Starting this week, Amazon Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) will be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn’t previously exist. Shifting toward ad-based tiers has been popular among streaming companies like Netflix, Max, Disney+, and Paramount. But whereas those services make a cheaper ad-based tier an opt-in […]
Well, this is not that much of a surprise, but in the leadup to the Senate “child safety” dog and pony show that will be happening in a few hours, Microsoft decided to twist the knife in to some of its competitors. Microsoft’s Vice Chair and President, Brad Smith (who was formerly the company’s general […]
And here we go. We have spent the past couple of years discussing Microsoft’s acquisition, and all the trials and tribulations that led to it, of Activision Blizzard. This deal, that faced mostly flaccid opposition from several national regulatory bodies throughout the world, cost Microsoft $69 billion, with a “b”, to consummate. And that’s just […]
You probably recall the subreddit WallStreetBets from the whole GameStonks! episode three years ago. Over the last year or so there’s been a different legal issue related to that subreddit, though. Jaime Rogozinski, who created the WSB subreddit, ended up suing Reddit, after they shut down his account. There were a few different issues at […]
First Amendment principles are nothing new. A ton of precedent has been established that firmly limits what the government can do to stop someone from saying something (and, less often, to force someone to say something). Prior restraint is pretty easy to recognize. And yet, every so often, a judge decides to rewrite the First […]
The DOJ can be some vindictive sons of bitches. This has nothing to do with justice at all. This is just pure spite. As has been detailed over and over again, while the public story was that Backpage was taken down for facilitating sex trafficking, the real story is very, very different. The site actually […]
Hey, everyone makes mistakes. Ring certainly did. Amazon’s home surveillance acquisition realized there was no one in the residential space willing to slavishly cater to cops. Ring decided it would provide this supposed “public service.” It gave cops cheap/free cameras and urged them to hand them out to as many private citizens as possible. The […]
You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let’s focus on the app. Right off the bat, let’s be clear about one thing: When we say “app” we don’t mean that you’re limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across […]
It is no secret that Senator Lindsey Graham hates Section 230. It’s also no secret that he has no clue how the internet or Section 230 actually work. He’s pushed bills to repeal 230 directly, and he’s pushed bills to repeal 230 indirectly. He does not like Section 230 in a house, or with a […]
Despite a lot of rhetoric by customers about how they were sick of Netflix price hikes and headed to the exits, the company’s latest earnings report showed impressive growth. The company added 13.1 million customers worldwide in the fourth quarter, up from the 8.76 million added the previous quarter. All told, the once-disruptive streaming upstart […]
The latest generative AI tools are certainly impressive, but they bring with them a wide range of complex problems, as numerous posts on Techdirt attest. A new academic paper, published on arXiv, raises more of them, but from a new angle. Entitled “A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism”, […]
Just days ago, we were talking about the release of PC game Palworld, an open-world monster collecting game that has often been described as “Pokémon, but with guns.” The point of my post was that this game served as a great example of the idea/expression dichotomy in practice. This game, whatever similarities it may have […]
Despite all evidence to the contrary, law enforcement officials continue to pretend being in the same room as dread drug fentanyl is enough to hospitalize officers, if not actually kill them. This myth has been irresponsibly perpetrated by a number of law enforcement agencies. To date, not a single case of contact overdose has been […]
The Supreme Court is about to review Texas’ HB20 law, that (among other unworkable things) says that websites cannot moderate based on “viewpoint.” Of course, websites don’t moderate based on viewpoint, but rather whether or not they think you’ve violated their rules/terms of service. Should the law be allowed to go into effect, it’s not […]
Buying domestic data from data brokers is just something the government does all the time. Bypassing restraints enacted by the Supreme Court, federal agencies (along with local law enforcement agencies) are hoovering up whatever domestic data they can from private companies all too happy to be part of the problem. Sure, the government can pretend […]
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Over and over again, we see politicians browbeat companies until they agree to support terrible legislation. Back when FOSTA was being debated, there was tremendous pressure from the media and Congress for tech to support it, falsely claiming that without it they were enabling sex trafficking. Eventually, after a ton of pressure was put on […]
When last we checked in with Hewlett Packard (HP), the company had just been sued (for the second time) for crippling customer printers if owners attempt to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. It was just the latest in a long saga where printer manufacturers use DRM or dodgy software updates to wage all out war […]
This week, both our top comments on the insightful side come in response to our post about the misrepresentation of Ben Franklin’s opinion on content moderation by private platforms. In first place, it’s an anonymous commenter with some clarification: So you, too, are unable to comprehend pretty basic sentences. Franklin is explaining that he can […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we took a close look at an interesting and challenging case about Section 230, while Google asked the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling about copyright in APIs. We wrote about the decline in broadband network investment post-net-neutrality despite promises from Ajit Pai and the telecoms. US media […]
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