This Week In Techdirt History: October 22nd – 28th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018, the broadband industry sued Vermont over consumer protections and net neutrality, while a few states got into the broadband fight on the side of the FCC, and we noted how perfect the coordination was between the agency and telecom lobbyists. Another report showed that FOSTA increased sex trafficking, and we saw a lawsuit over the Shitty Media Men" list. The UK government banned officials from using the term fake news", and there was a narrow breath of hope that link taxes and upload filters could be stopped in the EU. Also, we were surprised and slightly amused when Google decided that our post about the difficulty of content moderation was dangerous content.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, a new leak revealed the astonishing number of French phone calls surveilled by the NSA, leading to more denial word games from James Clapper, while the White House was assuring the German chancellor it would not monitor her calls (but stayed notably silent on what had happened in the past). The claims of the NSA's success in stopping terror attacks were spreading without evidence, and we wondered why the agency didn't focus more on its real success stories related to cybersecurity. We also learned that the NSA urged US officials to share their rolodexes" so it could find world leaders to track, and Congress was gearing up to drop a new anti-NSA bill.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, we were disappointed to see a lack of transparency in government bailouts during the financial crisis, and we wrote more about the risk of the crisis to venture capital and startups, plus took a look at some of the spectacularly bad ideas going around. We also wrote about why ISPs shouldn't be copyright cops, and wondered if either presidential candidate would commit to DMCA reform. Meanwhile, it was the era of online issues spilling over into the real world and resulting in some confused legal fights, from some Dutch kids being convicted for theft of a virtual magic amulet (which seemed like the wrong law to cover the horrible things they did), and a woman in Japan arrested for deleting her virtual husband's avatar.