The Myth of Platform Neutrality
In 1986, science and technology studies scholar Langdon Winner wrote, “The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and transistors, nuts and bolts.” To that list, we might add the […]
The Problem Isn’t Just Backpage: Revising Section 230 Immunity
Backpage is a classifieds hub that hosts “80 percent of the online advertising for illegal commercial sex in the United States.”This is not by happenstance but rather by design. Evidence suggests that the advertising hub selectively removed postings discouraging sex trafficking. The site also tailored its rules to protect the practice from detection, including allowing […]
Regulating at Scale
To tame the, sometimes, harmful power of enormous platforms, we need to reconsider the mathematics of regulation. The law tends to treat the growth of a company linearly, while the power and harm of online activity increases at a much faster rate. We need to scale up the mathematics of regulation to deal with many […]
Recent Posts
In an interview with Georgetown Law Technology Review, Karla Torres, AR Human Rights Policy Counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, describes how assisted reproduction (AR) and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) fit broadly among intersecting social movements, and how rapidly progressing technologies impact the surrounding legal landscape. AR refers to medical technologies used to […]
Consumer rights advocates secured a major victory this October, as the Library of Congress and the US Copyright Office published new exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Among other effects, the new exemptions will promote digital preservation, make it easier to conduct security research, and enable users to repair and […]
The rapid expansion and evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) in our world has emphasized both the infinite amount of new possibilities this technology may be able to achieve, as well as the perils that its very use may cause. This duality is not news to the technology community—at the end of October, Google announced that […]
On November 26th, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Apple v. Pepper, a long-running antitrust case that was originally filed back in 2011 against both Apple and AT&T, which at the time had a five-year exclusivity deal for the iPhone following its initial launch. The claims against AT&T were dismissed in 2013 and the […]
In November, 2018, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported that Ferial Nijem had been harassed by her ex-partner through her home security system. Nijem’s ex-partner used the security system installed in the home they used to share to blare music, flicker the lights, and turn the TVs on and off in the middle of the […]
On October 4, 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Chinese spies had surreptitiously implanted microchips as small as a “sharpened pencil tip” on server motherboards sold by Supermicro, an American company whose customers included Apple and Amazon. Businessweek alleged that the spies had forced domestic subcontractors to install the chips before the processed components were shipped to other […]