also mentioned in the article) that Google is already doing this. [4]<p>If we want to live in a free society, we need to fight back against this. You really can't use email without some sort of spam filtering, but if the definition of spam is going to be muddied to serve political agendas, then you should have the option to choose your spam filter.<p>[1]: <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/technology/521277-facebook-twitter-new-york-post-election-night-concerns" rel="nofollow">https://thehill.com/policy/technology/521277-facebook-twitte...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-election-donations-final-tally.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-el...</a><p>[3]: E.g. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31059882" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31059882</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.16743.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.16743.pdf</a>
In case you thought this was just changing the behavior of the spam filter, nope, he wants it <i>gone</i>:<p><i>> In a May meeting, Grassley told Google representatives that Gmail should operate like a post office and suggested that sending emails to spam was equivalent to a post office refusing to deliver the mail</i><p>This guy should not be allowed near any kind of legislation, yet here we are.