Reporting

A Q&A with Steve Lacoff, general manager of communications at Avalara (which provides cloud-based software tax compliance), on the Permanent Internet Tax Fairness Act.  

The government must urgently ensure that more than 1 million children have reliable internet access at home or risk irreparable harm to their education, a cross-party group of Members Parliament and former ministers has said.

The protests continuing around the country are historic displays of social action. For political operatives, the mass gatherings are also a unique opportunity to harvest data on potential voters. Advocacy and voter-registration groups are gathering a trove of data from protests by tracking the cellphones of participants and sending them messages about registering to vote or taking other actions. The tactics, which one user called “deeply spooky yet extremely helpful,” are the latest example of ways political groups are using cellphone data to target voters.

Even with the global economy reeling from a pandemic-induced recession and dozens of businesses filing for bankruptcy, tech’s largest companies — still wildly profitable and flush with billions of dollars from years of corporate dominance — are deliberately laying the groundwork for a future where they will be bigger and more powerful than ever.

Long before the coronavirus pandemic, the tech industry yearned to prove its indispensability to the world. Its executives liked to describe their companies as “utilities.” They came by their self-aggrandizement honestly: The founding fathers of Big Tech really did view their creations as essential, and essentially good. In recent years, however, our infatuation with these creations has begun to curdle.

Educators told the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pension (HELP) Committee on June 10 that access to technology is key to reopening schools in the new normal of COVID-19 and they could use some help in the form of government dollars. John King, former Education Secretary under President Barack Obama, said that before COVID-19, 79% of households had broadband versus only 66% of black households and 61% of Hispanic households.

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael O'Rielly said he's unsure whether his agency has the authority to carry out President Donald Trump's executive order targeting tech firms' legal protections. President Trump's order seeks to have the FCC craft regulations limiting the scope of legal immunity that online platforms have under federal law.

Twitter introduced a new feature that prompts users to read links to articles before sharing them.

The nonprofit has said its National Emergency Library was a public service to people unable to access libraries during the pandemic, but publishers and authors accused it of theft.

More than 9 million students still don’t have the high-speed home Internet required for online learning. One hopes the recent attention on the home Internet digital divide will be a call to action for our government and society that results in real change. But given that we can’t look to the telecom industry to solve this problem, what can be done?