In December 2014, the US Supreme Court extended its blessing of pretextual stops to cover imaginary moving violations. Ignorance of the law is the best excuse, cops were told in the Court’s Heien decision. All cops needed to do was make a “reasonable” error when interpreting the laws they enforce and that mistake could be […]
Back in 2013, Techdirt wrote about “the monster lurking inside free trade agreements”. Formally, the monster is known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), but here on Techdirt we call it “corporate sovereignty“, because that is what it is: a system of secret courts that effectively places companies above a government, by allowing them to sue […]
The regional monopolization of U.S. broadband (and the widespread corruption that protects it) comes with all manner of nasty side effects. The lack of competition at the heart of the country’s telecom economy contributes to high prices, comically bad customer service, slow speeds, spotty coverage, annoying fees, and privacy and net neutrality violations (since there’s often no […]
One interpretation of the First Amendment has been found by the federal courts (both levels) to be far more interesting than meritorious. But the plaintiffs have at least made the court (and the city of Everett, Washington) admit that an ordinance expanded solely for the purpose of preventing baristas from wearing bikinis while serving, treats […]
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You may recall that, back in April, Elon Musk announced that one of his plans was to “authenticate all real humans” on Twitter. This was his plan to somehow magically get rid of spam. As we noted at the time, doing so would create some pretty serious questions regarding freedom of speech on the platform […]
I’ve got some bad news for those of you who were frustrated or bored by decades of net neutrality bickering: it’s about to kick off all over again. And this time it’s even more global. In the UK, US, EU, and South Korea, telecom lobbyists have been making successful inroads on plans that would force […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous comment about the attacks on libraries from big publishers: It’s depressing to know libraries could not exist if they were invented today because of greedy publishers. In second place, it’s Strawb responding to a commenter complaining about our praise of Vijaya […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, it was looking like the FCC would use the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday to hide its unpopular plan to kill net neutrality, while a Verizon-funded group was claiming that killing the rules would really help Puerto Rico. The DOJ subpoenaed Twitter about Popehat and others over a smiley emoji […]
There must be something about being an energy drink company that turns you into a trademark bully turd sandwich. The stories about Monster Energy, for instance, are absolutely legendary and legion. Meanwhile, Red Bull, the other large player in the energy drink space, has far fewer chiding posts from us, but there are still a […]
Nilay Patel over at The Verge has written a fantastic article, Welcome to Hell, Elon, highlighting the many, many ways in which Elon Musk is likely going to be regretting the fact that he now owns Twitter. I will note that many of the links in the article are to some of my stories here […]
Thanks to our corruption-fueled failure to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era, the US has seen a steady parade of privacy scandals, hacks, and data breaches. More often than not involving companies with pathetic privacy and security standards, which are dinged repeatedly with pathetic wrist slap fines that are just absorbed […]
To date, Elon Musk has shown very little inclination to actually understand Twitter and why it has been such a useful platform to many. His understanding of free speech and content moderation hasn’t just been generally lacking, but ridiculous. And that’s not even getting into his apparently purposely obtuse misunderstanding of spam/mDAU issues. And, so, […]
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Last night, Elon Musk closed his on-again, off-again, on-again deal to buy Twitter, and his very first order of business was to fire a bunch of top executives. This was not necessarily unexpected. When new owners come in, they will often clean house, and the text messages revealed as part of the lawsuit while Musk […]
Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of “Big Tech” paying “Big Telecom” billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. This taxation effort always involves some variant of the claim that popular tech services are getting a “free ride” on the […]
Long-time readers here will know that one of the consistent themes over the years when it comes to video game DRM has been the absolute plethora of anecdotal stories you get about how DRM screwed up the playing experience for legitimate customers. Performance issues, inability to play online or single-player campaigns due to DRM failures, […]
Open records laws were passed because governments simply aren’t interested in voluntarily sharing their documents with the people that foot the bill for both the people and the paper. But governments have to pass these laws, in essence forcing transparency upon themselves. Since most governments seem to be more interested in opacity, massive holes in […]
I’ll start this post with a bit of whimsy before alarming you with the sense of doom portended by the stakes involved with last week’s oral argument at the US Supreme Court in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Lynn Goldsmith. In this case the Warhol Foundation is trying to get SCOTUS to […]
Last month, Florida officially asked the Supreme Court to review the detailed 11th Circuit ruling which mostly upheld the district court ruling saying that Florida’s social media content moderation law was unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. Earlier this week, NetChoice and CCIA argued that the 11th Circuit was (mostly) correct in trashing the law, but […]
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