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The NY Times has real difficulty not misrepresenting Section 230. Over and over and over and over and over again it has misrepresented how Section 230 works, even having to once run this astounding correction (to an article that had a half-page headline saying Section 230 was at fault): A day later, it had to [...]

After countless years pondering the idea, the FCC in 2022announcedthat it would start politely asking the nation's lumbering telecom monopolies to affix a sort of nutrition label" on to broadband connections. The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection, any hidden fees users will encounter, and whether the connection comes [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the legality of Elon Musk's vote-buying scheme: My trainers say it's illegal (volunteer voter registrar) We were taught that under no circumstances could we induce or attempt to induce anyone to register to vote, let alone to vote, let alone [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, congress rushed to pass a bill empowering copyright trolls to shake people down, while Ajit Pai was complaining about the state-level net neutrality laws he helped create. Donald Trump was threatening to sue CNN for its coverage based on a dumb legal theory, while we wrote about how [...]

Newspaper presidential endorsements may not actually matter that much, but billionaire media owners blocking editorial teams from publishing their endorsements out of concern over potential retaliation from a future Donald Trump presidency should matter a lot. If people were legitimately worried about the weaponization of government" and the idea that companies might silence speech over [...]

Over a decade ago, we wrote about how the flurry of trademark lawsuits seen at that time over competitors buying up Google Adwords to get their company ads displayed when competitors are searched might finally be coming to an end. While these types of suits have certainly reduced in number based on anecdotal evidence, they [...]

The copyright world is currently trying to assert its control over the new world ofgenerative AIthrough a number of lawsuits, several of which have been discussed previously on Walled Culture. We now have ourfirst decisionin this area, from the regional court in Hamburg. Andres Guadamuz has provided anexcellent detailed analysisof a ruling that is important [...]

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. Ben and Mike are technically off this week, but we [...]

Not all cops are terrible people, but a whole lot of terrible people seem to be cops. For some reason, a police officer (who has not been officially identified by the district) has a side gig as a substitute English teacher. I don't know what qualifications this officer brings to that job, but absolutely none [...]

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What do you do when the misinformation is coming from inside the house? In the recent book Character Limit, about Musk's takeover of Twitter, there's an anecdote that is in the introduction. A data scientist who worked at the company (and had survived the early purge), who was horrified at how Musk had fallen for [...]

At no point has the cable industry or its executives been particularly keyed in to the cord cutting" threat. As streaming video chipped away at their subscriber bases, most cable giants like Spectrum and Comcast responded byraising prices and being difficult. When confronted by growing evidence that cord cutting (defined as cutting theTVcord but keeping [...]

It was only a few weeks ago that we were discussing how, thanks to how fractured streaming has become, watching NFL games is becoming more and more an expensive and complicated process. It's gotten so bad that ESPN has released an app designed specifically just to help viewers find where to watch the NFL game [...]

You probably remember Redbox, the DVD-rental kiosk company that went went bankrupt last June. The story behind the bankruptcy is interesting, in case to you missed it. The company failed to pivot to streaming (you might recall the failed joint venture with Verizon), and the bankruptcy has been profoundly ugly in a scorched Earth kind [...]

Axon - having apparently exhausted the market for Tasers - has moved on to hawking body cameras to police departments. The cameras are the loss leaders. The real money comes from perpetual service contracts and access fees. With every new feature added to Axon's line of products, the difficulty level of switching manufacturers and service [...]

Elon Musk's SLAPP suit against Media Matters has hit a roadblock, as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals-not exactly known for its progressive rulings-has granted a stay on Judge Reed O'Connor's order compelling the nonprofit to reveal its donor information. These days, the Fifth Circuit is where good law goes to die, but apparently even [...]

Sometimes, people who think they know things about defamation pursue their own lawsuits, making fools of themselves because they so very firmly believe anything said about them that they don't like must be libel. Then there are the lawyers who do the same thing. They should know better. Even if they don't specialize in defamation [...]

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Recently, Karl had a post taking FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to task for a painfully misleading Wall Street Journal article that attacked Kamala Harris. The article claimed that her policies resulted in the lack of new broadband deployments under Joe Biden's 2021 Infrastructure Bill that put aside $42.5 billion in broadband grants for underserved communities. [...]

Back in February, the Biden administration issued an executive order preventing the large-scale transfer" of Americans' personal data to countries of concern." The restrictions cover genomic data, biometric data, personal health data, geolocation data, and financial data, with the goal of preventing this data from being exploited by foreign intelligence agencies. This week the administration [...]

When it comes to comedy, there is a principle that a physical gag will be funny if done 3 times, but then will stop being funny on any further attempts unless it reaches a much higher number, like 9. To see this in action, you need only look at this clip of the classic gag [...]

Excited delirium just won't go away. No medical association recognizes this condition as factually true. And no cop shop will ever move away from using it as a handy excuse for in-custody killings, at least not until forced to by state legislators. Excited delirium actually pre-dates its current status as the go-to excuse for cops [...]

One of the many interesting aspects of the current enthusiasm forgenerative AIis the way that it has electrified the formerly rather sleepy world of copyright. Where before publishers thought they had successfully locked down more or less everything digital with copyright, they now find themselves confronted with deep-pocketed companies - both established ones like Google [...]

I'm not sure I've ever seen a government official go from sending a clearly censorial First Amendment-violating threat letter to quitting his job to telling a court, I was pressured to do that and I resigned so that I wouldn't do that again" so quickly. Last week, we wrote about the fairly notable ruling in [...]

People are censoring books all over the country, thanks mainly to a new wave of hatred encouraged and blessed by a failed businessman and marginal golfer who somehow managed to be elected president for a single term. These book ban laws encourage activists with conservative views" (you know which ones) to challenge" any content they [...]

uTalk can help you start speaking like a native within minutes. Using the uTalk learning App you can listen to real native speakers to help you navigate through your next vacation or business trip.With more than 2,500 words and phrases to learn in each of our 140+ languages, the app gives you a running start [...]

