In a blow to millions of people who rely on local television broadcasts, a federal court ruled yesterday that the nonprofit TV-streaming service Locast is not protected by an exception to copyright created by Congress to ensure that every American has access to their local stations. Locast is evaluating...

Docket of the Living DeadIn 2017, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai - a former Verizon lawyer appointed by Donald Trump - announced his intention to dismantle the Commission’s hard-won 2015 Network Neutrality regulation. The 2015 order owed its existence to people like you, millions of us who...

This month, Apple announced several new features under the auspices of expanding its protections for young people, at least two of which seriously walk back the company’s longstanding commitment to protecting user privacy. One of the plans—scanning photos sent to and from child accounts in Messages—breaks Apple’s promise to...

Update, October 1, 2021: The original version of this essay incorrectly stated that Metcalfe's Law dictated that the number of connections in a network doubled with each new user; that has been corrected, below.When the FTC filed its amended antitrust complaint against Facebook in mid-August, we read it with...

ˀThe Chicago Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has released a highly critical report on the Chicago Police Department’s use of ShotSpotter, a surveillance technology that relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human “acoustic experts” to purportedly identify and locate gunshots based on a network of...

Update (8/26/21): Victory! OnlyFans has reversed course and suspended its plans to ban sexually explicit content, saying it has “secured assurances necessary” from banking partners and payout providers to enable it to continue to serve all creators. We hope that financial institutions will take note that it is unacceptable...

President Biden’s July 9 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is a highly technical, 72-part, fine-grained memo on how to address the ways market concentration harms our lives as workers, citizens, consumers, and beyond. To a casual reader, this may seem like a dry bit of...

Policymakers around the world are contemplating a wide variety of proposals to address “harmful” online expression. Many of these proposals are dangerously misguided and will inevitably result in the censorship of all kinds of lawful and valuable expression. And one of the most dangerous proposals may be adopted in Canada....

Canvas is an online learning platform created by the Utah-based education technology company Instructure. In the past year, the platform has also been turned into a disciplinary technology, as more and more schools have come to rely on Canvas to drive allegations of cheating—despite student protests and technical...