Interview: The GRANITE Act, explained by Preston Byrne

Preston Byrne (0:00)

This is really unprecedented in American law in that it touches on several different doctrines at the same time and updates the way that Americans use courts to protect their civil rights in the era of the Internet.

Jacob Robinson (0:16)

That was Preston Byrne. He's the managing partner of Byrne & Storm, and he's been instrumental in the work that went into the Granite Act, the act that he was referring to that was introduced to the House only a few days ago. It's an important bill that can set the lines on the future of jurisdiction in the Internet age, as well as free speech.

Preston Byrne (0:35)

I've been doing a lot of this myself with my co-counsel Ron Coleman from Coleman Law. So we've kind of been doing this, at least on the UK front. We've handled all of the contested enforcements in the United States for American targets. So we're very familiar with this issue. I've been working on it for 10 years. Ron's been active in this space for a long time as well.

He's a Supreme Court litigator. He was counsel in the Supreme Court case at Mattel versus TAM, which is a big First Amendment precedent on hate speech. So we've been very, very close to this issue as well as a handful of others. So we've decided when the bill was published, because it's only two and a half pages long. It's a tiny little bill. But for a two and a half page bill, radically redraws the lines of internet regulation around the world. I mean, if Congress enacts this, it's going to change how five and a half to six billion internet users around the world can use American infrastructure and speak freely. So for something very, very small, it would, if enacted, have some extremely significant consequences.

Jacob Robinson (1:38)

This, I believe, is the first podcast he's done since the bill was introduced at the federal level. There are other bills in the state level. And in this conversation, we dive into the history here, why it's needed and how sovereign immunity works in the US. Thank you to the sponsors of this podcast, including the presenting sponsor Altitude, which is a stable coin payments platform. If you do business in stable coins or you have entities in different jurisdictions elsewhere in the world, you should probably learn about Altitude. Visit altitude.xyz forward slash law to learn more.

This is my conversation with Preston about the Granite Act.

Preston Byrne (2:10)

So the traditional way that the First Amendment has worked and that First Amendment practitioners have worked is that the American government is limited to, is limited in terms of the kind of content and speech that it can, it can regulate by virtue of the First Amendment. Sometimes it oversteps its boundaries. And so what you do is you go to a court to vindicate those rights and the court has the power to restrain the United States. The Internet presents an interesting problem in that the Internet is a global system, and foreign governments are currently using the Internet to transmit threats into the United States in order to control how the Internet is used in the United States. So it's a strange situation that we have where countries like the member states of the European Union or the United Kingdom or Australia have gotten into the habit of saying that just because a web server is visible in their country, even if that web server is wholly and exclusively based and operated in the United States, that web server which is physically located in the US must obey some foreign edict. And we don't think that's right.

So the question is, how can you design a system within American domestic law which allows Americans using purely American domestic levers to deter these foreign censorship threats from entering the United States? And this is something that I developed over 10 years, frankly, of watching how foreign censors try to censor Americans. And this bill very much implements all of those learnings.

Jacob Robinson (3:34)

And history in your blog post plays a big role in just how you've thought about it, and how really the doctrines that the Granite Act covers have developed. I know there's an example of a warship in the harbor in the US., and a lot of the legal thinking came from those type of physical bounds. And this is quite a bit different. Can you talk about the unfixed structural flaw that you reference when it comes to the American system and how the thinking has evolved in this space?

Preston Byrne (4:05)

Sure. So, the problem is American law was written in an era when the Internet did not exist and was not, you know, could not even have been conceived.