I talk a lot about confirmation bias here because it's at the heart of many of the debates and discussions regarding disinformation. It's something we can all fall prey to, at times. But lately, I've been thinking a lot more about what makes one more susceptible to confirmation bias, and I'm increasingly coming around to [...]

Back in July, the Biden FCC voted to make unlocking your phone easier. As a result, the agency is now crafting new rules that would require that wireless carriers unlock customers' mobile phones within 60days of activation, even if you're still under contract. Wireless giant T-Mobile, which used to have a consumer-friendly reputation until its [...]

As they say, the wheels of justice grind slowly. The presumed upside is that they grind finely, which means every periodic iteration should produce better outcomes. And maybe that's true in some cases. (Cases handled in the Fifth Circuit, not so much.) This one's in the Fifth Circuit but at least hasn't suffered the possible [...]

A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itselfon the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuitfor its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company's own repair facilities, driving up costs and [...]

There are examples of the Streisand Effect... and then there are examples of the Streisand Effect. And, frankly, what Intuit just decided to do to itself must surely be one of the most explosive and idiotic examples of the Streisand Effect I've ever come across. Readers here will be familiar with our posts about Intuit. [...]

Let's be honest, Christopher Rufo is the ratfucking king. While I don't agree with him about anything, when it comes to dirty tricks, nobody does it half as good as him, he's the best. Whenever Rufo releases a new report, the woke" tremble, and pray he's targeting someone else. Rufo's current crusade is focused on [...]

The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court continues to hand down dumb decisions rewarding law enforcement for rights violations. And the Supreme Court - yes, this Supreme Court - keeps sending those decisions back for a do-over. In December 2017, Laredo PD officers arrested local independent journalist, Priscilla Villarreal, for the alleged crime of misusing official information." [...]

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Often when internet companies change their terms of service, there will be a short freakout from people overreacting and not really understanding the language of what's in there. We see these stories every so often, frequently around things like licensing terms (which sites are effectively required to have to get permission to host user-generated content). [...]

For much of the last decade, cable giants like Comcast (Xfinity) and Charter (Spectrum) have been protected from TV cord cutting" by one simple fact: they enjoyed a monopoly over broadband access across vast swaths of the U.S. That monopoly means that if a customer ditched traditional TV, Comcast or Charter could recoup any losses [...]

The Supreme Court's Carpenter decision created a warrant requirement for obtaining location data from service providers. It was a limited ruling, albeit one that has had far-ranging implications. Thanks to this ruling, law enforcement agencies have started buying location data from third-party brokers, rather than suffer the apparent indignity of having to ask a judge [...]

I've talked about Shawn Layden before. And in admiring terms, too. In the wake of the much of the industry consolidation we saw in the video game space last year, his comments about both what that would mean for creativity within gaming, the creation of entirely new titles, and even moreso what he said about [...]

Fortunately, not everything the Supreme Court does these days is absolutely horrible. In this case (handled by the Institute for Justice) a Missouri man can resume his lawsuit against the officer who arrested him for... well, for reasons the cop ginned up well after the arrest had already happened. Mason Murphy was minding his own [...]

Remember a few weeks ago when Elon Musk misleadingly claimed that George Soros was secretly buying a propaganda machine to influence how you think"? Can you imagine the kind of shitstorm that would be playing out on ExTwitter and Fox News if George Soros were out there offering $1 million per day to people to [...]

What an absolute shocker. What a completely unexpected turn of events. Oh how will we, as Americans, process this latest in a never-ending string of abuses of trust by law enforcement. What a time to be alive. Etc. Cops are always trying to hide the tech they use from criminal defendants, even when plenty of [...]

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In a stunning display of technological and regulatory ineptitude, Italy's Piracy Shield' law has managed to block access to Google Drive, apparently confusing the popular cloud storage service with a hotbed of illegal activity. Bravo, Italy, bravo. Earlier this year, we wrote about Italy's new Piracy Shield" nonsense, in which the country's telecom regulator, AGCOM, [...]

As we recently noted, the FCC has announced that's finally taking a look at" broadband usage caps. We've noted for decades how such limits are completely artificial, technically unnecessary constructs that exist specifically so your local telecom monopoly can rip you off. They don't manage congestion," they exist exclusively to price gouge captive broadband customers [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the judge who smacked down Florida's attempt to censor abortion initiative ads. In first place, it's an anonymous comment about our description of the legislature being confused" about the first amendment: Make no mistake: They know exactly how it [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, states were rushing to protect net neutrality followed by the court ruling that shot down the FCC's attempt to prevent them. Marc Benioff was being extremely hypocritical about Section 230, the guy who tried to extort YouTubers with bogus DMCA takedowns agreed to a settlement, and a guest [...]

I have to admit, the volume of trademark dispute stories in the brewing industry I've done over the course of these many years here at Techdirt have surprisingly slowed down the last few years. I'm not sure if this is a function of the slowdown in industry growth in the craft brewing industry, market consolidation [...]

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 [...]

Professor Eric Goldman continues to be the best at tracking any and all developments regarding internet regulations. He recently covered a series of cases in which the contours of Section 230's liability immunity is getting chipped away in all sorts of dangerous ways. As it's unlikely that I would have the time to cover any [...]

For many, many years we've pointed out that broadband usage caps are hugely profitable bullshit, used by regional telecom monopolies to rip off captive customers. The limits serve no technical purpose outside of price gouging. ISPs like Comcast spent years pretending they were necessary to manage network congestion," but after numerous journalists, academics, executives, and [...]