The “rule of law” folks (who also have a sizable overlap with the “party of free speech“) are at it again. Around the nation, legislators emboldened by the Republican party’s embrace of bigotry have been passing bills banning books (or, worse, subjecting librarians to criminal charges). Almost as often as a law gets passed, it […]
The first Trump FCC tried to give Musk nearly a billion dollars to deliver expensive Starlink access to some traffic medians and airport parking lots. The Biden FCC clawed back most of those subsidies, (correctly) arguing that the service couldn’t deliver consistent speeds, and if we’re going to spend taxpayer money on broadband, more future-proof and less […]
In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed an expansion of the state’s “right to repair” law. The original law was the first in the nation to be passed in 2013. The update dramatically improved it, requiring that all new vehicles be accessible via a standardized, transparent platform that allows owners and third-party repair shops […]
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 […]
It’s a familiar playbook. When Donald Trump receives backlash from the public or the press for some action he’s taken, say barring AP News from White House press briefings and events because it won’t bow to his desire to rename parts of a large body of water, he doesn’t shrink. He doubles down. Every single […]
Look, sometimes you make mistakes. Maybe you send an email to the wrong person. Maybe you accidentally buy the wrong kind of pasta sauce at the grocery store. Maybe you accidentally dismantle critical global health infrastructure. These things happen! At least, that’s what Elon Musk wants us to believe. At yesterday’s first official Musk/Trump administration […]
Lots of states have been passing performative, rights-violating bills that mandate sites hosting porn start performing age verification or suffer the consequences. The consequences can be severe, with fines being multiplied per access by unverified users on top of legal actions brought by state prosecutors. Most of these follow the same problematic blueprint. Even if […]
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Look, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post a decade ago, people worried that a billionaire owner might interfere with the paper’s editorial independence. For years, those fears seemed overblown — Bezos appeared content to let journalists do journalism while he focused on more pressing matters (like building rockets and not paying taxes). But it […]
It’s understandably not going to get the same attention as the dismantling of numerous government agencies at the hands of rich unelected manbabies, but the Trump administration is also taking aim at all the promising parts of the 2021 infrastructure bill. Especially as it relates to broadband. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) contained a whopping $42.5 […]
Here’s another appellate anomaly. Most circuits (including this one!) have concluded destroying someone’s home and property while engaging in law enforcement activity is just the sort of thing citizens are supposed to abide with good grace in exchange for living in a society. The Ninth Circuit isn’t most circuits. It covers a lot of ground […]
We’ve seen this sort of thing before, but it never really works. One of the symptoms of the permission culture we’ve built for ourselves, largely in the Western world, is that people or organizations think they can game otherwise legitimate systems in order to silence others. Intellectual property is one of those systems, where we’ve […]
How do you win the global AI race? If you asked Elon Musk or his supporters in the Trump administration, they’d probably talk about deregulation, or getting government out of the way, or maybe something about GPU clusters and massive power consumption. What they probably wouldn’t mention is USAID, the US government’s primary foreign aid […]
Every day Donald Trump seems to implement yet another of the key schemes of Project 2025, despite claiming last summer that “I know nothing about Project 2025.” According to the Project 2025 Web site, it is organized by the Heritage Foundation, which is also working on what it calls its “Oversight Project”: The Oversight Project […]
California taxpayers are now on the hook for $345,576 in legal fees to… Elon Musk. Why? Because Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta ignored warnings about the obvious Constitutional problems with AB 587, their social media “transparency” law. The law, which Google and Meta actually supported (knowing full well that they could comply […]
The Complete 2025 Penetration Testing & Ethical Hacking Training Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn to fight back against cyber threats. Courses include hands-on lessons on penetration testing for AWS, IoT, and web apps, along with hacking basics and a few certificate exam prep courses. It’s on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt […]
This stupid state. These stupid legislators. This goddamn constituency. This is my current home state. And it is painful to be here. Kristi Noem is now the head of the DHS, presumably because she never asked what this country could do for her, but instead asked “what can I do for Donald Trump?” She kept […]
We’ve noted repeatedly how new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is a Trump bootlicker of the highest order. He’s also busy illegally leveraging FCC power to trample the First Amendment and bully media companies that aren’t kissing Trump’s ass. At least when he isn’t busy attacking FCC civil rights reforms or dismantling whatever’s left of […]
While I have no interest in celebrating the demise of a company, one in which very real people had and have jobs that are going to go away, this was also a long time coming. The five year story about how EV trucking company Nikola ended in bankruptcy started in spectacular fashion in 2020, when […]
I am, unabashedly, a Humean emotivist. Like David Hume, I hold that emotions—not abstract reason—form the foundation of our ethics. Cold logic alone doesn’t guide our moral compass; it is shaped by the deep wellspring of human feeling. This isn’t a rejection of reason, but a recognition of its limits and its partnership with emotion in […]
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