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It’s no secret that I think this FTC has been pretty disappointing and has missed a ton of opportunities to actually make things better for the public. For reasons I really don’t understand, it has filed a lot of antitrust cases against tech companies that have almost always seemed half-baked, resulting in a losing streak […]

As we’re all too well aware, there’s plenty of money to be made in the surveillance business. The best surveillance businesses, though, are those that rely on captive markets. Sure, kids aren’t actually “captive,” but they’re in school often enough it’s tempting to let tech pick up the slack when it comes to keeping tabs […]

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What the fuck is going on with the 5th Circuit? Last week we wrote about it putting a law into effect just after a district court had laid out why it was unconstitutional (this was about mandatory made up “health warnings” and age verification on adult content websites). This followed on the 5th Circuit doing […]

With the Biden FCC now having a voting majority, the telecom industry is clearly worried about the agency’s plans to restore popular net neutrality rules stripped away by the Trump administration. To prep the lobbying field, the industry has started using its various proxy groups to seed the press with a bunch of bullshit arguments […]

A little over a year ago, Liberty Tax Service filed a trademark and defamation lawsuit against AMC. At issue was the depiction of a shady tax prep company run by con-men in the final season of the hit show Better Call Saul. In the show, the name of the tax prep company is “Sweet Liberty […]

Hey, remember when a bunch of unpopular broadband monopolies convinced a corrupt reality TV star to dismantle most oversight of their very broken industry? And remember how to accomplish this companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast spread endless lies about what was actually happening, going so far as to use fake and even dead people […]

The trust and safety conversation tends to focus on the huge platforms, and the millions of smaller websites (some still quite big!) get ignored. But those websites have trust and safety needs too, and they use a lot of different tools to meet them. Most of these tools are proprietary, but there’s a growing push […]

We’re increasingly at the mercy of bigots in this country. That’s an upsetting turn of events, considering our history, which includes a long list of enshrined rights as well as the assertion that all people are created equal. Thanks to the aberration that was the Donald Trump presidency, the worst people in the nation suddenly […]

We’ve been covering the multi-pronged ridiculousness around the Missouri/Louisiana “jawboning” cases, regarding whether or not the White House was overstepping the bounds of the 1st Amendment and pressuring private websites to moderate in a manner they deemed appropriate. Again, almost everything about this case is bizarre —and getting more bizarre with each move. Last night, […]

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It’s been eight years since the Authors Guild was thoroughly and totally embarrassed by losing its big lawsuit against Google over the Google Books scanning project. I guess they’re missing the feeling of embarrassment, as they’ve filed what is effectively the same damn suit against OpenAI over that company’s book scanning. Now, I know, some […]

It can’t be said often enough: it’s stunning that we’ve let scammers and scumbags hijack the nation’s top voice communications platform. And that we’ve let marketing and telecom industry lobbyists slowly degrade the authority of the one U.S. regulator capable of actually doing something about it. Every six months or so the FCC comes out […]

Are you familiar with “felony murder?” Let’s talk about it. It’s a handy way to send more people to prison for more years just because they participated in a crime that contained a murder. While I can (sort of) understand the deterrent effect of laws like these, the simple fact is felony murder laws hold […]

Last week, we wrote about a federal district judge in California, Beth Labson Freeman, tossing out California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AB 2273) as unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. The ruling was careful and thorough, which did not surprise me, having sat through the oral arguments on the matter, where it seemed that the judge […]

Last week, it appeared ever so briefly, the UK government might be finally giving up on its desires to legislate at least one end of messaging services’ end-to-end encryption. Having faced resistance from nearly every encrypted service (all of which threatened to exit the UK if anti-encryption mandates were put in place) as well as […]

It is quite incredible to me how, over the last five years or so, the California legislature has pushed over a dozen absolutely horrific, dangerous (and often unconstitutional) laws to completely undermine the very principles of an open internet… and it gets basically no attention at all. Last year, it felt like we at Techdirt […]

Most laws and policies banning drag shows are experiencing swift judicial blowback thanks to their obvious regulation of expressive speech. Some legislators have attempted to work around this expected roadblock to oppression by avoiding any mention of drag shows or drag performers when crafting unconstitutional laws, instead pretending they’re simply strengthening existing obscenity laws. None […]

Most modern companies put a lot of stock into data when making crucial business decisions. As such, they require employees who understand how to work with mass amounts of data, and effectively analyze it to get a holistic view of the company. These skills aren’t just reserved for analysts, they’re valuable for professionals in any […]

There’s a pretty well known scene from The Office, when Michael Scott (played by Steve Carrell) follows his GPS device’s instructions (incorrectly, obviously) and drives into a lake: The writer of that scene says the inspiration was a number of stories of people doing exactly that. In fact, in the earlier days of Techdirt, we […]