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I generally try not to engage in “I told you so,” but I told you so. The Trump administration’s long-percolating plan to use Dish Network as flimsy cover for harmful wireless consolidation is dead, just as I predicted five years earlier. Dish will lumber forward as another lazy MVNO for a while longer, but the […]

The Ryan Walters saga of stupid continues. Walters is the Superintendent of Oklahoma, where he oversees a state education system that ranks near the bottom among states, while also carving out time to lick Donald Trump’s boots as thoroughly as possible. Between naked attempts to sell the Trump bible in state schools and attempting to […]

Kristi Noem made an appearance on “Face the Nation” last week, squaring off against Ed O’Keefe of CBS News. CBS, of course, has already engaged in plenty of capitulation. And O’Keefe’s interview — while containing some probing questions — didn’t contain much push back against numerous bogus claims made by DHS head Kristi Noem. Somehow, […]

Earlier this month, Dish’s Sling TV unveiled a rare bit of innovation in an increasingly enshittified streaming video market. They began offering what they called “mini-subscriptions,” allowing users to subscribe to live streaming TV for the day, weekend, or a full week for prices starting at around $5. It was a nice option for folks […]

Last summer, when Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had violated antitrust laws through its search distribution agreements, I was left wondering what the hell any reasonable remedy would look like. The case always struck me as weird—Google was paying billions to Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine because users actually wanted […]

In September 2023, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk decided it was constitutional for a Texas university (West Texas A&M) to shut down a “PG-13” drag show. This was a decision he arrived at despite this being said (on the public record!) by the university official instituting the drag show ban: In the statement to the WTAMU community yesterday, [WATMU […]

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It’s always fascinating to watch supposed “free speech warriors” reveal their true colors the moment they get a tiny bit of power. We’ve been covering the ongoing saga of various COVID contrarians who spent years falsely claiming they were “censored” by the Biden administration, only to see the Supreme Court definitively reject those claims in […]

Back in April, the Trump FCC was sued by Nina Burleigh and Frequency Forward, alleging that Elon Musk’s influence in government was “creating unmanageable conflicts of interest within the FCC.” There’s not much debate there; Musk is getting slathered in new taxpayer subsidies via a Republican rewrite of the infrastructure bill, and all inquiries into his companies’ […]

I don’t find myself writing about how some combination of the USPTO and the court system gets things right on trademark matters very often, but I certainly did a couple of years ago in a series of posts about a fashion brand owned by Erik Brunetti. The brand was initially denied a trademark for its […]

One of the things upon which I spend a lot of time pondering: watching right-leaning, but otherwise intelligent people in my life look at Donald Trump’s systematic destruction of constitutional government and see just mere incompetence, but generally normal politics. These aren’t people force-fed reactionary propaganda in media bubbles. These are sophisticated observers who, if […]

Support us on Patreon » We’ve got a cross-post episode this week, with Mike’s recent appearance on the Computer Says Maybe podcast hosted by Alix Dunn. The discussion starts out looking at decentralization and Bluesky, then goes way beyond that into the early days of the internet and the concept of the Eternal September. You can […]

You can’t do mass deportation without being indiscriminate. That’s how things are working out in Trump’s second term in office, with ICE, etc. entirely abandoning any pretense of just trying to rid this country of dangerous criminals who are here in the country illegally. Raiding Home Deport parking lots to round up people just looking […]

When you read about Adam Raine’s suicide and ChatGPT’s role in helping him plan his death, the immediate reaction is obvious and understandable: something must be done. OpenAI should be held responsible. This cannot happen again. Those instincts are human and reasonable. The horrifying details in the NY Times and the family’s lawsuit paint a […]

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We’re all familiar with what grand juries should be able to do to the proverbial ham sandwich. But in Washington DC — the unwilling host of Donald Trump’s martial law test run — federal prosecutors can’t even get an indictment to stick the person throwing the sandwich. Federal prosecutors on Tuesday were unable to persuade […]

The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There have been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess. As U.S. news outlets […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is BernardoVerda passing along a quote about a specific speech issue that has (ridiculously) been put back up for discussion: In second place, it’s MrWilson with a comment about the ousting of the CDC Director for not being “aligned with the president’s agenda”: It makes […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the Secret Service joined the list of law enforcement agencies using data brokers to dodge warrant requirements for location data, much like the CPB was still doing via a broker being investigated by congress, while other agencies were throwing tax dollars at junk science — but at least […]

When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign. It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power. It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both […]