from the so-it-went dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2017, it was looking like the FCC would use the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday to hide its unpopular plan to kill net neutrality, while a Verizon-funded group was claiming that killing the rules would really help Puerto Rico. The DOJ subpoenaed Twitter about Popehat and others over a smiley emoji tweet as part of its bizarre vendetta against a security researcher. Senator Burr was pitching a Section 702 “reform” bill that would give the NSA back its collection powers, while Senator Wyden was pitching a very different bill that would limit backdoor searches and permanently kill some powers, all while new evidence was exposing more about the Defense Department’s abuse of surveillance procedures.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2012, Amazon showed once again how people don’t own their ebooks, while Random House issued a statement that seemed to go against the grain by firmly saying libraries truly own their ebooks from the publisher… except it quickly turned out it was too good to be true. The Librarian of Congress announced the latest DMCA exemptions with some good news, but also the rejection of an exemption for DVD ripping and a reversal of course on phone unlocking. The DOJ railroaded CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou into a guilty plea, while the UN was complaining that terrorists can use the internet. And we asked a question that is rather relevant now given this week’s events: how would Twitter handle a crackdown on speech in Saudi Arabia?
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2007, the news that Comcast was blocking some BitTorrent traffic was followed up by evidence that it was blocking other kinds of traffic too, and the company didn’t seem to recognize how much damage this was doing to its brand. A UK website operator was arrested for linking to infringing material, while the international game of file sharing whack-a-mole continued. Microsoft gave up on its antitrust fight in the EU, NBC took a turn towards hate in its love-hate relationship with YouTube, and bogus class action lawsuits against Facebook looked to be the next big thing.
In The Beginning…
This week’s edition of the Up To Date newsletter that would become Techdirt went out on October 25th, 1997 and included some numbers that were big at the time but seem tiny now, like a study showing that average users spend around 14 hours a week online, and another saying 33% of college courses use email.
Filed Under: history, look back
Source by www.techdirt.com