Techdirt

Roughly 83 million Americans currently live under a broadband monopoly. In most instances, their only choice is Comcast or Charter Communications, which sells service under the “Spectrum” brand. And in both cases, users pay significantly higher prices for spotty, slow, service with statistically terrible customer service, because that’s how monopolization works. But the nation’s two […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the EU’s new office in Silicon Valley that aims to work with tech companies on EU law compliance: I know it won’t happen because money, but the tech companies really need to just stop trying to placate these people. If […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Russia banned VPNs, Australian prosecutors were seeking to make it illegal to refuse to turn passwords over to law enforcement, the UK Home Secretary wanted companies to stop offering encryption altogether, and another US federal court said cops can get historic cell site location info without a warrant. […]

We had a depressing number of Techdirt stories on this site that involve Shaquille O’Neal. I say that as a basketball fan who absolutely adores Shaq’s contributions to the TNT studio broadcasts for the NBA. On the other hand, the times Shaq has made it onto our pages hasn’t been for the best of reasons. […]

There are a few questionable assumptions made by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court in its denial [PDF] of a suppression request, but the opening suggests drug cartels might want to vet their employees a little better. David Sierra Orozco was paid to drive a car with over $100,000 in drug-tainted cash hidden in a secret […]

The EU is well on its way to fundamentally destroying the internet. Two giant new regulations are set to become law soon: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. And while neither is ridiculous in the same way that laws in the US and the UK and some other places are just pandering […]

A few years back, the Trump DOJ and FCC rubber-stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without heeding expert warnings that it would stifle competition, kill jobs and eventually raise rates. Working closely with T-Mobile and Dish, the FCC and DOJ “antitrust enforcers” unveiled what they claimed was a “fix” for these problems: they’d cobble together a fourth major […]

Pretty much everyone who has ever gone to college hates educational publishers. There’s an oligopoly of just five giant publishers, and they long ago learned that they are in the best market ever: the buyers of their textbooks (the students) have no choice and are forced to buy the books if their professors assign them […]

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The Australian government doesn’t care much for encryption. It has, for years, tried to legislate encryption out of the picture. A law passed in 2018 gives the government the power to compel encryption-breaking efforts from tech companies. The law survived a cursory review by the Parliamentary Joint Committee. Its 2021 report said the law was […]

For years, we’ve noted how one of the greasier lobbying tactics in telecom is the co-opting of civil rights groups to provide cover for anti-competitive and anti-consumer policies. Such groups are given cash for a shiny new event center in exchange for parroting any policy position that comes across their desks, even if it dramatically […]

In an extremely rare move, a federal court has ordered a jail into receivership, placing it under the direct control of a court-appointed third party that will (hopefully) carry out the needed changes Hinds County, Mississippi either can’t or won’t do. (h/t Scott Greenfield) Receivership is uncommon. As Hernandez Stroud of the Brennan Center points […]

At this point, every reader here should be aware that YouTube has a copyright/DMCA problem it has yet to solve. Going through the myriad of posts we’ve done about DMCA and ContentID takedowns on YouTube, the theme is abundantly clear: YouTube’s automated systems are wide open for mistakes, fraud, and abuse. If you don’t think […]

When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector. Initially, things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the […]

Yes, yes, copyright is a tool for censorship. Contrary to the claims of copyright system supporters that copyright can’t be used for censorship, the reality is that is basically the only thing that copyright is good for. I mean, at this point, you are either not paying attention, or are just outright lying if you […]

Real problems are what legislators are supposed to be solving. The Philippines has plenty of those, ranging from (government-endorsed) extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and drug users to abuses of state power to silence journalists to the actual murders of human rights activists. But legislators with their own axes to grind will always find ways […]

GameGuru is a non-technical and fun game maker that offers an easy, enjoyable and comprehensive game creation process that is designed specifically for those who are not programmers or designers/artists. It allows you to build your own game world with easy to use tools. Populate your game by placing down characters, weapons, and other game items, […]

