Digital Content

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are amplifying a crisis for human rights online. While AI technology offers exciting and beneficial uses for science, education, and society at large, its uptake has also increased the scale, speed, and efficiency of digital repression. Automated systems have enabled governments to conduct more precise and subtle forms of online censorship. Purveyors of disinformation are employing AI-generated images, audio, and text, making the truth easier to distort and harder to discern.

Currently, no federal agency can effectively monitor or address broadband outages that threaten jobs, education, and public safety. And while the Federal Communications Commission has acted on a bipartisan basis to secure our communications networks against companies controlled by hostile foreign governments, the lack of specific authority over broadband leaves open a national security loophole.

Over 40 Republican senators signed a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel urging her to abandon her proposal to reinstate net neutrality rules. Re-imposing heavy-handed, public-utility regulations on the internet, they wrote, would threaten the progress our country has made since 2017, and it would steer our country out of the fast lane and into a world of less competition, less choice, less investment, slower speeds, and higher prices. Further, the FCC lacks this statutory authority over broadband internet access.

After months of experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) to make their work more efficient, some newsrooms are now dipping their toes in more treacherous waters: trying to harness AI to detect bias or inaccuracies in their work. Confidence in the news media is at 

The debate around “net neutrality” is back, only this time there is even less chance that the matter will be settled for good. Consumers’ online rights still need protection, and restoring them for an open internet is worthwhile. Those pointing to internet service providers’ (ISP) “good behavior” are being disingenuous at best. The 2018 decision to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's earlier net neutrality rule was being challenged in court until 2020, by which point several states had set up or had in motion their own net neutrality regulations in the absence of a federal one.

Net neutrality regulations have been dead for years, and they should stay that way. Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission has moved to reopen and re-litigate the issue. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has initiated a new rule-making that would enact what are largely the same net neutrality rules tried back in 2016. The law has changed and markets have changed, and yet the arguments for and against net neutrality have largely remained the same.

Traffic referrals to the top global news sites from Meta's Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) has collapsed over the past year, according to data from Similarweb. Website business models that depended on clicks from social media are now broken, as regulatory 

The labor agreement that writers struck with studios and streaming platforms will likely accelerate the end to “peak TV," a decade that included an explosion of programming for viewers and job opportunities for talent in Hollywood. Streamers will have to find a way to pay increased talent costs—from the writers’ settlement, along with an earlier deal with directors and whatever is finalized with actors—without adding to their overall production costs. That will likely mean that companies will make fewer new shows and cancel even more that are on the bubble.

This Reuters Institute report uses survey data from 20 countries and qualitative research from the United Kingdom (UK), US, and Germany to explore who is paying for news content online, which publications they pay for, how much they pay, and what motivations they have for subscribing or donating to news. The focus is  on how the cost-of-living crisis is impacting willingness to pay for online news. Key findings include that payment for online news is leveling off with high levels of cancellation strongly linked to the cost-of-living crisis.

Europe’s biggest telecommunications companies have called on the European Union to compel Big Tech to pay a “fair” contribution for using their networks, the latest stage in a battle for payments that has pitched the sector against companies such as Netflix and Google. Technology companies that “benefit most” from telecommunications infrastructure and drive traffic growth should contribute more to costs, according to the chief executives of 20 groups including BT, Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica.