Russell Brandom

One of the strange features of American government is that an 82-year-old’s broken hip can cause a sea change in telecom policy. The 82-year-old in question is Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who had surgery after a fall and is said to be resting comfortably. But while Leahy recuperates, he won’t be able to cast votes and Democrats won’t be able to flex their razor-thin Senate majority — which could cost the administration its last chance to institute net neutrality rules. The temporary stalemate caused by Leahy’s recovery has lots of downstream effects.

Elon Musk has lined up the funding he needs for his proposed takeover of Twitter. In a new filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on April 21, Musk laid out his plan for the $46.5 billion worth of loans that will allow him to finance the buyout offer made on April 14th.

The Federal Trade Commission passed a pair of pivotal measures expanding its power to regulate anti-competitive business practices, setting the stage for a more aggressive enforcement approach from the embattled agency. In the most aggressive effort, the commission voted to rescind a 2015 “Statement of Enforcement Principles” that restricted the FTC Act’s prescriptions on “unfair methods of competition” to explicit violations of existing antitrust law (specifically the Sherman and Clayton Acts). The vote proceeded along party lines, passing 3-2 with Democrats in the majority.

As we kick off our Infrastructure Week series, we wanted to show the scope of the problem ourselves. This map shows where the broadband problem is worst — the areas where the difficulty of reliably connecting to the internet has gotten bad enough to become a drag on everyday life. Specifically, the colored-in areas show US counties where less than 15 percent of households are using the internet at broadband speed, defined as 25Mbps download speed.

In the aftermath of the Kenosha (WI) shooting, an activist group called Change the Terms is calling on Facebook to institute new policies around potentially dangerous content, including a blanket ban on “event pages that encourage people to bring weapons to events.” In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Sept 3, groups called for a broad enhancement of Facebook’s moderation against extremism, including more automated tools for proactive enforcement and better systems for detecting event pages that promote violence.

One of the US government’s strongest forces for internet freedom is in danger, and supporters are calling on the public for help. The Open Technology Fund (OTF), a small US organization devoted to protecting digital speech across the world, has helped support nearly all of the most prominent encryption projects at various points — including Signal, Tails, Qubes, and the Tor Project. But after the abrupt firing of the fund’s entire leadership team, current recipients say their contractually promised funding is now at risk.

The future of the American mobile broadband industry has hinged on a small courtroom in lower Manhattan, where carriers and regulators are squaring off over a plan to reshape the wireless business as we know it. The last hurdle to T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint is a federal lawsuit, filed by ten state attorneys general in the Southern District of New York, accusing the merger of being anti-competitive. This is regulators’ last chance to stop the merger from going through, by proving that a merged T-Mobile will mean higher prices and worse service for wireless customers.

Twitter announced a new policy addressing “dehumanizing speech,” which will take effect later in 2018, and for the first time the public will be able to formally provide the company with feedback on the proposed rule.

Antitrust crusaders have built up serious momentum in Washington, making a strong case that big companies (especially big tech companies) are distorting the market to drive out competitors. We need a new standard for monopolies, they argue, one that focuses less on consumer harm and more on the skewed incentives produced by a company the size of Facebook or Google. Here's the case against four of the movement’s biggest targets, and what they might look like if they came out on the losing end. 

Facebook is caught in a secret legal fight with the FBI. The fight, which centers on an alleged MS-13 gang member in Fresno (CA), has been kept out of public court records, but Reuters broke the story on Aug 17. Apparently, prosecutors are looking to listen in on all Messenger voice calls from the target, similar to a conventional phone wiretap. Facebook says it’s impossible to comply because of the service’s end-to-end encryption, and the company is risking contempt charges to prove it.