A while back, we noted that there was something of a Rorschach test in how you viewed basically everything about Nick Sandmann, the MAGA-hat wearing high school student who became front page news after a video of him standing in front of a Native American demonstrator, Nathan Phillips, went viral. Everyone had their own interpretations. […]

INCOMPAS, the DC trade policy and lobbying group primarily steered by tech giants, is urging the FCC to finally boost the U.S.’ pathetic definition of broadband. The FCC’s current definition of broadband, 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up, is looking a bit pathetic, particularly on the upstream side. And the lower standard helps the uncompetitive […]

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about how an anonymous user had put up for sale the data of an estimated one billion Chinese citizens, probably obtained from the Shanghai police. Back then, what exactly had happened was a little unclear — not least because the Chinese authorities were shutting down any discussion of […]

Just a few weeks we noted that this was inevitable, but Facebook has now made it official that it’s no longer interested in dumping money on news publishers. “A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S. Most people do not […]

We’ve noted for years how U.S. consumer location data is routinely abused by a long list of bad actors, including wireless carriers, broadband providers, app makers, adtech companies, data brokers, police, people pretending to be police, governments, and more. It’s also, not too surprisingly, a problem in Canada. Restaurant chain Tim Hortons was recently found to […]

Civil asset forfeiture has shown us the government has a weird way of instigating lawsuits. In rem forfeiture cases allow government agencies to file suits against objects, rather than the people they’ve been seized from. This leads to some very amusing case names (even if the underlying process verges on legalized theft), like South Dakota […]

Early last year, Indonesia implemented a new internet regulation law. Referred to as “MR5,” the law gave the government the power to engage in widespread blocking of content. Not only did the law create intermediary liability, it required any site offering services to Indonesian representatives to register with the government. On top of that, service […]

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As you’ll recall, the defining moment that lead to Donald Trump creating his Truth Social Twitter clone was his being banned from Twitter for potentially egging on further violence on January 6th. Even before Truth Social was started, Trump’s most vocal and loyal… well, let’s just call them “fans,” kept insisting that what was needed […]

This week we noted how the Democratic party had introduced a new two-page bill that would simply give the FCC even clearer authority to restore net neutrality. Of course the bill won’t pass this corrupt Congress, was barely noticed in the summer heat, and couldn’t be implemented anyway because the telecom industry and GOP have […]

Yikes. Deputy Boyd stayed for approximately two hours, during which time he made numerous inappropriate sexual statements and commands, which the district court found were neither invited nor consensual. For example, Deputy Boyd told Tyson that he and fellow officers had recently seen her at a restaurant, and he repeated sexual comments that the officers […]

For the last few months we’ve been writing a lot about AICOA, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, being pushed for by Senator Amy Klobuchar. It’s an antitrust bill, but not an antitrust bill designed to fix the whole host of problems we have today with industrial consolidation and anticompetitive practices. No, it’s just […]

It’s an election year, and like clockwork, legislators around the country want to show they care about protecting kids online. This pre-election frenzy leads performative bills that won’t actually help any kids. Today I’m blogging about one of those bills, California AB 2408, “Social media platform: child users: addiction.” (For more on how the California legislature […]

Is it too much to ask that politicians try to live in reality? The obsession over the past few years that anything bad that people say on the internet is the fault of the internet (rather than the people using it) and must be outlawed is already problematic enough. But the politicians and their “solutions” […]

Governments love targeting Twitter for user data requests, but apparently now more than ever. The latest Twitter transparency report says new records are being set in the data request sector. The social network saw “record highs” in the number of account data requests during the July-December 2021 reporting period, with 47,572 legal demands on 198,931 […]

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As you may have heard, a few days ago, the FTC announced that it was seeking to block Meta’s acquisition of Within Unlimited, a maker of a popular VR fitness app. I believe this is the first case in which the Lina Khan-run FTC has stepped in to block an acquisition by one of the […]

