What if I told you the Trump FCC just leveraged a fake investigation into an American company to force it to sell valuable assets to companies and billionaires loyal to the administration? Well that’s exactly what’s happening with the news that Dish Network and Echostar are selling $17 billion in valuable spectrum to Elon Musk, […]
Ohio State University has had a history of being fairly ridiculous when it comes to trademarks. Whether its trademarking the word “the” (yes, seriously) or stretching the concept of public confusion so far that the school challenged the trademark for a random brand of vodka, the Buckeyes sure love some trademark shenanigans. But I guess […]
CBS has decided it likes being in an abusive relationship. A few months ago, it laid the groundwork for perpetual extortion by settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump over allegedly deceptive editing of an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump claimed this was election interference and sued, despite winning the election, re-taking power, and […]
Support us on Patreon » In what feels like something of a throwback to much earlier days of Techdirt, the Supreme Court is getting into the weeds of the DMCA. Cox v. Sony is a case centered around questions of repeat infringers and intermediary liability, and we’ve submitted an amicus brief from the Copia Institute, written […]
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals did something remarkable last week—they followed binding Supreme Court precedent. In 2025. Involving Trump. Which, predictably, got them immediately overruled by the Supreme Court just days later. In a 2-1 decision, the court dissolved the government’s stay and ordered that FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter be reinstated to her […]
The “fresh hell” administration keeps on rolling. There’s no need to actually ask what fresh hell awaits. You need do nothing more than exist and a new fresh hell will be delivered, almost daily. Here’s the freshest: the US military decided to blow up a boat traveling in international waters — one carrying eleven people, […]
Splunk is a powerful data platform used to gather information from multiple sources and index it for efficient access. You can then use collected data to create visualizations, analytics, and a variety of automated and security-related functions. With its web-style interface, Splunk is easy to use and is utilized by many companies worldwide. The 2025 Complete […]
You know that Family Guy meme where they have the skin color chart to determine how suspicious someone should be? Yeah, you know the one. Well, the Supreme Court just essentially codified that into constitutional law. And they did it on the lawless shadow docket without a real explanation, because of course they did. In […]
For fifty years or so, U.S. media academics warned anybody who would listen about the perils of letting your media companies consolidate in the hands of a bunch of rich assholes and giant, amoral corporations. Not only did America ignore those recommendations every step of the way, the avoidable issues our ignorance created are rearing […]
Cory Gardner, who spent a decade as a Republican senator, has been freshly announced as the CEO of the NCTA–The Internet & Television Association–the cable industry’s biggest lobbying organization. As the revolving door spins you might recall that Gardner is replacing Michael Powell, former FCC boss, whose stint at the agency has largely destroyed government […]
New data from the UK’s age verification rollout provides hard evidence of what internet governance experts have been warning about for years: these laws don’t protect children—they systematically drive users from regulated, compliant platforms to unregulated, non-compliant ones while accomplishing nothing except creating a massive privacy surveillance apparatus. The Washington Post has done the legwork […]
Good lord, here comes another act of preemptive cowardice in service of ensuring the most powerful man in the world enjoys his appearance before a crowd he can’t control or doesn’t own. Here’s Ben Rothenburg of tennis-focused blog Bounces with the scoop: An internal email sent by the U.S. Tennis Association leadership to U.S. Open […]
A longtime open internet activist recently asked me whether I’d reversed my position on internet openness and copyright because of AI. The question caught me off guard—until I realized what he was seeing. Across the tech policy world, people who spent decades fighting for an open, accessible internet are now cheering as that same internet […]
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I, for one, cannot wait for the commenters to show up to call this headline hyperbole. mfers please. Why don’t you just read it for yourselves, in your own god-king’s words and images: So, what are we looking at here, you might be asking if the embed didn’t load or you’ve averted your eyes in […]
Last year Trump Republicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) had broad, bipartisan support, and more than 23 million Americans received the discount at its peak. At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason, of […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Shannon Vanshoon with a comment about RFK Jr’s congressional hearing: So, yeah, I’d say on one hand that it’s nice Senator Cassidy is railing against Kennedy like this for all the unmitigated and horrifically dangerous decisions he’s making. But hey, you know what would’ve […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, AT&T was hypocritically calling for Section 230 reform and astroturfing the FCC in support of Trump’s attack on social media, while we submitted FCC comments both from Mike and from the Copia Institute on the NTIA petition calling for 230 to be reinterpreted. We also wrote about how […]
For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. And […]
Well, that was certainly a thing. We mentioned yesterday that RFK Jr. was scheduled to go before the Senate Finance committee to answer all kinds of questions as to just what in the holy hell is happening at HHS. As we said, this was always going to be a contentious hearing, given that the Democrat […]
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