This is probably it for awhile. The DOJ Civil Rights Division most likely will be sidelined for at least the next four years as Trump returns to office and his not-so-latent desires to impose a police state. Notwithstanding his supporters’ apparent willingness to assault officers who stand between them and a “stolen” election, Trump has […]
I’m not crazy about writing about a Supreme Court oral argument if the Court is just going to make a fool out of me by doing something they know is wrong and completely divorced from the argument they heard, which laid before them everything they needed to reach a decision that adhered to constitutional precedent. […]
Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, […]
Well, that didn’t take long. A short-lived win for civil liberties and the Free Speech Coalition has been undone by the Sixth Circuit Appeals court. The reasoning behind the roll back of the injunction are questionable, to say the least. The Free Speech Coalition’s case against Tennessee’s age verification law was solid. Or, at least, […]
For years many press outlets (and contrarian engagement pundits like Matt Stoller) tried to argue that the Trump GOP was now “serious about antitrust reform,” “reining in corporate power,” or “holding Big Tech Accountable.” The argument was that because Trumpism claims to be “populist,” it could be convinced to implement serious anti-corporatist antitrust reform that […]
For those of you who are not football fans, we’re coming up on Super Bowl season. And, yes, that will surely mean that we will eventually do some posting on the ridiculous way in which the NFL enforces the trademark rights it has, and indeed some it does not have, for the Super Bowl. But […]
I know that Mark Zuckerberg no longer likes fact-checking, but it’s not going to stop me from continuing to fact-check him. I’m going to rate his claimed plans of moving trust & safety and content moderation teams away from California to Texas as not just an obnoxiously stupid political suck-up, but also something that increasingly […]
Even though the Supreme Court somehow didn’t agree, the ban on TikTok remains unconstitutional garbage for all the reasons we’ve discussed: its impact on the platform itself, the impact on its users, and its impact on other service providers that help it work. The corrupt scramble we’ve seen to try to keep it going, ever […]
One of the many new executive orders signed by President Donald Trump on Monday was the long-hyped creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE is portrayed as a sort of government efficiency and innovation office, but it’s primarily flimsy cover for the extraction class as they eliminate corporate oversight, consumer protection, labor rights, and the social […]
This post was written on Sunday. By the time you read it there may have been 12,492 further unconstitutional TikTok-related hijinks since then, but because this particular kind of unconstitutional violation might well rear its ugly head again, if not with respect to TikTok then with respect to something else, it’s still worth pointing out […]
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Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, even though part of this is cheering on a new entrant looking to build an alternative to Bluesky. There’s been some debate over the last year or so regarding Bluesky and how […]
Last year U.S. broadband giant Verizon faced yet another class action lawsuit for sleazy, misleading fees. This latest $100 million class action alleged that Verizon for years ripped off its customers via a $3 (and up) “Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge” that it tacked at the bottom of user bills to help the company falsely […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Stephen T. Stone with a comment about platforms systematically removing a user for making a deck of Most Wanted CEO playing cards: The same people who celebrate this will whine their asses off if someone gets banned from Twitter for saying a racial slur. Can’t […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, an excellent piece in the New York Times looked how years of copyright maximalism were killing pop music. AG William Barr was sparring with Apple over the DOJ’s ability to crack iPhones, and Devin Nunes was extending his legal threats to fellow congressional representatives. We looked at the […]
I suppose this was probably inevitable, but boy do I wonder if it’s smart. We were just talking about the celebrity drama du jour between Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and Justin Baldoni. The very short version of this is that Lively and Baldoni starred in a movie together, Lively sued Baldoni and made a series […]
As the we wrote in our amicus brief (which it appears the justices did not read – guess they didn’t have time…), if the TikTok ban is blessed, it provides a roadmap for how to avoid the Constitution’s prohibition to “make no law” abridging free expression. All the government needs to do is declare that […]
Last year, Kashmir Hill at the New York Times published a major story confirming that automakers collect all sorts of driver behavior data then sell it to a long list of companies — without making that clear to car owners or getting consent. That includes insurance companies, which are now jacking up insurance rates if they see […]
Italy remains pretty fucking weird when it comes to all things Italian. From top prosecutors taking aim at vendors who “debase” respected Italian art by, say, offering products featuring Michelangelo’s “David” (mainly the naked bits, which is all of it) or fining government entities (even those engaged in promoting tourism) for using any other language […]
It seemed pretty obvious from the way the Supreme Court’s oral arguments went regarding the TikTok ban that this would be the outcome: a 9-0 per curiam decision saying “eh, it’s fine to ban TikTok.” There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, […]
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