At some point U.S. regulators effectively declared that it was okay to rip off consumers with a dizzying array of bogus fees, letting companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock you with a bunch of additional surcharges when the bill comes due. That’s particularly true of the cable and broadband industry, which has saddled consumers […]

Over these many years, we’ve talked about a myriad of ways in which people and companies can respond to copyright infringement. The common reaction, and probably the one most natural, is for those copyright holders to absolutely freak out, scream about lost sales and “teh pirates!!1!”, and then turn to their lawyers. Others take a […]

NSO Group has gone from being an under-the-radar spyware darling selling powerful phone hackery to some of the absolutely worst governments in the world to being an extremely exposed malware pariah which has sold powerful phone hackery to some of the absolute worst governments in the world. A data dump last summer served as a […]

It is bizarre that the California legislature, in a state that has produced most of the biggest internet companies out there, has apparently decided it wants to destroy them all in a flood of purely vexatious litigation. There are a whole series of bills that the legislature is reviewing, and so many of them are […]

ShotSpotter — the gunshot analytic company with the rather sketchy reputation — is, once again, endearing itself to the public by doing things that seem… well… sketchy. On Friday, an attorney representing ShotSpotter, a gunshot-detection technology company, made the unusual request that a judge in a criminal case hold the company in contempt of court […]

Over the last few months, we’ve been covering a ridiculous situation in which Republicans are trying to force their spam into your inboxes. It began with a study that some Republicans misread (or deliberately misinterpreted) to claim that Google was “censoring” their political mailings. That study showed that for an untrained, brand new mailbox, Google […]

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The only surprise in this decision isn’t that the court ruled the way it did. It’s that the Grand Rapids, Michigan police department apparently believed it wasn’t a violation of rights. Here are the origins of the case, as summarized by ABC affiliate WZZM. (WZZM apparently feels no one needs to read the actual opinion […]

Democrats have a “strategy” they really love to employ that involves pushing bills they know will never pass. The idea is that while the bill may not pass, it will bring extra attention to whatever issue they’re pushing, and force the GOP to put their opposition to (policy X) on the record, shaming them publicly. […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment on our post asking why the media is lamenting Disney’s loss of copyright instead of celebrating the public domain: ‘Copyright is for companies, not the public!’ The US spent so long with nothing entering the public domain and […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Senator Wyden was seeking answers about how many times Americans have been targeted by one of the least-discussed NSA surveillance programs, while we noted the silence from tech companies as the clock ticked down on Section 702 renewal (while newly released documents showed even more violations by the […]

I’ll preface this post with this short bit of throat-clearing: no writer or reader of this site should expect the average person on the street to understand the nuances of intellectual property at the same level of those of us interested in the topic. The law is complicated and nuanced, and the layperson is simply […]

Sometimes you’ve got to shoot a few civilians to make the public safe. (h/t Maggie McNeill) More often than not, police do not stop a mass shooting. In Denver over the weekend, they actually started one. According to the Denver Post, police in the Lower Downtown area opened fire to stop a man who allegedly pulled a […]

Ever since Reality Winner was arrested, we’ve written about the ridiculousness of her case. It was yet another in a long line of cases using the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who aren’t spies, but are actively trying to do the right thing — and, as per the Espionage Act — not even allowed […]

You might recall that John Oliver bit years ago about how Americans fall asleep when they hear the word “infrastructure.” We’ll obsess for hours over Elon Musk showmanship, or the innovative potential of NFTs, but the U.S. press in particular falls into a lazy stupor any time actual, essential infrastructure is mentioned. It’s a problem […]

Donald Trump, whose supporters still pretend is a “free speech” champion, has regularly been known to sue news organizations that are mildly critical of him. You may recall that back in 2020 he hired notorious-lawyer-for-suing-media-companies (yes, he once was the lawyer in a case against us), Charles Harder, and sued both the NY Times and […]