This Week In Techdirt History: June 17th – 23rd

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, we hit the deadline on the FCC's comment period about rolling back net neutrality rules, and published Techdirt's submission. We also looked at how AT&T tricked its customers into opposing net neutrality, and Comcast's silly attempt to say killing the rules was necessary to help sick and disabled people, while Ron Wyden was telling Ajit Pai to stop lying about his own comments on net neutrality. And despite supposedly being a stickler for transparency, Pai refused to release complaints about net neutrality issues, and also wouldn't release data to support its claim that a DDoS attack (not John Oliver's show) brought down its website.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, Mexico's IP office surprised its anti-ACTA congress by signing the deal anyway. A patent troll launched an attack on Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, LinkedIn and many more, while we looked at how the patent battle over speech devices was doing real harm (not unlike how the US's secrecy was holding up a treaty to help the visually impaired access copyrighted works), and a very old antitrust lawsuit over Windows 95 was finally dismissed.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, the HD DVD and Blu-ray camps were warring over who had the largest share of a still-tiny market, Clear Channel was trying to use the XM-Sirius merger to get looser rules for its own acquisitions, and Google was taking another swing at its attempt to get into the print advertising business (while Congress was taking a closer look at its acquisition of Doubleclick). Meanwhile, the MPAA was opposing net neutrality on the grounds that it would hamper anti-piracy efforts, the RIAA was trying to get out of paying some legal fees, and a Russian court said Visa couldn't cut off payments for AllofMP3.