This Week In Techdirt History: December 14th – 20th

from the as-it-was dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, USA Today published its latest bogus oped against Section 230 that misrepresented the law, a district court rejected CDT’s challenge of Trump’s ridiculous executive order about 230, and Trump appointed an unqualified 230-hater to a top DOJ role. Lindsay Graham threatened to repeal 230 if it wasn’t reformed, a prelude to the repeat of this attack happening now, while Brendan Carr was doing his own part in misrepresenting the debate about the law, and some smaller internet companies were saying they were open to 230 reform just to keep Facebook from being the only voice in the room. We also saw accusations that the FCC blew $9 billion delivering broadband to rich people who already had it, and that it was falsely inflating data on the availability of gigabit broadband.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, while the clueless press was being played to suggest encryption played a role in the San Bernardino attacks, Congress dropped all pretense and quietly turned CISA into a full-on surveillance bill that represented a massive threat to privacy (which of course didn’t stop its supporters from saying it was necessary to protect privacy). The White House broke its promise and threw its support behind the bill too, then Congress approved it as part of an omnibus bill that also contained a bunch of other nonsense. Meanwhile, Philips caused a stir with DRM on lightbulbs that locked purchasers our of third-party bulbs with a firmware upgrade, but after spending a day being kicked around by anyone and everyone online, they walked it back.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, we wrote about how the US government’s reaction to Wikileaks was doing a lot more harm than the leaks themselves, while the Congressional Research Service was complaining about having its access to the site blocked, Columbia Journalism School staff were warning Obama that prosecuting Wikileaks would set a dangerous precedent, and the government was considering trying to bring CFAA charges against Julian Assange. Meanwhile, the owners of a hip-hop blog whose domain was seized by Homeland Security were still trying to get answers about what they supposedly did wrong, the judge in the Limewire case was asking record labels to actually prove their supposed losses, and the US infamously became a book-banning country with a permanent injunction against an unauthorized sequel to Catcher In The Rye.

Filed Under: history, look back