Court case

Over the past 26 years, the Universal Service Fund — a federal subsidy pool collected monthly from American telephone customers — has spent close to $9 billion a year to give Americans better phone and internet connections, wiring rural communities in Arkansas, inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago, and public libraries and schools across the country. Now it faces the biggest crisis of its existence, and Congress appears paralyzed in the effort to fix it.

Dish Network wants to buy 800 MHz licenses from T-Mobile, but it doesn’t have $3.5 billion on hand to finance the purchase, so it’s asking the US government to give it 10 more months to come up with the capital. In a filing with the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Dish argues that turmoil in global capital markets in the past few years have made Dish’s ability to buy the licenses more onerous than anticipated. Dish figures that 10 months is enough time to raise additional capital and obtain financing, in part because its just-announced 

Years after a lawsuit alleged Apple was adding software that slowed down older iPhones, the tech giant has agreed to pay a settlement worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Cotchett, Pitre & McCarty, one of the firms representing Apple customers in the suit, announced Aug. 9, 2023, that the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals dismissed two appeals from people challenging the settlement.

The Biden administration on Monday told the Supreme Court it should overturn the 5th Circuit Court’s decision to uphold a controversial Texas social media law, calling on the high court to take up a pair of cases that could have broad implications for the future of online speech. At stake are two laws passed in Texas and Florida in response to allegations that tech companies censor conservative viewpoints.

The latest battle between free and expensive information started with a charitable gesture. Brewster Kahle runs the Internet Archive, a venerable tech nonprofit. In that miserable, frightening first month of the Covid pandemic, he had the notion to try to help students, researchers and general readers.

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

A collective cry is breaking out as authors, artists and internet publishers realize that the generative-AI phenomenon sweeping the globe is built partly on the back of their work. The emerging awareness has set up a war between the forces behind the inputs and the outputs of these new artificial-intelligence tools, over whether and how content originators should be compensated. The disputes threaten to throw sand into the gears of the AI boom just as it seems poised to revolutionize the global economy.

The US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana barred certain government agencies from working with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” The injunction seems to threaten the myriad of government programs—including those in the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the St

Microsoft can close its $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a federal judge ruled, delivering a major setback to the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to rein in big mergers. The deal would combine Microsoft’s Xbox videogaming business with the publisher of popular franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush.

The US Justice Department asked a federal judge to stay his sweeping injunction barring many government interactions with social media companies on free-speech grounds, arguing that it was vague, confusing and likely to be overturned on appeal. “The Court’s July 4 preliminary injunction is both sweeping in scope and vague in its terms,” lawyers led by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton wrote in a filing before US District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana, citing rules that require the document to make clear “exactly what conduct is proscribed.” The government team ask