Writing in the Atlantic, programmer/economics commentator Steve Randy Waldman explains “Why I changed my mind” about the Communication Decency Act’s Section 230: In the United States, you are free to speak, but you are not free of responsibility for what you say. If your speech is defamatory, you can be sued. If you are a publisher, you can be sued for…
Tag: monopolies
US Broadband Speeds Jumped 90% In 2020. But No, It Had Nothing To Do With Net Neutrality.
An anonymous reader shares a report from Techdirt: Last last week, a report out of the UK topped the trending news items at Hacker News. The report found that U.S. broadband speeds — historically the poster child for mediocrity — jumped roughly 90% during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The improvements weren’t consistent geographically, and the report was quick to note that by…
As Antitrust Pressure Mounts, Google To Pull Back Benefit to News Sites That Adopted Its Preferred MobileTechnology
Four years after offering special placement in a “top stories carousel” in search results to entice publishers to use a format it created for mobile pages, called AMP, Google announced last week that it will end that preferential treatment in the spring. “We will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we…
The Tech Antitrust Problem No One Is Talking About: US Broadband Providers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After years of building political pressure for antitrust scrutiny of major tech companies, this month Congress and the US government delivered. The House Antitrust Subcommittee released a report accusing Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook of monopolistic behavior. The Department of Justice filed a complaint against Google alleging the company prevents consumers from…
Debian Donates 10,000 Euros to Fund Free and Decentralized Livestreaming
PeerTube (developed by Framasoft) is “the free and decentralized alternative to video platforms, providing you over 400,000 videos published by 60,000 users and viewed over 15 million times,” according to its web site. But now they’re exploring livestreaming, writes Debian developer Phil Hands (Slashdot reader #2,365): Holding DebConf20 online this year highlighted the effort involved in setting up Live Streaming using…
House Democrats Tackle Big Tech ‘Monopolies’
The House Judiciary Committee says Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are monopolies — but its new plan to rein in their power won’t change anything overnight. Instead, Democratic lawmakers propose to rewrite American antitrust law in order to restructure the U.S.’s most successful and powerful industry over time. From a report: The report is a long pass down the field of…
Cory Doctorow’s New Book Explains ‘How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism’
Blogger/science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (also a former EFF staffer and activist) has just published How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism — a new book which he’s publishing free online. In a world swamped with misinformation and monopolies, Doctorow says he’s knows what’s missing from our proposed solutions: If we’re going to break Big Tech’s death grip on our digital lives, we’re…
Musk Says ‘Time To Break Up Amazon,’ Escalating Feud With Bezos
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said it’s “time to break up Amazon” in a tweet Thursday, escalating a rivalry with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, another billionaire investing in space exploration. “Monopolies are wrong,” Musk tweeted while tagging Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man. Musk’s post came in response to a tweet from a…
Vint Cerf Explains Why the Internet is Holding Up
In a video interview over Google Hangouts this week, 76-year-old Vint Cerf explained to the Washington Post why the internet’s 50-year-old architecture is still holding up, “with a mix of triumph and wonder in his voice.” “Resiliency and redundancy are very much a part of the Internet design,” explained Cerf, whose passion for touting the wonders of computer networking prompted Google…
Nonprofit Argues Germany Can’t Ratify the ‘Unitary Patent’ Because of Brexit
Long-time Slashdot reader zoobab shares this update from the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a Munich-based non-profit opposing ratification of a “Unified Patent Court” by Germany. They argue such a court will “validate and expand software patents in Europe,” and they’ve come up with a novel argument to stop it. “Germany cannot ratify the current Unitary Patent due to Brexit…”
The…