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Five Years Ago This week in 2017, it was looking like the FCC would use the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday to hide its unpopular plan to kill net neutrality, while a Verizon-funded group was claiming that killing the rules would really help Puerto Rico. The DOJ subpoenaed Twitter about Popehat and others over a smiley emoji […]

There must be something about being an energy drink company that turns you into a trademark bully turd sandwich. The stories about Monster Energy, for instance, are absolutely legendary and legion. Meanwhile, Red Bull, the other large player in the energy drink space, has far fewer chiding posts from us, but there are still a […]

Nilay Patel over at The Verge has written a fantastic article, Welcome to Hell, Elon, highlighting the many, many ways in which Elon Musk is likely going to be regretting the fact that he now owns Twitter. I will note that many of the links in the article are to some of my stories here […]

Thanks to our corruption-fueled failure to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era, the US has seen a steady parade of privacy scandals, hacks, and data breaches. More often than not involving companies with pathetic privacy and security standards, which are dinged repeatedly with pathetic wrist slap fines that are just absorbed […]

To date, Elon Musk has shown very little inclination to actually understand Twitter and why it has been such a useful platform to many. His understanding of free speech and content moderation hasn’t just been generally lacking, but ridiculous. And that’s not even getting into his apparently purposely obtuse misunderstanding of spam/mDAU issues. And, so, […]

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Last night, Elon Musk closed his on-again, off-again, on-again deal to buy Twitter, and his very first order of business was to fire a bunch of top executives. This was not necessarily unexpected. When new owners come in, they will often clean house, and the text messages revealed as part of the lawsuit while Musk […]

Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of “Big Tech” paying “Big Telecom” billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. This taxation effort always involves some variant of the claim that popular tech services are getting a “free ride” on the […]

Long-time readers here will know that one of the consistent themes over the years when it comes to video game DRM has been the absolute plethora of anecdotal stories you get about how DRM screwed up the playing experience for legitimate customers. Performance issues, inability to play online or single-player campaigns due to DRM failures, […]

Open records laws were passed because governments simply aren’t interested in voluntarily sharing their documents with the people that foot the bill for both the people and the paper. But governments have to pass these laws, in essence forcing transparency upon themselves. Since most governments seem to be more interested in opacity, massive holes in […]

I’ll start this post with a bit of whimsy before alarming you with the sense of doom portended by the stakes involved with last week’s oral argument at the US Supreme Court in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Lynn Goldsmith. In this case the Warhol Foundation is trying to get SCOTUS to […]

Last month, Florida officially asked the Supreme Court to review the detailed 11th Circuit ruling which mostly upheld the district court ruling saying that Florida’s social media content moderation law was unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. Earlier this week, NetChoice and CCIA argued that the 11th Circuit was (mostly) correct in trashing the law, but […]

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It seems like every couple of weeks there’s another report of a Hertz customer being treated like a thief because the car rental company can’t be bothered to do even the most minimal of due diligence or follow-up. At this point, there are more than 100 plaintiffs involved in class action lawsuit claiming Hertz has […]

Early in the pandemic, the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), which gives low income Americans a $50 discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gave money to ISPs, which then doled out discounts to users — if they qualified. But (and I’m sure this will be a surprise […]

Governments set up rules governing how they govern. Then they ignore them. So, what’s the point? Is it a nod to decorum before the proverbial government party guest throws up in the bathtub and hits on your mom? If the law says an entry order or warrant is needed to enter people’s homes to investigate […]

A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a terrible idea in France: requiring companies to pay for the use of public domain material. As the post explained, this is a subversion of what it means for something to enter the public domain, and a betrayal of the implicit bargain of copyright. Fortunately, the plan was dropped, […]

Signal ensures its users’ security and privacy by encrypting their messages and refusing to collect a bunch of data governments or malicious hackers might find useful or interesting. That hasn’t made it many friends in governments (except with government officials who utilize the service to dodge public records requests). An FBI official once compared Signal […]

Imagine waking up in the morning, grabbing your hot cup of coffee, and scrolling your favorite blog post or website, only to find it looking like this: Images are missing. Video content is not there. Nothing but an empty black void staring back at you. This is what could happen if a recent case brought […]

The Brazilian government — under the “leadership” of Donald Trump Mutual Admiration Society member Jair Bolsonaro — has been steadily cracking down on free speech under the guise of saving the public from “fake news” and other misinformation. Over the past few years, it has ramped up efforts to eradicate content and reporting that it […]

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There’s this weird thing that people who hate Section 230 continue to ignore: that if you just take away Section 230, it doesn’t magically make companies liable for the actions of their users. If you studied the history of Section 230 (i.e., read Jeff Kosseff’s excellent book on the topic) or just had a passing […]

For decades, consumers have mostly wanted one thing from their ISP: a semi-affordable dumb pipe connection for the Internet. For just as long, US ISPs have bucked this demand, routinely trying to saddle users with higher costs and additional services consumer never asked for, while finding strange new ways to make an additional buck on […]

A couple of years ago, we discussed the work being done, essentially by one enterprising individual going by the handle “Peebs,” to archive a bunch of retro video game manuals for the sake of preservation. Earlier this year, we updated you all with the fairly impressive news that every SNES game manual had been digitized […]

Last week a new GitHub Copilot investigation website created by Matthew Butterick brought the conversation about GitHub’s Copilot project back to the front of mind for many people, myself included. Copilot, a tool trained on public code that is designed to auto-suggest code to programmers, has been greeted by excitement, curiosity, skepticism, and concern since it was announced. The GitHub […]

