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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 [...]

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 [...]

While we still lament the fact that the DMCA's Section 512(f) has no real teeth to punish people for filing bogus DMCA takedown notices, at least some companies are still trying to use it against the most egregious offenders. Last year, Google went after two people in Vietnam, who Google accused of creating at least [...]

Get ready for some more unexpected uses of the world's most controversial facial recognition tech. Clearview has amassed a 10-billion-image database - not through painstaking assembly but by sending its bots out into the open web to download images (and any other personal info it can find). It then sells access to this database to [...]

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Jonathan Haidt's incredibly well-timed decision to surf on the wave of a moral panic about kids and social media has made him a false hero for many parents and educators. In my review, I noted that his book, The Anxious Generation," is written in a way that makes adults struggling with the world today feel [...]

One foundational belief of the right to repair" movement is that consumers should actually own the technology they pay for. Unfortunately that's increasingly not the case when it comes to carmakers, who are utterly insistent on not only charging people a flat retail price for a vehicle - but are also increasingly charging you additional [...]

If there's anything that's going to severely reduce the number of pretextual stops performed by cops, it probably won't be the handful of traffic stop reform efforts being made by legislators. It's going to be the continued legalization (or decriminalization) of marijuana possession. One of law enforcement's favorite tricks is to pull over a car [...]

When it comes to how you include religious texts in public school classrooms and libraries, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Want those texts of various world religions in place for secular teaching of topics they pertain to? All good! But picking one particular religion's iconography and injecting it into public schools [...]

Back before T-Mobile merged with Sprint you might recall that academics, consumer groups, and beat reporters like myself warned that the deal would immediately result in less competition, higher prices, and a whole bunch of layoffs. Captured Trump regulators ignored those worries, but it didn't take long before the deal's critics were proven indisputably correct [...]

What if the reason we're so worried about teens on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat is because we've fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the digital world? What if we're confusing the everyday risks of growing up online with the specter of unavoidable harm? No one is better at covering the moral panic about the kids these [...]

The spectacular collapse of the Mayor Adams' administration is still in progress. Pretty much everyone with ties to the ex-cop, current mayor has either been informed of an ongoing investigation or managed to infer that following multiple raids by the FBI. The mayor's handpicked police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned shortly after these raids occurred, most [...]

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Three years ago, we updated Vizzini's list of classic blunders" from The Princess Bride to include never try to patent troll Cloudflare." That was when the company announced that patent troll Sable Networks had made that mistake and now needed to be taught a lesson. That lesson is now complete, and Cloudflare has successfully destroyed [...]

Last week I noted how Elon Musk saw fit to inject himself in the middle of the Helene hurricane disaster by falsely claiming that hurricane victims died because the FCC refused to give Starlink a billion dollars in subsidies. I explained at length why that claim was grotesque and incorrect, in part because the subsidies [...]

The Fifth Circuit seems to love nothing more than creating more distance between cops and accountability. But, every so often, it finds a law enforcement member that even it is not willing to redeem. That's how far Louisiana state trooper Kasha Domingue went off the rails in the incident leading to this lawsuit. The ruling [...]

It shouldn't be news to any regular readers here that Warner Bros. has been a ridiculously jealous protector of all things intellectual property when it comes to the Harry Potter franchise. Harry Potter themed fan festivals? That's banned magic, according to Warner Bros. Want to make a parody condom called Harry Poppers"? Here comes Warner [...]

Sometimes it feels like every story we see these days about kids and the internet is all about how it's evil, making them depressed, and a huge problem for society. We keep trying to remind people that the actual science on this finds no support of the internet being so horrible. Indeed, the research suggests [...]

Call a right enshrined" all you want, but if a judge decides it's better to protect law enforcement officers from their own actions than to allow the public to view killings performed in the name of public safety," the public gets nothing. Neither do the people serving the public and providing them with information, like [...]

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You may have seen the news yesterday about 14 attorneys general filing lawsuits against TikTok. It was covered in a bunch of places, including Reuters, CNBC, the NY Times, the Washington Post, NPR, CNN and more. And, bizarrely, none of them seemed to include links to any actual complaint. It took me a little while [...]

