Defending Your Rights in Every Reality: Year in Review 2020
Virtual reality and augmented reality technologies (VR/AR) are rapidly maturing and becoming more prevalent to a wider audience, especially as the pandemic drives more people to virtual activities. This technology provides the promise to entertain and educate, to connect and enhance our lives, and even to help advocate for...
Competitive Compatibility: Year in Review 2020
2020 saw governments on three continents take action against the dominance of the biggest tech platforms, with a flurry of pro-competition rules, investigations and lawsuits. As exciting as this is, it's just the beginning. Antitrust enforcement is often a matter of years or even decades, and if...
What Comes Next for the Santa Clara Principles: 2020 in Review
For many years, we have urged platforms to operate with more transparency—both to the public and to their users—and to ensure that the people who use their services have the ability to appeal wrongful content moderation decisions. As such, in conjunction with several other organizations and academic experts, we launched...
EU and the Digital Services Act: 2020 Year in Review
While 2019 saw the EU ramming through a disastrous Internet copyright rule that continues to reverberate through legal and policy circles, 2020 was a very different story as the EU introduced the Digital Services Act (DSA), the most significant reform of Europe’s platform legislation the EU has...
How We Saved .ORG: 2020 in Review
If you come at the nonprofit sector, you’d best not miss.Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it had agreed to sell the Public Interest Registry—the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain (TLD)—to private equity firm Ethos Capital....
The Slow-Motion Tragedy of Ola Bini's Trial
EFF has been tracking the arrest, detention, and subsequent investigation of Ola Bini since its beginnings over 18 months ago. Bini, a Swedish-born open-source developer, was arrested in Ecuador's Quito Airport in a flurry of media attention in April 2019. He was held without trial for ten weeks while...
Vaccine Passports: A Stamp of Inequity
A COVID vaccine has been approved and vaccinations have begun. With them have come proposals of ways to prove you have been vaccinated, based on the presumption that vaccination renders a person immune and unable to spread the virus. The latter is ...
Visa and Mastercard are Trying to Dictate What You Can Watch on Pornhub
Pornhub is removing millions of user-uploaded videos. This action comes after a New York Times column accused the website of hosting sexual videos of underage and nonconsenting women. In response to the Times’ article, Visa and Mastercard cut ties with Pornhub, making it impossible for Pornhub to process...
California Has a New COVID Exposure Notification App
Today California joined dozens of other states and countries in launching its COVID-19 exposure notification app, CA Notify, built on Google and Apple’s Exposure Notification API. Google and Apple’s API is already used in 20 other U.S. states, as well as countries including Germany, the...
It’s Not Section 230 President Trump Hates, It’s the First Amendment
President Trump’s recent threat to “unequivocally VETO” the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) if it doesn’t include a repeal of Section 230 may represent the final attack on online free speech of his presidency, but it’s certainly not the first. The NDAA is one of the “must-pass” bills...