We’ve often talked about the importance of distinguishing content moderation at the infrastructure layer of the internet stack from that which happens on platforms at the edge, and this issue was brought to the forefront recently when Cloudflare took down Kiwi Farms. This week, we’re joined by internet policy expert Konstantinos Komaitis to discuss an […]

The Saudi government, led by crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, doesn’t care to be criticized. It routinely punishes its own citizens for insulting the nation’s ruler. It occasionally murders and dismembers critics for refusing to be silenced. And now it’s prosecuting and imprisoning US citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights. Last month, the Saudi […]

Emily Baker-White has quite the story over at Forbes, revealing how ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, apparently planned to have its “Internal Audit and Risk Control” department spy on the location of some American citizens: The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least […]

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Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt is involved in some questionable use of the state’s public records laws. Following the AG’s dubious decision to sue schools over what he called “illegal” mask mandates, he raised his controversy level considerably earlier this year. He continued this assault on his own credibility by suing schools and educational non-profits […]

You’d be pretty hard pressed to find a company that leans more right wing than AT&T. The company was a big ally to President Trump and drove most of his telecom policy (which was basically to give AT&T everything it wants). AT&T has a long, long record of supporting politicians who oppose civil rights and […]

We know cops often can’t differentiate innocuous substances from actual drugs. These from-the-hip determinations are just the manufacturing of reasonable suspicion and probable cause, something that allows cops to perform the searches and seizures they were planning to do anyway. Whether it’s the “odor of marijuana” (something that can rarely be objectively examined in court) […]

Last week the Internet Archive announced a new project: “Democracy’s Library.” This hits on a bunch of important topics for us here at Techdirt. First, it’s a travesty that government-funded research and publications are often hidden away, locked up and impossible to access, despite the fact that they were paid for by us, the public. […]

Clearview hasn’t won many friends since its inception. Scraping the web of any relevant content to compile a few billion records for facial recognition matches is no way to run a respectable business, and Clearview has been anything but respectable. Early access was granted to anyone who was interested, including private companies, government agencies, and […]

Okay, let’s get this out of the way first: Republican politicians send a shit-ton of spam. And, no, it’s not just standard political messaging. It’s spam. And it’s often full of absolute scams. Erick Erickson, an extremely rightwing/GOP-supporting commentator, recently wrote a whole post calling out his team for spamming everyone and then blaming others […]

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar: UK telecom regulator Ofcom is proposing that the country scale back popular net neutrality rules under the claim that the rules are harming innovation. The UK had adopted net neutrality as part of its membership in the EU. With that membership discarded, Ofcom is now claiming the […]

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It seems quite likely that Elon Musk will own Twitter in a few days. One thing that has remained very much up in the air through all of this is how Musk views Bluesky. As you’ll recall, Bluesky was a project kicked off by Jack Dorsey back in late 2019, partially influenced by my paper […]

Undaunted by criticism that its plan is little more than a Comcast-esque cash grab, Netflix executives say they’re moving full speed ahead with a plan to begin cracking down on password sharing, a practice executives spent years previously encouraging. In a letter to shareholders, Netflix said it would be bringing its password sharing crackdown to […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to New York’s plan to destroy free speech online in response to the Buffalo shooting. In fist place, it’s an anonymous comment about the idea that online platforms sit at the root of white supremacy: Remind me again, when was the K.K.K. formed? […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the push was on for encryption backdoors, with the DOJ rolling out some new and even worse arguments at the hands of the new Deputy Attorney General, while the White House’s cybersecurity boss was employing the tactic of calling for backdoors while refusing to actually use the word. […]

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine is the largest in Europe, and one of the ten largest in the world. It’s of particular concern at the moment because it sits close to the front line between the Ukrainian and Russian armies, and has been subject to bombardment and loss of backup power. The […]

No-knock warrants remain under fire as they continue to needlessly increase the death toll of residents who often have no idea who’s violently entering their home and, therefore, respond in unpredictable ways. Supposedly obtained to increase officer safety, these warrants often seem like a handy way to put officers in “fear for your safety” mode, […]

The Fifth Circuit is often the worst circuit when it comes to protecting constitutional rights. Every so often, it will make the right call, but most often it’s willing to let the government expand its power at the expense of the citizens it’s supposed to be serving. It does this often enough even the Supreme […]

Honestly, the only thing one can say about the whole Elon Musk buying Twitter situation is that you should expect the unexpected to happen. Nothing about this deal has been normal, even though some moves (like Musk coming up with laughably ridiculous pretextual excuses to try to get out of the deal) were telegraphed way […]

Jamaicans are being asked to fund futility with their tax dollars. Radio still exists, but it’s nowhere near as powerful or relevant as it was three or four decades ago. A ban like this doesn’t make sense for several reasons, but the most obvious reason is that it will only “protect” people who listen to […]

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Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is likely to close within a week. The deadline before the Court of Chancery wakes back up is October 28th, which is rapidly approaching. I’ve discussed in the past ways in which I think Musk could actually be good for Twitter, but it requires having a pretty basic understanding […]

While the last decade hasn’t been what you’d call great for consumer rights in the U.S. (especially in sectors like telecom), one bright spot has been the mainstreaming of “right to repair” standards. What began as some nerdy fringe policy activism among those eager to repair their own tractors, has very quickly become a mainstream […]

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are one of the most fascinating things to emerge from the crypto space. While everyone was going crazy over NFTs, almost all of the more interesting things were happening in the DAO space. DAOs are something of an experiment in being able to form new kinds of organizations quickly in non-traditional […]