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We've documented for decades how U.S. telecom is an uncompetitive mess dominated by politically powerful telecom monopolies that see no competition and effectively own Congress. As a result, the U.S. telecom and broadband market is an uncompetitive mess, with Americans still seeing higher prices, slower speeds, spottier access, and worse customer service than in many [...]

It can be really amazing just how bad video game companies have been, and currently still are, when it comes to preserving the very culture that they help to create. While groups like GOG are at least attempting to pressure more developers and publishers to take efforts to preserve older games, it's simply a fact [...]

Last yearTrumplicans killeda popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC'sAffordable Connectivity Program(ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak. At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, [...]

Once again, the Texas legislature is coming after the most common method of safe and effective abortion today-medication abortion. Senate Bill (S.B.) 2880*seeks to prevent the sale and distribution of abortion pills-but it doesn't stop there. By restricting access to certain information online, the bill tries to keep people from learning about abortion drugs, or [...]

Remember the Lois Lerner scandal? For years, it was the Republican party's Exhibit A of Obama administration overreach - proof that Democrats were weaponizing the IRS to target conservative groups. The outrage was endless. The GOP-led congressional investigations were relentless. The rhetoric about threats to democracy was breathless. Funny thing about that: it turned out [...]

Splunk is a powerful data platform used to gather information from multiple sources and index it for efficient access. You can then use collected data to create visualizations, analytics, and a variety of automated and security-related functions. With its web-style interface, Splunk is easy to use and is utilized by many companies worldwide.The 2025 Complete [...]

This has always been the truth. And it has always been ignored by people like Donald Trump, who combine if it bleeds, it leads" media narratives with the always-exploitable fear of others." Whether a migrant is in this country legally or illegally, the odds of them committing criminal acts are much lower than those for [...]

This is it: we're about to lock in our order quantity for One Billion Users, the competitive card game about running a social media network that we funded on Kickstarter last year. If you haven't yet become a backer of the campaign, you can still make a late pledge to order as many copies as [...]

As recently noted, authoritarian assholes don't like public broadcasting. Because they don't like the idea of untethering U.S. journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based media system. If we bolstered real independent journalism or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested in telling people the truth. Yuck! That's [...]

You may have heard a mantra that is becoming more popular these days thanks to a certain presidential administration operating as a language-destroyer. It goes: Every accusation is a confession." The idea behind it is that when someone goes all firebrand accusing others of a thing, you often find the firebrand guilty of that very [...]

There will never be enough casual evil with this administration. Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the extrajudicial renditioning of Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum security prison in [checks notes] El Salvador. Claiming that the mere presence of foreign gang members is an act of war has allowed the DHS, CBP, [...]

Support us on Patreon Though the original promise of the internet has been twisted and distorted, today we're seeing more and more people working to restore decentralization and user power online. One such person who sees the problem better than most is Flipboard founder and former Twitter board member (among many other things) Mike McCue, [...]

If you feel this nation is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyrannies of evil men, you probably should be scared shitless that the clowns are running the circus. Of course, those backing Trump aren't truly concerned about any of this, not even those running his agencies and/or repeating [...]

Harvard University took the extraordinary step ofsuing the Trump administrationon April 21, 2025, claiming that the pressure campaign mounted on the school by the president and his Cabinet to force viewpoint diversity on campus violated the Constitution's guarantees of free speech. Defendants' actions are unlawful," Harvard's lawsuit states. The First Amendment does not permit the [...]

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Last July, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court handled a geofence warrant case, marking the first time this issue had been handled at the appellate level. The robbery suspect, Okello Chatrie, challenged the constitutionality of the warrant, arguing that its non-particular nature placed it outside the bounds of the Fourth Amendment. A half-decade ago, this argument [...]

Do you have what it takes to run a social media network that grows to one billion users and beyond? That's the question in our new card game, One Billion Users, which we successfully funded on Kickstarter last year. Now the game is entering production, and since we have no plans to make more copies [...]

We've covered for years the ugly retransmission feuds that break out between your cable company and broadcasters during contract negotiations. These fights routinely result in you losing access to channels you pay for with no real recourse. The FCC has perpetually refused to protect consumers from this stuff, taking a sort of boys will be [...]

It should be no secret that Comcast, as well as many other cable TV and internet providers, have a firm reputation for shoveling mountains of bullshit and calling it their base fees only to have a bunch of hidden or sneaky other fees attached to invoices that greatly inflate the price of services. These have [...]

At a time when Section 230 has become one of the most politically divisive tech policy issues, our final episode of the Otherwise Objectionable podcast brings together an unusual panel for a roundtable discussion" between myself, Jessica Melugin of CEI, Charles Cooke from the National Review, and Dave Willner (well-known trust & safety expert who [...]

Today Microsoft shut down Skype, a company that helped revolutionize phone calls online. To commemorate the death of Skype, we're running a recent Pessimist's Archive" article on the history of internet calls, and how it almost wasn't allowed. If you're not already, you should subscribe to the Pessimist's Archive. It used to cost money to [...]

In an unprecedented 102-page ruling that methodically dismantles the Trump administration's executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, Judge Beryl Howell has issued a permanent injunction that goes far beyond her initial temporary restraining order. The ruling represents a stark rebuke of what the court calls an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain [...]

Earlier this year, soon after Elon Musk began stripping away parts of the government he had no constitutional authority to destroy, we warned that it appeared officials in the White House were gearing up to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government. The basics of the playbook are as follows: As Charlie Warzel [...]

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Things continue to change thanks to the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision. Prior to that, it was assumed the Third Party Doctrine justified all sorts of data dragnets, so long as the data was held by a third party. But that doctrine assumed the data being grabbed by law enforcement was being handed over knowingly and [...]

