To be in law enforcement is to be almost criminally obtuse. (We haven’t criminalized that. YET! But when we do…) They can’t stay out of their own way. The public may be willing to… | Continue reading
Is it too much to ask that politicians try to live in reality? The obsession over the past few years that anything bad that people say on the internet is the fault of the internet (rather than the … | Continue reading
Over the last few months, we’ve been covering a ridiculous situation in which Republicans are trying to force their spam into your inboxes. It began with a study that some Republicans misread… | Continue reading
Over the last few months, we've been covering a ridiculous situation in which Republicans are trying to force their spam into your inboxes. It began with a study that some Republicans misread (or deliberately misinterpreted) to claim that Google was "censoring" their political ma … | Continue reading
The core GOP belief in “small government” and “free markets” and “no taxpayer waste” doesn’t hold up quite as well as it used to to scrutiny, assuming it e… | Continue reading
For a few months now, we’ve been following this nonsense story, driven almost entirely by executives at the GOP’s favorite digital marketing (read: spamming) operation, that Google is c… | Continue reading
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) — Canada’s federal Dudley Do-Whatevers — is again belatedly admitting it has access to powerful surveillance tech its supposed oversight s… | Continue reading
Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amaz… | Continue reading
For at least three years now, we have been discussing the goings on concerning a trademark application submitted by Ohio State University for using the word “the” on apparel. If your br… | Continue reading
We’ve been talking about the importance of patent quality, and one of the points made in our podcast discussion, was that many companies felt the unfortunate need to patent something just to … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that the Russian government has been working overtime to try to block out accurate information about its invasion of Ukraine from reaching the citizenry. That’s part of w… | Continue reading
Modern reviewers put modern televisions through a gamut of different tests to determine display brightness, quality, power consumption, and other factors. Samsung, apparently thought it would be a … | Continue reading
Don’t think this headline is hyperbole; as this post will explain, it is not. But what follows here isn’t just about books, Amazon, or even Paxton himself. What the headline captures is… | Continue reading
We’ve noted for a few months how telecom and media giants are engaged in a full court press to scuttle the nomination of popular anti-monopolist and reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Sohn’… | Continue reading
Techdirt is one of the few remaining independent blogs. And, in many ways, I really miss the era of independent blogging that became a thing mainly in the early 2000s. Over time, most people have m… | Continue reading
As you've no doubt heard, on Saturday there was yet another horrific shooting, this one in Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding more. From all current evidence, the shooter, a teenager, was a brainwashed white nationalist, spewing nonsense and hate in a long manifesto that rep … | Continue reading
The Biden Administration just announced the creation of a DHS subagency apparently intended to confront “disinformation.” The biggest problem with it is that it is impossible, right now… | Continue reading
So there has been lots of talk about Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter. I’ve written multiple things about how little he understands about free speech and how little he understands conten… | Continue reading
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) set aside $42.5 billion to be spent by the states on expanding access to affordable broadband. But state by state, telecom lobbyists are working ha… | Continue reading
We’ve noted for a long time how data makes it clear that, contrary to claims by telecom monopolies, community broadband networks are hugely beneficial. They generally offer faster speeds at l… | Continue reading
Given the seemingly endless privacy scandals that now engulf the tech, telecom, and adtech sectors on a near-daily basis, many consumers have flocked to virtual private networks (VPN) to protect an… | Continue reading
Lots of talk yesterday as Elon Musk made a hostile takeover bid for all of Twitter. This was always a possibility, and one that we discussed before in looking at how little Musk seemed to understan… | Continue reading
Obviously over the past few years there’s been all of these debates about the content moderation practices of various websites. We’ve written about it a ton, including in our Content Mo… | Continue reading
Let’s start this off by noting that I actually think that Elon Musk sometimes receives both too much criticism from some circles and too much praise from others. I think he deserves tremendou… | Continue reading
The games have begun! Vote here! It’s that time of year — March Madness — when tons of people have filled out brackets and are watching college basketball. Way back in 2020 I had … | Continue reading
We already knew that the UK’s Online Safety Bill was going to be an utter disaster for the open internet, because that had been made clear early on. Last week, the government finally unveiled… | Continue reading
