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Five Years Ago This week in 2019, a big new study showed once and for all that net neutrality did not hurt broadband investment, while telcos were teaming up with Rupert Murdoch to lob antitrust accusations at Google, because apparently Comcast felt qualified to give lectures on monopoly power. A court said the FCC can't [...]

A couple of years back, we discussed a win in the courts for the U.S. Dairy Export Council against both French and Swiss consortiums that had attempted to trademark the word Gruyere" in America. Both of those groups were jointly attempting to get a PDO/PGI trademark for the term, arguing that gruyere cheese should only [...]

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 roundup of the latest news in online [...]

Going back many, many years, we've written about how the public narrative that the large social media networks engage in anti-conservative bias" in their content moderation policies is bullshit. Because it is. And now we have yet another scientific study to prove this. The first time we covered it was in response to a ridiculous [...]

The Detroit PD is a case study in misuse of powerful surveillance tech. The department is notable for being involved in no less than three wrongful arrests, due to misuse/abuse of its facial recognition tech. The city has already paid out a $300,000 settlement in one of these cases. Worse, two of the three cases [...]

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In recent weeks there has been a flurry of laws, regulatory proposals, and lawsuits regarding deepfakes," along with the usual rising levels of concern in the media about how the world won't be able to handle this. For some perspective, the Pessimist's Archive just published a story highlighting how a nearly identical fear gripped the [...]

I know I've argued that not every Elon Musk brain fart warrants its own news cycle, but this one is particularly gross given recent events. We've noted repeatedly how in 2020, the Trump administration tried to give Elon Musk's low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband company Starlink nearly a billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies to connect [...]

Some of our nation's finest Drug Warriors are at it again. And by at it," I mean doing seriously stupid, seriously unconstitutional stuff in hopes of finding drugs or (better yet!) cash that will somehow prove they're doing anything at all to stem the flow of illegal drugs. And yet, they weren't even after a [...]

As someone who has evangelized for the video game industry and how games, long villainized by parents, politicians, and police, are actually either a neutral or positive force for the public and culture, I never shy away from sharing studies that demonstrate this. While a great deal of time has been spent on discussions of [...]

A year ago, we wrote about how a challenge brought by the Free Speech Coalition against Utah's (obviously unconstitutional) age verification law couldn't go forward because the district court noted (regrettably) that the structure of the law prevented FSC from challenging it before it went into effect. The issue is that it's a bounty" law, [...]

The no-fly" list has many problems. Pretty much any fed can nominate" someone for the list. Pretty much everyone on the list has almost zero chance of getting off it other than by filing a lawsuit. And even though the government has been forced by court decisions to offer a venue for challenges, the federal [...]

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Well, things sure move fast in this world of AI regulations. Just last week, we noted that California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a pretty obviously unconstitutional set of laws regarding the use of deepfake imagery around election communications." Then, just hours later, he was sued for it. This week, federal judge John Mendez has already [...]

As noted a few times, recent Supreme Court rulings have thrown most U.S. regulatory enforcement into operational and legal chaos. The dismantling of Chevron in particular now dictates that regulators can't implement new rules or reforms without the explicit approval of Congress. Two problems there: one, regulators ideally have very specific subject expertise Congress doesn't [...]

Going all the way back to 2020, we have been discussing one of a series of copyright disputes centered on video games and their faithful depictions of real-life tattoos within them. While the first of these were related to depictions of NBA players in Take-Two's NBA2K series, which the company generally successfully defended, one outlier [...]

The Institute For Local Self Reliance (disclosure: I have done writing and research for them) has released an updated interactive map of every community-owned and operated broadband network in the U.S. All told, there's now 400 community-owned broadband networks serving more than 700 U.S. towns and cities nationwide, and the pace of growth shows no [...]

These days, there's a formula for articles pushing the unproven claims of harm from social media. Start with examples of kids harming themselves, insist (without evidence) that but for social media it wouldn't have happened. Throw some shade at Section 230 (while misrepresenting it). Toss out some policy suggestions without grappling with what those policy [...]

There is no crime apocalypse impending, incipient, or in progress in the United States. But you wouldn't know by listening to Trump and his supporters. Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically [...]

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Well, that was quite the end to last night's Vice Presidential debate. While the overall debate was pretty boring (though hilarious when JD Vance flipped out and whined that the moderators had promised not to fact check him), towards the very end they had what might be the dumbest possible exchange regarding free speech. It [...]

CNN, like most cable news networks, professes to provide users access to journalism. Instead, what you'll most consistently find is a sort of generic drivel with the rough edges (read: truth) sanded off. On any given day you'll find a rotating parade of lazy view from nowhere" journalism that doesn't inform so much as it [...]

Taylor Swift isin the news, and not just because she has become themost decorated solo artist of all time. The fact that Taylor Swift has already been mentionedmultiple timeson Walled Culture underlines that she is also an important - if surprising - figure in the world of copyright. That's because Swift has beenre-recording her albumsin [...]

This isn't a good look for the Las Vegas Metro PD, even if it's completely supported by court precedent. No matter how often law enforcement agencies sling around the phrase protect and serve," they have almost no legal obligation to do either of those things. Sometimes a failure to intervene" allegation might undermine a cop's [...]

Culminating a deal that's been rumored about for the better part of the last twenty years, Dish Network and DirecTV have struck a new merger in a bid to try and remain relevant. It's not going to help. The deal involves DirecTV acquiring Dish for one dollar, in addition to $9.75 billion in Dish's debt. [...]

