Just recently we discussed a new report showing how U.S. wireless price competition effectively ground to a halt immediately in the wake of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger. Consolidating the U.S. wireless sector from four to three major providers immediately muted price competition, much like every credible academic, consumer group, and deal critic predicted. It […]
This week, Stephen T. Stone takes both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it’s a preemptive comment on our post about five Section 230 cases that made online communities better: In second place, it’s a comment about laws that aim to ban library books: The best libraries offend everyone. The worst libraries […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, people were jumping on the bandwagon of fearmongering about Huawei, while we pointed out that the real security threat is the internet of things. Another federal magistrate said that compelled production of passwords and biometrics violates the Fifth Amendment, ICE spent another $820,000 on cellphone cracking tools, and […]
The last time we saw German-based grocer Aldi get into a trademark tiff over an alcohol product, it was with Brew Dog in the UK and it was one of the most good-natured trademark “disputes” on the record. While that whole thing was refreshing to see, not every company chooses to approach things in a […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s 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 […]
ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) tends to treat the Constitution as some ticky-tack policy its officers can safely ignore. That’s not to say ICE believes the Constitution does not exist. It probably at least realizes it exists. After all, it’s a US federal agency. What it firmly believes is that the Constitution provides no protection […]
Another day, another dumb lawsuit against TikTok. We’ve seen school districts and parents suing TikTok on the basis of extremely weird claims of “kids used TikTok, some bad stuff happened to kids, TikTok should be liable.” But in the past year, it seems that a bunch of state AGs have decided to sue TikTok as […]
None of this makes sense. At least, not when you attempt to reconcile what’s being said with the university’s actions. It makes more sense later. But we’ll get to that in a moment. A non-profit called the Atlanta Police Foundation, which claims to be interested in building a better relationship between Atlanta’s police and the […]
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Public libraries are supposed to be places for communities to gather and learn, with an important focus on being a place for kids to gain access to information. But thanks to a moral panic in the GOP about “indoctrination” in libraries, it seems that at least one library has decided to shut its door to […]
Earlier this year you probably saw the story about how a political consultant used a (sloppy) deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn’t particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had much of an actual impact. […]
A couple of months back, we talked about an odd decision Warner Bros. Discovery made to simply “retire” a bunch of games it published, mostly from small indie studios, from the various online stores where they were sold, such as Steam. This resulted in anger from those who bought these games and confusion from those […]
Hey Google, can you spare a few hundred million to keep Rupert Murdoch’s yacht afloat? That’s essentially what some legislators are demanding with their harebrained schemes to force tech companies to fund journalism. It is no secret that the journalism business is in trouble these days. News organizations are failing and journalists are being laid […]
While the celebrity-driven allure of the Scarlett Johansson voicealike story might be an easier headline grab, it is in the dark arts of election dirty trickery where you’re more likely to find the kinds of election misinformation concerns that have an impact on society. Indeed, experts have been warning for some time that fake text, […]
Qualified immunity is a mess. It’s a mess the Supreme Court created and, to date, seems largely unwilling to fix (despite the occasional remand). The theory of QI is this: law enforcement officers (and other government employees) should be granted forgiveness for blowing constitutional calls during rapidly evolving situations potentially involving life and death. And […]
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The internet is the wild west! Kids are dying! AI is scary and bad! Algorithms! Addiction! If only there was more liability and we could sue more often, internet companies would easily fix everything. Once, an AI read my mind, and it’s scary. No one would ever bring a vexatious lawsuit ever. Wild west! The […]
Annoyed by the kind of expensive, shitty, slow, and spotty broadband access caused by limited competition and monopoly power, hundreds of U.S. communities have been building their own broadband networks. These networks come in a variety of forms, including direct municipal ownership, cooperatives, extensions of city-owned electrical utilities, or public private partnerships. While there’s certainly […]
Pretextual stops. Let’s talk about it. Cops who perform traffic stops are rarely performing traffic stops because they care about traffic safety. They’re looking for something — anything — else. Driving a car on public roads puts you on the outside of the Fourth Amendment. Warrants aren’t required. Reasonable suspicion is the low bar that […]
I’ll admit, I had to read this story a couple of times, since it’s so unbelievable. With the explosion of AI tools that have come out over the past couple of years, coming along for the ride are all kinds of concerns over how that AI gets used. In the realm of higher education, this […]
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