Just two weeks ago a new report showed how U.S. wireless price competition effectively ground to a halt immediately in the wake of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger. Consolidating the U.S. wireless sector from four to three major providers immediately muted price competition, much like every credible academic, consumer group, and deal critic predicted. It also resulted in […]
It should not be controversial to state that, as it stands today, YouTube’s ContentID platform for policing copyright on YouTube videos is hopelessly broken. The system is wide open to abuse from bad actors who might lay claim to content that simply isn’t theirs, sometimes to the tune of raking in millions of dollars. ContentID […]
The ultimate lesson here is one that’s been taught over and over again by the government of a free nation: if you attempt to bypass government revenue generation mechanisms, expect to get put in your place, citizen. Back in 2021, North Carolina resident Michael Jones — with the assistance of the Institute for Justice — […]
The moral panic about kids and technology these days is just getting dumber and dumber. The latest is that MPs in the UK are considering an outright ban on smartphones for kids under 16. Just last week, we posted about a thorough debunking of the “mobile phones are bad for kids” argument making the rounds. […]
TikTok, the short-video company with Chinese roots, did the most American thing possible on May 7, 2024: It sued the U.S. government, in the person of Attorney General Merrick Garland, in federal court. The suit claims the federal law that took effect on April 24, 2024, banning TikTok unless it sells itself violates the U.S. Constitution. The law […]
We’ve long been critics of facial recognition tech here at Techdirt. Even though the steady march of technology inevitably means the tech will get faster and better, the problem is the first part: faster. The tech has proven to be very fallible. And it has made things even worse for the sort of people most […]
The Speed Reading Mastery Bundle has 6 courses to help you learn to absorb new information faster by learning speed reading methods used by top universities and Guinness World Record holders. These skills will not only help you with your everyday tasks, but open doors to take on any new interest or career. Within minutes, […]
Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed ‘free speech absolutist,’ rarely gets it right when it comes to actual free speech. But he deserves a rare round of applause in his fight against Australia’s global speech injunction. We’ve had many posts detailing Elon Musk’s somewhat hypocritical understanding of free speech. This included his willingness to fold and give […]
The U.S. yet yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law — or regulate data brokers. And while there’s a lot of misdirection and pretense to the contrary, the primary reason is (1) because the U.S. government is too corrupt; and (2) because the U.S. government really enjoys being able to purchase massive amounts […]
And here we go again. It used to be that when you bought a thing, you owned the thing. You could do whatever you wanted with the thing, so long as you didn’t violate the law with the thing, because you owned the thing. And I recognize I’m using the word “thing” a lot here, […]
Never underestimate the coercive power of law enforcement. Officers were so convinced Thomas Perez Jr. had murdered his “missing” father, they spent 17 hours torturing him into confessing to a crime no one had actually committed. Perez Jr. initiated this. He called the police to report his father was missing, mistakenly assuming they’d help him, […]
I wonder if Gina Rinehart, an Australian mining magnate, is a fan of Barbra Streisand? It’s been a bit since we had a straight-up classic Streisand Effect story like the good old days, where someone powerful saw something they didn’t like and insisted that it must be disappeared because they didn’t like it. Meet Gina […]
You have to feel tremendous sympathy for the families of the victims in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. As has been well documented, there was a series of cascading failures by law enforcement that made that situation way worse and way more devastating than it should have been. So who should be blamed? Apparently, […]
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It’s no fun when your friends ask you to take sides in their disputes. The plans for every dinner party, wedding, and even funeral arrive at a juncture where you find yourself thinking, “Dang, if I invite her, then he won’t come.” It’s even less fun when you’re running an online community, from a groupchat to a Mastodon server (or […]
Just recently we discussed a new report showing how U.S. wireless price competition effectively ground to a halt immediately in the wake of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger. Consolidating the U.S. wireless sector from four to three major providers immediately muted price competition, much like every credible academic, consumer group, and deal critic predicted. It […]
This week, Stephen T. Stone takes both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it’s a preemptive comment on our post about five Section 230 cases that made online communities better: In second place, it’s a comment about laws that aim to ban library books: The best libraries offend everyone. The worst libraries […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, people were jumping on the bandwagon of fearmongering about Huawei, while we pointed out that the real security threat is the internet of things. Another federal magistrate said that compelled production of passwords and biometrics violates the Fifth Amendment, ICE spent another $820,000 on cellphone cracking tools, and […]
The last time we saw German-based grocer Aldi get into a trademark tiff over an alcohol product, it was with Brew Dog in the UK and it was one of the most good-natured trademark “disputes” on the record. While that whole thing was refreshing to see, not every company chooses to approach things in a […]
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 […]
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