For decades there has been endless policy wrangling over whether “unlocking your phone” (removing restrictions allowing you to take the device with you to another carrier) should be allowed. Giant carriers have generally supported onerous phone locks because it hampers competition by making it harder to switch providers. Consumer rights groups and the public broadly […]
You know, rather than paying out thousands or millions in lawsuits for retaliatory arrests, maybe states should just spend more money on skin thickening for their police officers. It’s not like case law isn’t pretty much completely established at this point. Flipping the bird to a cop is protected speech. So is complaining, however profanely, […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.
I was worried after oral argument in the NetChoice cases that we were going to get a mess of a decision. Maybe it would give us the right result (the Florida and Texas laws remaining canceled), but with dicta that pulled its punches and gave future would-be censors some cover for their continued attacks on […]
We keep pointing out that, contrary to the uninformed opinion of lawmakers across both major parties, laws that require age verification are clearly unconstitutional*. * Offer not valid in the 5th Circuit. Such laws have been tossed out everywhere as unconstitutional, except in Texas (and even then, the district court got it right, and only […]
If you had an extra $100k on hand and happened to be on eBay at the right time, you could have become the proud(?) owner of tech that was once so secretive and controversial, both the manufacturer and the FBI would make you sign restrictive non-disclosure agreements just to purchase one. A lot has changed […]
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Today, the Supreme Court made it pretty clear that websites have First Amendment rights to do content moderation as they see fit, but decided to send the cases challenging laws in Florida and Texas back to the lower courts to be litigated properly, effectively criticizing the litigation posture of the trade groups, NetChoice and CCIA, […]
You might recall that “way back” in 2007 Comcast here in the U.S. was caught throttling BitTorrent uploads and subsequently lying about it. Since BitTorrent was popular, hoovering up network resources, and posed a threat to traditional cable TV, Comcast execs thought their best approach would be to make an entire file transfer system less […]
This week, both our winners on the insightful side come to our post about the media’s widespread misrepresentation of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Murthy case. In first place, it’s Drew Wilson, who shares our frustration with this kind of thing: In second place, it’s Rocky with a response to the claim that Mike […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, an Australian court ruled that media companies could be held liable for Facebook comments on their news stories, the Indian government used a national security law to block Twitter accounts all over the world, and the EU Intellectual Property Office released an utterly ridiculous propaganda film. Josh Hawley’s […]
For a long time we’ve been pointing out just how dangerous it is to turn over school discipline problems to cops. Sure, there are reasons schools might need a police response to an incident, but putting cops on staff has allowed administrators to abdicate their duties and turn incidents that could be resolved by educators […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online […]
Law enforcement will always get more than a fair shake from the Fifth Circuit. No circuit is more apt to award immunity or otherwise refuse to punish officers for coloring outside of the constitutional lines. And that apparently includes officers’ dogs, who probably enjoy a fair shake as much as anyone. Who’s a good boy?!? […]
As more and more governments try to pass more and more laws requiring age verification, some of us keep pointing out that age verification will cause a ton of harm. For all the talk of how it’s necessary to “protect the children,” the only way to verify ages is to collect a ton of private […]
This is one of the stupidest things ever in terms of public records lawsuits. And that’s saying a lot, considering how often this site has covered public records lawsuits. This traces back to April of last year. Ben Camacho, a Los Angeles journalist who contributes to sites like Knock LA, sent out a records request […]
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It’s just like adults to be constantly diagnosing the wrong thing in trying to “save the children.” Over the last couple of years there’s been a mostly nonsense moral panic claiming that the teen mental health crisis must be due to social media. Of course, as we’ve detailed repeatedly, the actual research on this does […]
You might recall that Elon Musk claims to hate taxpayer subsidies. They should all be “deleted.” Except for the subsidies given to his companies (sometimes for doing nothing), of course. Back in 2020, Musk’s satellite broadband venture, Starlink, gamed a Trump-era FCC subsidy program to try and grab $886 million in taxpayer dollars. It was a […]
The Supreme Court on Wednesday was 1-and-1, with one good decision, in Murthy v. Missouri, and one doozy in Snyder v. US, where it somehow read a statute criminalizing corruption to… not actually criminalize corruption. But this post is about the one that, happily, the Court got right. Not just because it got the result […]
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