We have a hero in our midst, one that is responsible for freeing up the term superhero" from its previous trademark imprisonment. If you don't recall, Scott Richold is a British comic artist who produces the Superbabies line of comic books. Richold applied for a trademark for his comic only to find it opposed by [...]

Forget defund the police." Let's just get rid of the sheriffs. Or, at the very least, change how the job is handled. Sheriffs are elected, which means a lot of sheriffs are less interested in providing good law enforcement than ensuring they've catered to their voting bases enough that they'll be re-elected. And since it's [...]

The Database Administration Super Bundle has 9 courses to help you go from data novice to expert administrator. You'll discover how to build and manage databases with MySQL and MongoDB. Courses also cover Microsoft SQL Server, Informatica, Minitab, Tableau, and regression modeling. It's on sale for $60. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and [...]

In this stupid partisan world we live in, the MAGA world has decided that simply accurately explaining that the First Amendment does not allow for the suppression of speech (which is a good thing!) is somehow a call for abolishing the First Amendment. This isn't even blaming the messenger." It's misinterpreting the messenger and demanding [...]

Analysts (and Musk himself) had beenquietly notingfor a while that Starlink satellite broadband service would consistently lack the capacity to be disruptive at any real scale. As it usually pertains to Musk products, that analysis was generally buried under product hype. A few years later, and Starlink users are facingobvious slowdownsand a steady parade of [...]

There's that well known adage that if you want to teach a child not to touch a hot stove, just let them touch it once and that will be all the teaching needed to have them never do so again. Whoever came up with that saying obviously has never met my children, for starters. And [...]

Well, I hope it was worth it, Rudy. You sold out completely, offering up every last bit of your integrity for the chance to push election conspiracy theories in court on behalf of a man who won't even bother to look in your direction now that you've professionally disgraced yourself on his behalf. No matter [...]

I don't think I've ever seen quite as much hype about a state bill as California's SB 1047, a pretty terrible AI Safety" bill. Its supporters were a really weird combination of AI doomers, AI haters (not the same as the doomers), technically illiterate concern trolls... and a few people with legitimate interests about how [...]

It seems so long ago that people weretrying to stopthe worst aspects of theEU Copyright Directive. It was quite a battle, as Chapter 6 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versionsavailable) recounts in detail. The final legislation was passed in March 2019, but it is important not simply to accept what happened and move [...]

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It probably will not shock you to find out that big tech's promises to never again suppress embarrassing leaked content about a political figure came with a catch. Apparently, it only applies when that political figure is a Democrat. If it's a Republican, then of course the content will be suppressed, and the GOP officials [...]

As we've mentioned a few times, $42.5 billion in taxpayer-funded broadband subsidies will soon start hitting the states next year courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill's Broadband, Equity And Deployment (BEAD) program. Efforts to expand affordable fiber access don't get all that much press attention in the AI hustlebro era, but the impact will be [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are invocations of established maxims. In first place it's an anonymous comment about people flipping opinion of hacked materials between Hunter Biden and JD Vance: How many times must I tap the sign? Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we learned more about how easy it was to buy access to people's movements from companies gathering license plate data, while AT&T was proclaiming that it could not be sued for selling customer location data just as readily. A big EU ruling thankfully said the right to be [...]

Scientists say that low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations being built by Amazon, Starlink, and AT&T pose a dire threat to astronomy and scientific research, and that too little is being done to address the issue. Back in 2022, scientistsdeclaredStarlink satellite constellations an existential threat for astronomy," noting that the reflection and light pollution (Musk [...]

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 [...]

PEN America published recent data on book bans and removals just in time for Banned Books Week. Key findings indicate that most books challenged by censorship advocates this past year focus on LGBTQ+ subject matter. Additionally, Iowa and Florida are currently the two worst states for book bans amid Republican-backed content restriction laws. The PEN [...]

This would seem like a truly extraneous nail in the coffin of ShotSpotter deployment in Chicago, but there are far too many city council members still willing to prop up under-performing tech with faith-based arguments. And there's the company itself, which has shifted narratives (along with redoing the company letterhead) over the past several months [...]

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It's been all of [checks calendar] one freaking day since we wrote about Elon Musk's hypocrisy on free speech compared to the old Twitter regime, and he has to go and make another example. Twitter, under old management: Briefly limits sharing of (at the time) unverified Hunter Biden laptop story. Elon: Outrageous censorship!" and possibly [...]

Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both theUSandEU, trying to get policymakers to force internet companies to pay them billions of extra dollars for no coherent reason. These efforts, routinely dressed up as serious adult policy, usually involve false claims that tech companies are getting a free ride" on the Internet, and should therefore [...]

TheGates Foundationis one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is thesecond largest charitable foundation, and as of 31 December 2023 had an endowment of around$75.2 billion. That makes a shift in its publishing policy hugely important. An article in Chemical & Engineering Newsexplains that hitherto the Gates [...]

Here's a phrase I have to use but hate doing so: let's go back to the 2020 presidential campaign. During what was essentially a multi-year advertisement for just how absolutely petty, stupid, and disingenuous a political system could possibly be, the 2020 American presidential election also featured a video sent out by the Trump campaign [...]

Remember DoNotPay"? They were the company, run by Joshua Browder, claiming to be the world's first robot lawyer." There were all sorts of sketchy things going on, some of which dated back to DoNotPay's" earliest days. But things really came to a head last year when legal investigator extraordinaire, Kathryn Tewson, started digging in and [...]

One of the most horrific acts of police brutality has now resulted in two DOJ investigations. The first concerned the torture of Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker by six white deputies who referred to themselves as the Goon Squad" for their willingness to break rules and violate rights. The first investigation involved the incident itself [...]