The ends aren’t always supposed to justify the means. And a federal agency that already raised the hackles of defense lawyers around the nation during a CSAM investigation probably shouldn’t be in this much of hurry to start sending out unsolicited software to unknowing recipients. But that’s the way things work now. As a result […]
So, I already wrote a long post walking through the mostly very good 5th Circuit ruling in the Missouri v. Biden case, in which the court threw out most of the district court judge’s injunction against the government communicating with social media companies and academics. The end result is a very good, straightforward ruling on […]
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We’re going to go slow on this one, because there’s a lot of background and details and nuance to get into in Friday’s 5th Circuit appeals court ruling in the Missouri v. Biden case that initially resulted in a batshit crazy 4th of July ruling regarding the US government “jawboning” social media companies. The reporting […]
We’ve already noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill aims to spend a whopping $42 billion on broadband deployments via the Broadband Equity and Deployment program (BEAD). We’ve also noted how big regional monopolies are doing everything in their power to ensure the lion’s share of that money goes to them, and not smaller ISPs or […]
This week, both our top comments on the insightful side are about Elon Musk going to war with the ADL. In first place, it’s Thad with some thoughts about the situation: There are some legitimate criticisms of the ADL, as Mike points out. I tend to agree that they’re too aggressive, and too quick to […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, despite the best efforts of lobbyists, California passed its net neutrality law and sent it to the governor’s desk, while at the federal level, Ajit Pai was busy coddling big telecom and demonizing big tech. The automated DMCA systems of Hollywood studios were targeting IMDb for some reason, […]
Long time Techdirt readers may recall the iterative changes that Japanese copyright laws have undergone over the course of the last several years. While they aren’t the only changes to have occurred, the topline summary was to turn copyright infringement from a predominantly civil law issue into a criminal one, particularly in cases that prosecutors […]
While recent evolutions in “AI” have netted some profoundly interesting advancements in creativity and productivity, its early implementation in journalism has been a sloppy mess thanks to some decidedly human-based problems: namely greed, incompetence, and laziness. If you remember, the cheapskates over at Red Ventures implemented AI over at CNET without telling anybody. The result: […]
Hey, Techdirt haters: hold onto your hats, because I’m going to praise Elon Musk for doing the right thing, even though many of you insist that my complaints about him are motivated by personal dislike. But, as I’ve noted repeatedly, I’m happy to highlight when he does the right thing, such as here where he […]
If asked to name the absolute worst Democratic and Republican Senators when it comes to technology and innovation policy, it would be difficult to come up with any worse than Richard Blumenthal from the Democratic side and Josh Hawley from the GOP side. Both have extremely long histories of having absolutely terrible, free speech destroying, […]
It’s great to see hateful people being shut down by little things like, you know, the Constitution. Would that it happened more frequently. Or, more hopefully, would that the mere existence of the Constitution prevent hateful legislators from passing hateful laws that have zero chance of surviving a constitutional challenge. It’s the land of the […]
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Common Sense Media provides some really useful tools if you’re a parent looking to see if certain content is age appropriate. I’ve used it for years. But… also, for years, the organization has been way out over its skis in supporting all sorts of absolutely horrible laws that would do real damage to the internet, […]
While government leaders spent the last three years hyperventilating about TikTok, less talked about has been the dodgy “internet of things” (IOT) space; a broad assortment of mostly overseas-made techno doodads with paper-grade security and privacy standards that Americans connect to home and business networks with reckless abandon. “Smart” TVs, fridges, and other internet-connected devices […]
The Ultimate Fighting Championship people are certainly no strangers to readers here at Techdirt. The league that puts on both mixed martial arts events and, incredibly, events where participants take turns slapping the shit out of each other has been one of the most aggressive pushers of greater and greater IP enforcement programs in professional […]
The two big EU attempts to overly regulate the internet are starting to go into effect. The Digital Services Act (DSA), along with all its associated problems, is about six months ahead of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and all of its associated problems. Six months ago, the EU designated 17 sites as “Very Large […]
You might recall that Biden’s first nominee to the FCC, Gigi Sohn, found her nomination torn apart after an industry-funded smear campaign successfully derailed the nomination. Sohn is an extremely competent and popular reformer, but a homophobic lobbying campaign by media and telecom giants (Comcast, News Corp.) falsely framed Sohn as a radical extremist, eroding […]
Governments are weird. Maybe “weird” isn’t the right word. The more accurate word may be “opportunistic.” When it comes to speech they don’t like, they move into this mode. If they think they can silence it, they will try to. And they’ll do this while still pretending the speech they’re trying to control is nothing […]
A few weeks ago, we had director Alex Winter on the podcast to talk about his latest documentary, The YouTube Effect. In that film he spoke with a young man who talked about getting “radicalized” on YouTube and going down the “alt-right rabbit hole.” One thing that Alex talked about in the podcast, but was […]
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