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T-Mobile says that from January 2017 forward, all of the postpaid plans it sells will offer an unlimited amount of data. John Legere, the company’s CEO, says the change reflects the way that people have begun using mobile data, where it’s in frequently the primary way they access the internet. “The internet was meant to be unlimited,” Legere said. “Why the hell are carriers still selling the mobile internet this way?” T-Mobile will stop offering plans with data limits as of January 22nd, only offering its “unlimited” T-Mobile One plans. The carrier telegraphed this move several months back, when it first unveiled the new plan’s branding, but it’s only now fully removing other options. While T-Mobile won’t be selling postpaid plans with data caps, it will still offer prepaid plans with specific data limits.

Google has been sued by the Department of Labor for withholding data in an ongoing audit. In a complaint filed Jan 4, the Department says Google refused to provide compensation data as part of an anti-discrimination audit, and seeks a court order forcing the company to comply. The case stems from Google’s federal contracting business, which provides advertising and cloud computing services to a number of federal agencies. The lawsuit doesn’t allege that Google actually engaged in discrimination, only that it dragged its heels as the Department of Labor conducted the necessary audit. According to the complaint, officers launched the audit in September 2015, requesting a series of compensation snapshots drawn from current Google employees that could be compared over time. A few months later, Google replied with a letter declining to produce the some of the data. Google says it withheld that data for privacy reasons, but has produced hundreds of thousands of records over the course of the audit.

Newscorp CEO Rupert Murdoch may have a significant influence in the next four years of American telecommunication policy. According to a new report from New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, President-elect Donald Trump has asked the conservative Australian broadcast titan to submit names of his preferred candidates for chair of the Federal Communications Commission. There’s no guarantee Trump will follow Murdoch’s recommendations, but the news suggests Murdoch already wields significant influence in the incoming administration. Apparently, Murdoch is also lobbying for further conditions on AT&T’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner, potentially because he sees the new conglomerate as a threat to his holdings.

Canada has recognized the obvious and declared high-speed broadband internet access a “basic telecommunications service” that every citizen should be able to access.

Previously, only landline telephone services had received this designation from the country’s national telecoms regulator, CRTC, and the change is supported by a government investment package of up to $750 million to wire up rural areas. “The future of our economy, our prosperity and our society — indeed, the future of every citizen — requires us to set ambitious goals, and to get on with connecting all Canadians for the 21st century," said CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais. “These goals are ambitious. They will not be easy to achieve and they will cost money. But we have no choice.” As part of declaring broadband a “basic” or essential service, the CRTC has also set new goals for download and upload speeds. For fixed broadband services, all citizens should have the option of unlimited data with speeds of at least 50 megabits per second for downloads and 10 megabits per second for uploads — a tenfold increase of previous targets set in 2011. The goals for mobile coverage are less ambitious, and simply call for “access to the latest mobile wireless technology” in cities and major transport corridors. The CRTC estimates that some two million Canadian households, or 18 percent of the population, do not currently have access to their desired speeds.

A year into its expensive investment into live video, Facebook is adding an audio option. The company said that the feature, which is first being made available to publishers, is designed to complement video streams with a lower-bandwidth option.

Initial partners include Britain’s LBC radio, the BBC World Service, Harper Collins, and authors Adam Grant and Britt Bennett. It will be made available to everyone in 2017. Listening to live streams on iOS will require that you have Facebook open on your mobile device the entire time, Facebook said — a feature that seems likely to limit engagement among listeners. Android users can close the app and continue to listen.

Google tentatively agreed to a series of changes in the way it collects data from Gmail, as part of a proposed settlement in Northern California District Court. If the court approves the settlement, Google will eliminate any collection of advertising-specific data before an email is accessible in a user’s inbox.

The result likely won’t be noticeable to users, but it represents a real change to the way Google’s systems work, brought about after a voluntary settlement rather than a legal ruling. The case, called Matera vs. Google, began in September 2015, when plaintiffs alleged the email scanning violated California and federal privacy law, calling it “the twenty-first-century equivalent of AT&T eavesdropping on each of its customers’ phone conversations, or of the postal service taking information from private correspondence.” The suit was specifically brought on behalf of non-Gmail users, who haven’t agreed to have their emails scanned under Google’s Terms of Service.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son made a surprise appearance at Trump Tower where he appears to have worked out a deal with the President-elect to invest $50 billion in the US over the next four years and create 50,000 new jobs. Details of the planned investment are basically nonexistent, but it’s more than likely that it involves Sprint, which represents SoftBank’s main presence in the US. Sprint has been struggling since its acquisition by SoftBank in 2012, falling into fourth place among wireless carriers, behind T-Mobile, and cutting jobs in the face of rocky financials. "I just came to celebrate his new job. We were talking about it. Then I said I would like to celebrate his presidential job and commit, because he would do a lot of deregulation,” Son said. “I said this is great. The United States would become great again.” It wasn’t stated what Trump offered, aside from a lighter regulatory environment, to entice SoftBank.

The fake news problem we’re facing isn’t just about articles gaining traffic from Facebook timelines or Google search results. It’s also an issue of news literacy — a reader’s ability to discern credible news. And it’s getting harder to tell on sight alone which sites are trustworthy.

On a Facebook timeline or Google search feed, every story comes prepackaged in the same skin, whether it’s a months-long investigation from The Washington Post or completely fabricated clickbait. While feed formatting isn’t anything new, platforms like Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News are also further breaking down the relationship between good design and credibility. In a platform world, all publishers end up looking more similar than different. That makes separating the real from the fake even harder.

Nov 28, AT&T made a dim prophecy official by announcing that its new DirecTV Now streaming service would be zero rated: it won’t count against its customers’ data caps. Zero rating isn’t new — T-Mobile has been writing the manual on how to get away with it — but now it’s finally happening at a scale that matters. And AT&T’s version is much worse than T-Mobile’s.

AT&T’s zero rating model is pretty much the nightmare scenario that Internet advocates and pro-competition observers have been warning us about. That’s because AT&T owns DirecTV, and is now giving DirecTV Now privileged access to AT&T’s wireless Internet customers. The corruption is so obvious here that it doesn’t need a fancy network neutrality metaphor — AT&T is clearly favoring a company it now owns over competitors. And that’s just the beginning of where AT&T is screwing us. The company stands to reap massive tolls on the other end of that “most favored nation” deal with DirecTV, because it also offers something called “sponsored data” to other companies that want the same kind of privileged access to AT&T customers. So, for example, if Netflix wants to compete fairly with DirecTV, it would need to pay AT&T to exempt its video traffic from data caps. This is what Internet service providers really want the Internet to look like: a bundle of premium services that run up the cost of access to their networks.

An interview with one of the Black Lives Matter movement's most prominent voices, DeRay Mckesson.

With his now-iconic blue vest, DeRay Mckesson, now the interim chief of Human Capital for Baltimore City Public Schools, has balanced using his platform online and off in order to draw attention to matters such as public safety and law enforcement reform. He has protested against police violence in places like Ferguson (MO); Baton Rouge (LA), and Charleston (SC). Through Campaign Zero, he and other BLM activists designed a policy plan calling for police reform. He even ran for Baltimore mayor in 2016, and though he lost, he drew widespread attention to his effort to bring BLM to the halls of government, where real change happens.