MIT Technology Review

As lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, and social distancing threaten to stretch out into the weeks, months, and even years ahead, there is a scramble to collect, in real time, the overwhelming abundance of information being produced online. Without it, the record of how we lived, how we changed, and how we addressed the global pandemic would be left incomplete and at the mercy of a constantly shifting internet, where even recent history has a tendency to get buried or vanish.

Aiming to tackle well-defined harms such as hate crime, stalking, and terrorist activity alongside issues such as trolling and disinformation, the United Kingdom government proposes combining work done across eight or more separate regulators into one. This new "super-regulator" could have powers to fine technology companies according to their revenue, or even to block them. It could also be able to prosecute individual executives. The proposed body could be funded either by an industry levy or from the proceeds of any enforcement fines it imposed.

Photo fakery is far from new, but artificial intelligence will completely change the game. Until recently only a big-budget movie studio could carry out a video face-swap, and it would probably have cost millions of dollars. Artificial Intelligence (AI) now makes it possible for anyone with a decent computer and a few hours to spare to do the same thing. Further machine-learning advances will make even more complex deception possible—and make fakery harder to spot. These advances threaten to further blur the line between truth and fiction in politics.

Internet activists and some politicians are ramping up efforts to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality decision, or to reimpose net neutrality rules through legislation. Here are the main battle strategies they will employ in 2018:

Entrepreneurs are rightly concerned that large companies will spend heavily to dominate fast-lane access, making it harder for some startups, such as bandwidth-hungry mobile video companies, to challenge them. “Milliseconds of difference can leave you at a disadvantage when potential customers are evaluating your product,” explains Tom Lee, the head of policy at Mapbox, a location data platform for mobile and Web applications. Even the very biggest startups could suffer.