1. Monthly archive
  2. July 2023

July 2023

The Internet Didn’t Destroy Local Languages; It’s Helping Preserve Them

If you Google the question “Is the Internet killing local languages and cultures,” you will receive a lot of results that suggest the answer is yes. But if you look at them a bit more closely, you will see that the most dire warnings tend to be from 2010 to 2017. More recent results often take the opposite stance—that technology actually helps preserve local languages. Advances in machine translation are clearly part of this shift in opinion. But there are also important economic, geopolitical, and cultural forces at work. Languages have always evolved as if in a marketplace.

Restoring US Leadership on Digital Policy

The US emerged as a global leader in digital policy in the 1990s thanks to its pro-innovation approach, supplemented by multi-stakeholder and international cooperation on key issues.

Senate Panel Piles On Potential Social Media Regulations

Big Tech could be fighting a losing battle with a bipartisan movement in Congress for new regulations on social media use by children, including getting kids off such platforms entirely. The Senate Commerce Committee approved two bills, the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (CTOPPA), sending them along to the full

T-Mobile Gets Mostly Bad News in Advertising Watchdog Decision

T-Mobile will appeal several decisions made by the National Advertising Division (NAD) of BBB National Programs to challenges brought by AT&T. The decisions involved “Phone Freedom” ads that appeared in television commercials, radio advertisements, and on T-Mobile’s website. The good news for T-Mobile is that NAD found at least one claim made in the “Phone Freedom” campaign to be supported. The bad news for T-Mobile is that some claims were not found to be supported.

National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy

This first-of-its-kind comprehensive approach is aimed at addressing both immediate and long-term cyber workforce needs. Filling the hundreds of thousands of cyber job vacancies across our nation is a national security imperative and the Administration is making generational investments to prepare our country to lead in the digital economy.

Coalition forms against BEAD letter of credit requirement

A small coalition of internet service providers (ISP), broadband associations, and digital equity advocates is emerging to warn that a requirement for service providers to provide a letter of credit in order to participate in the federal government's Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program will "shut out a huge number of ISPs." The $42 billion BEAD program requires grant recipients to provide a letter of credit for 25% of the award, in addition to a 25% match requirement.

Self-Proclaimed “Free Speech Absolutist” Elon Musk Tries to Silence Independent Researchers Center for Countering Digital Hate

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has been a leading voice exposing how Musk’s leadership and the changes he is making to “X” have led to a proliferation of hate speech on the platform. While Musk proclaims himself to be an advocate for free speech, his latest tactics involve making brazen verbal and legal threats against CCDH, all while allowing racist, antisemitic content to proliferate on his platform. Rese

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