U.S. wireless giant T-Mobile gets hacked a lot. In fact, the company has been hacked eight times in the last five years, with several of the intrusions exposing the sensitive personal data of millions of T-Mobile customers. The last hack, revealed in a 2023 SEC filing, exposed the names, addresses, social security numbers, and other [...]

So by now, assuming you've spent any decent amount of time reading Techdirt, you likely know that Nintendo has a reputation for being aggressive and litigious when it comes to intellectual property enforcement. Someone makes a game that is inspired by Pokemon, but does not directly copy it? Lawsuit. Mods for that same game make [...]

Trumpist Republican outrage (most of it manufactured) over being spied on by the US government almost led to significant reforms to Section 702 surveillance powers, specifically the loophole the FBI abuses to search for Americans' communications in the NSA's foreign-facing haystack. But that all got scuttled during the infighting and increasing desperation to just give [...]

Though the current popular narrative about social media seems to be that it is harmful and has little or no redeeming value, the truth (which a lot of people know) is that it also has a lot of value, and the potential to be even better. A recent research report from New_Public finds some ideas [...]

Creating surveillance backdoors for law enforcement is just asking for trouble. They inevitably become targets for hackers and foreign adversaries. Case in point: the US just discovered its wiretapping system has been compromised for who knows how long. This should end the encryption backdoor debate once and for all. The law enforcement world has been [...]

The EU Commission is the definition of insanity. It has tried for years to convince all EU members the best way to fight crime is to undermine the security and privacy of millions of EU residents. And, for years, it has failed to make an argument capable of convincing a majority of the 27 European [...]

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How quickly do you think we'd be having Congressional hearings about election interference" if Mark Zuckerberg so much as posted a Harris/Walz" lawn sign in front of his house? Yet, Elon Musk is now directly tweaking the site he owns to push his favored political candidate, even seizing people's accounts to promote Trump. One of [...]

Though Republicans are the worse of the two offenders, neither Democrats nor Republicans have cared all too much about preventing media consolidation. As a result, U.S. journalism and media has increasingly fallen into the hands of a handful of wealthy corporations and billionaires; and it's routinely reflected in terrible journalism (especially political journalism) and bumbling [...]

It's not just the Rankin County (MS) Sheriff's Office being scrutinized by the US DOJ. While that's the main concern following the conviction of six deputies of a self-proclaimed Goon Squad" who spent hours brutalizing and torturing two black men, the rest of Mississippi apparently isn't in great shape either. This recently-released report [PDF] details [...]

In the process of enshittification, it seems that the process will not stop until the customer has been well and truly pissed off. It was merely earlier this year that we discussed Amazon taking its Prime Video offering, after gobbling up a huge number of adopters, and suddenly introducing everyone's favorite thing about television: advertisements! [...]

You know how little kids sometimes play a game where they claim they've changed their name, and you can no longer blame them for what they did under their previous name? You know how that never actually works? Well, about that... Elon seems to be trying a corporate version of that trick in Australia, and [...]

Cheap thrills? Perhaps not so much. A report from Joseph Cox for 404 Media not only points out there's no such thing as a free meal AI-generated deepfake nude, but that this is exactly the sort of thing Vice Media would have been all over if it hadn't been burnt to the ground by string [...]

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let's focus on the app. Right off the bat, let's be clear about one thing: When we say app" we don't mean that you're limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across [...]

Hillary Clinton has no clue how Section 230 works. She seems to think that repealing it will make websites more likely to remove misinformation (which is backwards). But what law do we need repealed to stop Clinton from spreading misinformation about Section 230 (and social media)? In April, we wrote about some comments from Hillary [...]

Lina Khan has most certainly faced some growing pains as the head of the FTC, occasionally filing some undercooked cases and raising the hackles of some staff (some grumbling about real missteps, some simply grumbling about reform). At the same time, she's the closest the U.S. has gotten to a competent antitrust enforcer any time [...]

This week, both top spots on the insightful side were taken by similar comments from That One Guy. In first place, it's a comment about the subject of free speech in the Vice Presidential debate: Broken finger vs Severed arm I mean, neither came out looking great with regards to the first amendment but whereas [...]

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 [...]