It's that time of year -- March Madness -- when tons of people have filled out brackets and are watching college basketball. Way back in 2020 I had jokingly suggested on Twitter that we should set up a bracket for the most frequently misunderstood legal concepts, and people seeme … | Continue reading
When you’re a natural telecom monopoly in America you get away with a lot. Take for example broadband ISP Frontier Communications, which has spent the last few years stumbling in and out of bankrup… | Continue reading
DuckDuckGo, of course, is a popular “alternative” search engine, using Microsoft’s Bing as its underlying search engine but then doing a bunch of generally good stuff for the wide… | Continue reading
Remember NetzDG? This is the German content moderation law that has been a complete disaster from day one. It puts all sorts of requirements on social media companies to remove undesirable content … | Continue reading
One of the problems in the debate about the impact of unauthorized downloads on the copyright industry is the paucity of large-scale, rigorous data. That makes it easy for the industry to demand go… | Continue reading
Several days into Russia’s attack on Ukraine, we are already witnessing astonishing stories play out online. Social media platforms, after years of Techlash, are once again in the center of a histo… | Continue reading
A major trick dominant broadband providers use to limit competition is exclusive broadband arrangements with landlords. Often an ISP will strike an exclusive deal with the owner of a building, apartment complex, or development that effectively locks... | Continue reading
You may recall that, back in 2012, Syria suddenly dropped off the face of the internet. It actually happened twice. There was all sorts of speculation about how it happened. At the time, Cloudflare's analysis was one of the most... | Continue reading
We've said it over and over again, if libraries did not exist today, there is no way publishers would allow them to come into existence. We know this, in part, because of their attempts to stop libraries from lending ebooks, and to price ebooks... | Continue reading
I've already explained the dangers of the EARN IT Act, which is supported by 19 Senators, who are misleading people with a "fact" sheet that is mostly full of myths. As Senator Wyden has explained, EARN IT will undoubtedly make the... | Continue reading
I know that people who identify tribally as Democrats or Republicans often like to accuse the other team of being especially censorial, but the unfortunate fact is that elected officials in both parties seem equally interested in using the power of... | Continue reading
Back in November we wrote about a very bizarre attempt to abuse copyright law to uncover who was behind a Twitter account, @CallMeMoneyBags. That account tweeted out various things mocking and shaming various extremely wealthy people, including... | Continue reading
For years we've covered the problems of copyright trolls -- abusive schemes in which aggressive lawyers and schemers leverage copyright to shake down hundreds or thousands of people over what may be accidental or incidental infringement. In some... | Continue reading
As far as Techdirt's pages go, Hershey, the company behind all kinds of candy and sweets brands, doesn't come out of the wash clean. The company has been known to lean on IP laws quite aggressively, even absurdly. For instance, it sued a... | Continue reading
China's efforts to subdue the turkic-speaking Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region will be familiar to Techdirt readers. International awareness is increasing, too, not least thanks to the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics that the US... | Continue reading
Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that we didn't need additional consumer privacy protections (or opt in requirements, or net neutrality rules) because consumers would keep the company honest. "The extensive oversight provided by literally... | Continue reading
For a long time now, it's been fairly clear that consumer safety was an afterthought for some of the more well known companies developing self-driving technology. That was made particularly clear a few years back with Uber's fatality in... | Continue reading
Kudos for open records laws proving to us that not only is Missouri Governor Mike Parson a technologically illiterate hack, but he's a lying one as well. You'll recall, of course, that in October, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on how... | Continue reading
For decades regional U.S. telecom monopolies have often refused to deploy broadband into low ROI areas, despite billions in subsidization. At the same time, they've fought tooth and nail against towns and cities that attempt to improve their own... | Continue reading
Whether your a baseball fan, or a sports fan in general, or not, regular readers here will know that we've covered aspects of many sports leagues and Major League Baseball in particular. As you'd expect with any major business like MLB, some... | Continue reading
Back in June we reported on how Florida's social media moderation bill was tossed out as unconstitutional in a Florida court. The ruling itself was a little bit weird, but an easy call on 1st Amendment grounds. It was perhaps not surprising, but... | Continue reading
The ATF (the accepted not-actually-an-acronym for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) is back on its periodic charm offensive. This time the charm seems a bit more forced, as citizens and governments all over the nation are... | Continue reading