Washington will soon become theeighth statein the country to pass Right to Repair legislation. While U.S. consumer protection is generally an historic hot mess right now, the right to repair" movement - making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you own - continues to make steady inroads thanks to widespread, bipartisan annoyance at [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bruce C. with a reply to a comment that attempted to downplay the recent behavior of federal agents: Even plain clothes officers are required to carry their badge. If they were undercover officers they shouldn't be presenting themselves as officers to civilians unless they [...]

As we announced last week, our recently-Kickstarted card game One Billion Users is about to enter production, which means this is your last chance to secure a copy for yourself. The Kickstarter campaign is accepting late pledges from now through the end of Wednesday, May 7th. We recently received our proof copy, and it looks [...]

This is the fourth in our series of posts about the winners of this year's public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and today we're looking at the winner of the Best Adaptation category: Calder's Circus by David Harris. Regular followers of [...]

One of things we've talked about repeatedly is how much better it would be for content producers, instead of immediately defaulting to behaving like IP protectionists, to treat their fans in a human and awesome way. There are times when the need for protecting IP makes sense, but there are far more times when creative [...]

The free, independent state of Texas continues to make it clear it only respects certain rights and freedoms and only those that adhere to the Holy Trinity of guns, God, and, um... Nazi-adjacent Cybertruck manufacturers. A number of efforts have been made to remove books from schools and public libraries in recent years. None of [...]

A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusualspike in potentially sensitive data flowing outof the agency's network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency's databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Securitygained accessto Internal Revenue Service [...]

Bizarrely buried near the bottom of NY Times article about the chaos behind the renditioning of people to a Salvadoran gulag is an important detail: the US and El Salvador have already brought back eight people who were mistakenly" sent there: In Washington, the Trump administration was working to address Mr. Bukele's confusion about whom [...]

This comes as no surprise. Pretty much everything about Trump's extrajudicial rendering of undocumented migrants to a foreign hellhole prison has been awful, but rarely lawful, to twist a phrase that's already pretty twisted. Resurrecting a law last used to justify the mass incarceration of migrants during World War II, Trump 2.0's acceleration of his [...]

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Well look who else thinks Trump's plan to use a centuries-old law to vanish people to El Salvador is batshit crazy: one of his own judges, Fernando Rodriguez Jr. I'm sure the admin will be out there calling him a far-left radical Marxist before long. Let's be clear about how absolutely unhinged this whole thing [...]

In the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, data suggests that wireless carriersimmediately stopped trying to compete on price(exactly what deal critics had warned the Trump administration would happen when you reduce sector competition). Recently, T-Mobile imposedanother $3-$5 per month price hike on most of its plans- including customers who believed they were under a [...]

RFK Jr.'s tenure at HHS must be put to an end. We already have ample evidence for that necessity, both in the form of his complete mismanagement of a ballooning measles outbreak that continues to expand, his vaccine skepticism that has led to him stating that he's going to have the origin of autism all [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. A federal employee who is helping the Trump administration carry out the drastic downsizing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau owns stock in companies that could benefit from the agency's dismantling, a ProPublica investigation has found. Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-oldDepartment of Government Efficiency aide, disclosed the [...]

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a state legislature, caught up in the moral panic about social media, passes yet another clearly unconstitutional bill that will waste taxpayer money on doomed legal battles. This time it's Colorado, whose legislature passed a ridiculously bad social media regulation bill (SB25-086) that looks suspiciously similar to [...]

Back in 2021, Apple mostly won the antitrust case that Epic brought against it, and the Ninth Circuit largely agreed. The court rejected most claims about Apple's App Store being an illegal monopoly. The company just had to make one small change: let developers tell users they could make purchases elsewhere. Simple enough. Instead, Apple [...]

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Radley Balko's post on Substack details an ordeal, however brief, Texas appellate lawyer Clayton Jackson suffered through recently. A longer one possibly awaits, thanks to his employer firing him shortly after he went public with his recounting of this unwanted interaction. Balko's opening paragraph explains why the Trump Administration has hit law firms and universities [...]

So we've established by now that the second Trump administration is attempting to completely destroy regulatory authority, consumer protection, labor rights, and corporate oversight. Whether by precedent-ignoring court ruling, executive order, illegally firing commissioners, cronyism, or regulatory capture, the effort isn't subtle, and is poised to usher forth a new golden age of corruption. That's [...]

Okay, there's a lot to unpack in this story, so hang with me here. For the past month or so, Americans and American businesses have been stuck in tariff hell. Blanket and additional tariffs issued via executive order by Trump have been in a seesaw pattern for a month now. This tariff program was a [...]

Last year, we were thrilled with the success of our Kickstarter campaign for One Billion Users, the Social Media Card Game. In case you missed it at the time, One Billion Users is a fun, fast-paced game where 2-4 players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. Now, the game is about [...]

Support us on Patreon We probably don't need to tell you that the current tariff situation is causing complete chaos in global supply chains, in large part due to the uncertainty - for all we know, the exact rules will have changed since this episode was recorded just yesterday. But we wanted to get some [...]

When last we checked in with CBS, the company was preparing to fold under pressure from the Trump administration, amidst bogus accusations that 60 Minutes had unfairly made Donald Trump look bad. As we've noted previously, the accusations are utterly baseless, but that's apparently not stopping the CBS board from kissing authoritarian ass and throwing [...]

The Party of Free Speech" is at it again. House Speaker Mike Johnson just bragged about using legal threats to remove his opponents' political advertising - perhaps the most constitutionally protected form of speech that exists. And he did it while lying about them lying. As he says in that clip: Do not believe the [...]