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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 [...]

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It's not unheard of for us, or other publications, to paraphrase what a court ruling says at times. This time, however, the quote in the headline is actually 100% a direct quote from Judge Mark Walker, the Chief Judge of the Northern District of Florida federal court in a ruling against the state of Florida. [...]

States are poised to receive $42.5 billion in broadband grants thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill. While a lot of this money will be going to the usual entrenched monopoly incumbents, a lot of it is also going to a growing list of popular cooperatives, municipalities, and city-owned utilities to expand affordable fiber. This Broadband [...]

After the ACLU obtained a settlement from the city of Chicago over the PD's unconstitutional stop and frisk" program, the Chicago PD decided to take the show on the road. Literally. The number of traffic stops in Chicago surged after the settlement with ACLU Illinois over stop-and-frisk pedestrian stops, while pedestrian stops fell from a [...]

We've been writing stories about how, when it comes to digital purchases, we typically do not own what we've bought. Instead of buying a product, such as the digital version of a video game, what we are instead buying is a non-transferable license to use that product. While readers here will be largely familiar with [...]

Felony murder" laws are still problematic, even if that law has led to a corrupt drug warrior finally being punished for the evil he has committed under the color of law. Gerald Goines headed up a Houston PD drug squad for years and was never one to let facts or a lack of evidence stand [...]

We are living under a sea of AI-generated slop, where AI deepfakes and non-consensual intimate content abound. Congress, a self-interested creature, naturally wants to create protections for themselves, their favorite celebrities, and their wealthy donors against online impersonation. But until now, visions of so-called AI protections have been limited. From my lair, I've seen how [...]

There are few things the government loves less than admitting wrongdoing, especially when the admission might affect multiple levels of government. That's why nearly every settlement paid out to litigants includes a disavowment of any wrongdoing. And that's why courts - at multiple levels - are so extremely reluctant to give possibly innocent people an [...]

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It has been rumored for a while that Elon wants to remove the official block" functionality on ExTwitter, but now it's official. The company has announced that it will soon start rolling out a new version of block" that no longer blocks content, only interactions. That's ExTwitter's engineering team saying: Soon we'll be launching a [...]

While FTC boss Lina Khan certainly has had some growing pains, she's fought for consumer protection and antitrust reform in a way that U.S. regulators haven't seen for the better part of a generation. Whether it's taking on automaker privacy abuses, supporting right to repair reforms, or taking aim at Amazon's attempt to dominate the [...]

It can be easy for people to dislike the secondary market if they aren't the ones selling into it. Commonly referred to as scalpers", the fact is that the secondary market is a very important part of the economy. It's how goods retain some of their value, for instance. And when goods are sold several [...]

There is simply too much going on here to pretend there's a way to succinctly sum up what's led us to this point in our coverage. A small Kansas newspaper's offices, the home of its 98-year-old owner (who died shortly after the raid), and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel were all raided [...]

Over the summer we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided toeliminate decades of MTV News journalismandComedy Central historyas part of their ongoing and utterly mindless cost saving" efforts. It was just the latest casualties in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least competent [...]

Of course, Elon Musk had to take Twitter private. If he had to answer to shareholders, he would have been ousted months ago for his systematic, single-minded destruction of the company's value. Pretty much every move he's made has been some level of bad, ranging from confusing to annoying to infuriating to catastrophic. Alienating long-term [...]

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When Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in 1994, they were assured by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh that the mandated wiretap backdoors posed no security risks. Fast forward to today, following the news of a massive CALEA hack and Senator Ron Wyden is reminding the DOJ of that history, while urging [...]

I've written extensively that U.S. broadband is slow, spotty, and expensive thanks to regulatory capture and regional monopoly power. Republicans have propped up this broken status quo at every opportunity, routinely working to undermine state and federal consumer protection, while letting companies like AT&T and Comcast quite literally write terrible state and federal telecom law. [...]

There's no evidence anywhere that even remotely suggests registered sex offenders leverage Halloween to lure victims to their homes. It's just as untrue and ridiculous as the annual assertions people are lacing (cheap) candy with (expensive) drugs for... well, those reasons go completely unexplored. Sex offenders are already subject to a considerable number of restrictions, [...]

We're coming right up to the election here in America, so it is obviously time for all kinds of intellectual property strife surrounding political campaigns and advocacy groups. We see all kinds of ways these disputes happen, from campaigns making use of music at rallies, to political ads that use music, up to and including [...]

As far back as 2017, Techdirt was warning that robot vacuum cleaners represented a threat to privacy. In that instance, it concerned the possibility that iRobot, makers of the robot vacuum Roomba, might sell the data that its device collected about the size and layout of a home. Five years later, it was becoming clear [...]

How should we feel when an AI journalist operation falsely accuses someone of murder? How about if the person falsely accused is a public figure? I know there are some questions lately about where liability should land when an AI system hallucinates, but here it seems pretty clear who is at fault: a nonsense peddling [...]

A couple of years ago, private prison giant CoreCivic decided it had had enough. It went to court to secure an order blocking noted First Amendment lawyer Daniel Horwitz from talking about it. Horwitz was then currently engaged in multiple lawsuits against the private prison company, the most prominent being his representation of the family [...]

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There is a widely believed but totally false claim by Trumpists that the Biden administration" told Twitter to censor" the NY Post article about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop four years ago. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump himself accused the Biden administration of doing as much: Of course, in 2020 Donald [...]

A favorite tactic of U.S. corporations looking to dismantle consumer protection reforms (or anything they don't like, really) is to create entirely fake consumer groups custom-built to confuse voters and journalists. Such groups are usually used in combination with think tanks and other pseudo-objective organizations to muddy the waters, confuse constituents, and mislead the press [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is DisgruntledAnonymous with a comment on our post about Elon Musk seizing people's Twitter accounts to promote Donald Trump: This just solidified my decision to delete and deactivate my accounts (primary and burner) on that site. I would advise those who haven't fallen into the [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Deupty AG Jeffrey Rosen was complaining about companies like Facebook offering encryption, while FBI Director Chris Wray was deploying straw men arguments about the tech, and the DOJ was conflating the content moderation debate with the encryption debate. We learned more about ICE's massive surveillance network, and the [...]

You all know the playbook when it comes to shady copyright shakedown outfits that work with or for pornography companies. Groups like Malibu Media and others built an infamous reputation for using the legal system to extract IP address-based information on customers whom they then claim downloaded porn illegally, they then mail settlement offers to [...]