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For fifty years or so, U.S. media academics warned anybody who would listen about the perils of letting your media companies consolidate in the hands of a bunch of rich assholes and giant, amoral corporations. Not only did America ignore those recommendations every step of the way, the avoidable issues our ignorance created are rearing up like a dragon to take the country’s head clean off.
The...
Cory Gardner, who spent a decade as a Republican senator, has been freshly announced as the CEO of the NCTA–The Internet...
New data from the UK’s age verification rollout provides hard evidence of what internet governance experts have been warning about for years: these laws don’t protect children—they systematically drive users from regulated, compliant platforms to unregulated, non-compliant ones while accomplishing nothing except creating a massive privacy surveillance apparatus.
The Washington Post has done the...
Good lord, here comes another act of preemptive cowardice in service of ensuring the most powerful man in the world enjoys his appearance before a crowd he can’t control or doesn’t own. Here’s Ben Rothenburg of tennis-focused blog Bounces with the scoop:
An internal email sent by the U.S. Tennis Association leadership to U.S. Open broadcasters, obtained by Bounces, requested that broadcasters...
A longtime open internet activist recently asked me whether I’d reversed my position on internet openness and copyright because of AI. The question caught me off guard—until I realized what he was seeing. Across the tech policy world, people who spent decades fighting for an open, accessible internet are now cheering as that same internet gets locked down, walled off, and restricted. Their...
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I, for one, cannot wait for the commenters to show up to call this headline hyperbole. mfers please. Why don’t you just read it for yourselves, in your own god-king’s words and images:
So, what are we looking at here, you might be asking if the embed didn’t load or you’ve averted your eyes in a last desperate act of self-preservation. And if you’re just visiting here from a more pleasant...
Last year Trump Republicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) had broad, bipartisan support, and more than 23 million Americans received the discount at its peak.
At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason, of course, was that the ACP was popular...
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Shannon Vanshoon with a comment about RFK Jr’s congressional hearing:
So, yeah, I’d say on one hand that it’s nice Senator Cassidy is railing against Kennedy like this for all the unmitigated and horrifically dangerous decisions he’s making.
But hey, you know what would’ve been even better? Not being the deciding vote in the first place...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, AT...