This Week In Techdirt History: March 1st – 7th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2021, while AT&T was apparently committed to being comically hypocritical about Section 230, Utah was prematurely trying to dance on 230’s grave with a new and extremely horrible “free speech” bill that was a disaster in the making, and we had Ron Wyden and Chris Cox on the Techdirt Podcast to talk about why 230 matters so much. Washington State was also spitting on Section 230 by going after Google for political ads, while Arizona was moving forward with a law that would force Google and Apple to open up payments in app stores. Meanwhile, Parler dropped one lawsuit against Amazon then filed an equally dumb new one, a reporter sued the DOJ to find out if it was helping Devin Nunes try to unmask the @DevinCow Twitter account, and the FBI director was using January 6th to once again ask for encryption backdoors.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2016, it was the CIA and NSA directors talking about encryption, specifically blaming the media for terrorists using it. Congress actually seemed pretty angry about the FBI’s belief that the courts could force Apple to help it get into iPhones, and we read all 20 court filings in support of Apple in the fight, as well as the rather problematic filings from law enforcement groups on the side of the FBI, though nothing was as insane as the brief from the San Bernardino District Attorney. Meanwhile, Brazil arrested a Facebook executive because the company refused to reveal info on WhatsApp users, but a different judge quickly ordered his release. And, in a post that seems almost quaint in its obviousness now, we wrote about how Donald Trump could definitely cause problems for free speech and the First Amendment.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2011, ICE’s boss was insisting it was okay to ignore the constitution and seize domain names to help companies, Senator Al Franken was defending censoring the internet for the sake of Hollywood’s business model, and Rep. Darrell Issa was insisting that the IP Czar should be able to pin liability for file sharing on third parties (not unlike what Rosetta Stone was demanding while writing in support of COICA). Meanwhile, UK publishers were speaking out against fair use, the BSA was fearmongering about open standards, and new proposed legislation to protect the IP of farmers would make it a felony to photograph farms.