Browsed by
Category: Internet

How politics hung up a $42 billion Biden internet buildout

How politics hung up a $42 billion Biden internet buildout

Politico reports: President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law promised to help Virginia expand broadband internet to hard-to-reach corners of the commonwealth — investing nearly $1.5 billion to improve a key service across a swing state crucial to Democrats’ hopes in the November election. But so far, Virginia, like many states, hasn’t seen a cent of that money put to use. The state got news only in July that it was approved for funding — more than 10 months after completing…

Read More Read More

U.S. said to consider a breakup of Google to address search monopoly

U.S. said to consider a breakup of Google to address search monopoly

The New York Times reports: Google was found last week to have violated antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly in internet search. Now discussions over how to fix those violations have begun. Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off…

Read More Read More

FCC officially votes to reinstate net neutrality

FCC officially votes to reinstate net neutrality

TechCrunch reports: The Federal Communications Commission made its official vote Thursday to reinstate net neutrality, which bars broadband providers from slowing or even blocking internet traffic to some sites while improving access to others that pay extra fees. With some changes and protections, passing the order titled Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet restores rules passed back during the Obama administration in 2015 and rolled back in 2017, after Donald Trump was elected president. Since the FCC announced in September…

Read More Read More

The news business really is cratering

The news business really is cratering

Jack Shafer writes: Journalists across the country burst into flames of panic this week, as bad news for the news business crested and erupted everywhere all at once. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher of the Los Angeles Times, laid off 20 percent of his newsroom. Over at Time magazine, its billionaire owners, Marc and Lynne Benioff, did the same for 15 percent of their unionized editorial employees. This latest conflagration had ignited at Sports Illustrated the previous week as catastrophic layoffs were dispensed via email to most staffers. Business…

Read More Read More

Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era

Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era

Cory Doctorow writes: The Federal Trade Commission’s chair, Lina Khan, has brought her long-awaited, audacious case against Amazon, signaling the Biden administration’s determination to restore an approach to competition law that has been in decline since the Carter administration. This will doubtless draw fresh criticism about her supposed overreach. But Amazon is precisely the kind of company that Congress had in mind in enacting America’s many antitrust laws. Only more so: The Congress of 1890, which passed the first of…

Read More Read More

The five most eye-opening lines in the antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

The five most eye-opening lines in the antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

Politico reports: A heavily redacted, 172-page lawsuit reveals how Amazon allegedly orchestrated a long-running campaign to muscle out competitors from the online retail space by financially squeezing merchants who rely on its platform. It’s a landmark case that will cement the legacy of FTC Chair Lina Khan, who first gained public attention going after Amazon. It’s also a key pillar in the Biden administration’s push to curb the alleged monopoly power of the nation’s largest tech companies. “There is immediate…

Read More Read More

Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it

Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it

Emily Conover writes: Keeping secrets is hard. Kids know it. Celebrities know it. National security experts know it, too. And it’s about to get even harder. There’s always someone who wants to get at the juicy details we’d rather keep hidden. Yet at every moment, untold volumes of private information are zipping along internet cables and optical fibers. That information’s privacy relies on encryption, a way to mathematically scramble data to prevent any snoops from deciphering it — even with…

Read More Read More

James Block helped take down crypto exchange, FTX, in his spare time

James Block helped take down crypto exchange, FTX, in his spare time

Charlie Warzel writes: The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby. James Block, who runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media, has gotten overlooked in the swift and spectacular collapse of FTX. On November 2, a report…

Read More Read More

The value of deliberate ignorance when there is too much to know

The value of deliberate ignorance when there is too much to know

Joshua Benton writes: Eyeballs. That’s what everyone on the internet seems to want — eyeballs. To be clear, it’s not actual eyeballs, in the aqueous humor sense, that they’re looking for. It’s getting your eyeballs pointed at whatever content they produce — their game, their app, their news story, whatever — and however many ad units they can squeeze into your field of view. Your attention is literally up for auction hundreds or thousands of times a day — your…

Read More Read More

How Google’s ad business funds disinformation around the world

How Google’s ad business funds disinformation around the world

By Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Klühspies Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found. The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such…

Read More Read More

After Ukraine, Biden administration turns to Musk’s satellite internet for Iran

After Ukraine, Biden administration turns to Musk’s satellite internet for Iran

CNN reports: The White House has engaged in talks with Elon Musk about the possibility of setting up SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink inside Iran, multiple officials familiar with the discussions told CNN. The conversations, which have not been previously reported, come as the Biden administration searches for ways to support the Iranian protest movement that exploded just over a month ago after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died under suspicious circumstances after being detained by the country’s morality police. The White…

Read More Read More

How a single Texas ruling could change the web forever

How a single Texas ruling could change the web forever

Charlie Warzel writes: Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the…

Read More Read More

Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Jeffrey Marlow writes: Somewhere beneath the Adriatic Sea, a rogue block of the African tectonic plate is burrowing under southern Europe, stretching Italy eastward by a few millimetres each year. On October 26, 2016, the stress triggered an earthquake in the Apennine Mountains, one in a series of quakes which toppled buildings in Italian towns. On the day of the tremor, Giuseppe Marra, a principal research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, was running an experiment that…

Read More Read More

Google Search is not what it used to be

Google Search is not what it used to be

Charlie Warzel writes: A few weeks ago my house had a septic-tank emergency, which is as awful as it sounds. As unspeakable things began to burble up from my shower drain, I did what any smartphone-dependent person would: I frantically Googled something along the lines of poop coming from shower drain bad what to do. I was met with a slew of cookie-cutter websites, most of which appeared hastily generated and were choked with enough repetitive buzzwords as to be…

Read More Read More

The content that fills discontent with nothing

The content that fills discontent with nothing

Kyle Chayka writes: In the beginning, there was the egg. In January of 2019, an Instagram account called @world_record_egg posted a stock photo of a plain brown chicken egg and launched a campaign to get the photo more likes than any online image had before. The record holder at the time was an Instagram shot of Kylie Jenner’s daughter, Stormi, which had more than eighteen million likes. In ten days, the egg’s like count rocketed beyond thirty million. It remains…

Read More Read More

How you’re still being tracked on the internet

How you’re still being tracked on the internet

The New York Times reports: The internet industry shuddered last year when Apple introduced privacy measures for the iPhone that threatened to upend online tracking and cripple digital advertising. Google pledged similar privacy actions. But in less than a year, another type of internet tracking has started taking over. And it is having the unintended effect of reinforcing the power of some of tech’s biggest titans. The shift suggests that gathering people’s online data for targeted advertising is not going…

Read More Read More