Digital Content

The internet’s original promise was to help people and businesses connect, innovate and share information. Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996 to realize those goals. It was an overwhelming success. Section 230 of the act helped shepherd the internet from the “you’ve got mail” era into today’s global nexus of communication and commerce. Unfortunately, Section 230 is now poisoning the healthy online ecosystem it once fostered.

The debate on children’s use of smartphones can veer towards two extremes. There are those who see a generation made fragile by technology. They point to studies showing that social media does not just correlate with poor mental health; it causes it. The other extreme sees this as another misguided moral panic, such as the one once aimed at video games. But there are possibilities for nuance and compromise. Sonia Livingstone is a social psychologist who leads research at the London School of Economics into children’s digital lives. Livingstone’s research has led her to focus on two points.

Google is taking Canada's broadcasting regulator to court, arguing "significant" revenue it earns from advertisements on YouTube videos shouldn't be considered when it comes to the regulatory fees it owes the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). In an application filed in the Federal Court of Canada on April 24, Google says those revenues come from user-generated content, which it argues should be excluded from fee calculations because of exemptions in the Broadcasting Act. But the tech giant says that after submitting a form to the regulator which outlined it

Dotdash Meredith, one of the largest digital publishers in the US, inked a deal with OpenAI to license its content to train 

Two concrete examples of rapidly growing broadband demand are schools and internet service provider (ISP) backhaul. A decade ago, there was a scramble to get gigabit broadband access to schools. Because of the use of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) E-rate money, a lot of schools across the country got connected to fiber and were able to buy faster broadband. The original goal was to get a gigabit connection to each school, and almost every school in many states met that goal.

American and Chinese diplomats plan to meet to begin what amounts to the first, tentative arms control talks over the use of artificial intelligence. The talks in Geneva are an attempt to find some common ground on how A.I. will be used and in which situations it could be banned—for example, in the command and control of each country’s nuclear arsenals.

Microsoft and OpenAI launched a $2 million Societal Resilience Fund to further artificial intelligence education and literacy among voters and vulnerable communities. Grants delivered from the fund will help several organizations—including Older Adults Technology Services from AARP (OATS), the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) and Partnership on AI (PAI)—to deliver AI education and support their work to create better understanding of AI capabilities.

Librarians are mounting a fierce state-by-state battle against the high prices they pay to provide patrons with e-books—so far, with little to show for it. Th

Senators Brian Schatz (D-HI), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Katie Britt (R-AK) introduced new legislation to keep kids off social media and help protect them from its harmful impacts. The Kids Off Social Media Act updates legislation Schatz introduced last spring and would set a minimum age of 13 to use social media platforms and prevent social media companies from feeding algorithmically-targeted content to users under the age of 17.

Most Americans are wary of social media’s role in politics and its overall impact on the country, and these concerns are ticking up among Democrats, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults.