Wired

The US Digital Service emerged from the technological and political meltdown of the 2013 launch of healthcare.gov. After a squad of Silicon Valley techies descended to fix the site, President Barack Obama created USDS to get tech workers helping other parts of government. Under President Obama, the group’s missions included speeding immigration processes, and expediting the acceptance of refugees. Under President Donald Trump, the unit’s current leader, Matt Cutts, admits that he’s less likely to highlight those projects.

You might not be hearing much from big tech on net neutrality lately. But the likes of Google and Facebook are still invested in the fight behind the scenes. The Internet Association joined a legal battle to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's decision to revoke the Obama-era rules, as did the industry group Incompas, which includes smaller telecommunications companies as well as tech companies including Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, and Twitter.

Facebook is making three important announcements on false news. The first new announcement is a request for proposals from academics eager to study false news on the platform.  The second announcement is the launch of a public education campaign that will utilize the top of Facebook’s home page, perhaps the most valuable real estate on the internet.

Police departments pay Amazon to use facial-recognition technology the company says can “identify persons of interest against a collection of millions of faces in real-time.”  More than two dozen nonprofits wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to ask that he stop selling the technology to police, after the ACLU of Northern California revealed documents to shine light on the sales.

[Commentary] The Senate voted 52–47 to revive an Obama administration rule ensuring equal treatment for online traffic—the so-called “net neutrality” rule recently erased by the Trump Federal Communications Commission. But the vote wasn't really about "net neutrality." Instead, it was a deeply political, bipartisan call—three Republican Senators signed on—for internet freedom writ large. Here's why: "Net neutrality," these days, is shorthand for "We don't like how much unconstrained power Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink have over us." 

In 2013 Mark Zuckerberg debuted a bold, humanitarian vision of global internet. It didn’t go as planned—forcing Facebook to reckon with the limits of its own ambition.

The competition is stiff, but Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai may be the most reviled man on the internet. He is despised as both a bumbling rube, trying too hard to prove he gets it, and a cunning villain, out to destroy digital freedom. The anger emanates from his move, shortly after being appointed by President Donald Trump, to repeal Obama-era net ­neutrality regulations. He called his policy the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, an Orwellian touch in the view of his critics, who see ­it as a mortal threat.