Favorite Ethos Capital is at it again. In 2019, this secretive private equity firm that includes insiders from the domain name industry tried to buy the nonprofit that runs the .ORG domain. A huge coalition of nonprofits and users spoke out. Governments expressed alarm, and ICANN (the entity in charge of the internet’s domain name…
All posts tagged Shadow Regulation
UN Report Sets Forth Strong Recommendations for Companies to Protect Free Expression
Favorite “YouTube keeps deleting evidence of Syrian chemical weapon attacks” “Azerbaijani faces terrorist propaganda charge in Georgia for anti-Armenian Facebook post” “Medium Just Took Down A Post It Says Doxed ICE Employees” These are just a sampling of recent headlines relating to the regulation of user-generated online content, an increasingly controversial subject that has civil…
Senators Pressure Platforms for Private Censorship of Drug Information
Favorite Last month Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), John Kennedy (R-La.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) separately wrote to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Pinterest accusing them of facilitating trade in illegal narcotics and prescription drugs. The near-identical letters demand that each of the recipients: consider removing from its platform content that advertises the use…
Private Censorship Is Not the Best Way to Fight Hate or Defend Democracy: Here Are Some Better Ideas
Favorite From Cloudflare’s headline-making takedown of the Daily Stormer last autumn to YouTube’s summer restrictions on LGBTQ content, there’s been a surge in “voluntary” platform censorship. Companies—under pressure from lawmakers, shareholders, and the public alike—have ramped up restrictions on speech, adding new rules, adjusting their still-hidden algorithms and hiring more staff to moderate content. They…
How Threats Against Domain Names Are Used to Censor Content
Favorite Today EFF and Public Knowledge are releasing a whitepaper titled Which Internet registries offer the best protection for domain owners? Top-level domains are the letters after the dot, like .com, .uk, .biz, or .mobi. Since 2003, hundreds of new top-level domains have come onto the market, and there has never been more choice for…
Payment Processors Are Profiling Heavy Metal Fans as Terrorists
Favorite If you happen to be a fan of the heavy metal band Isis (an unfortunate name, to be sure), you may have trouble ordering its merchandise online. Last year, Paypal suspended a fan who ordered an Isis t-shirt, presumably on the false assumption that there was some association between the heavy metal band and…
Industry Efforts to Censor Pro-Terrorism Online Content Pose Risks to Free Speech
Favorite In recent months, social media platforms—under pressure from a number of governments—have adopted new policies and practices to remove content that promotes terrorism. As the Guardian reported, these policies are typically carried out by low-paid contractors (or, in the case of YouTube, volunteers) and with little to no transparency and accountability. While the motivations…
London Police Ink Shadowy Deal with Industry on Website Takedowns
Favorite We’ve previously highlighted how payment service providers like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and others go beyond the law to isolate and effectively censor websites that infringe their sometimes arbitrary standards. This has resulted in websites that provide information on sexuality, pharmaceuticals, or whistleblowing, suddenly finding themselves cut off from their sources of funding, and left with…
FOIA Uncovers Part of U.K. Shadow Regulation on Search Engines and Copyright
Favorite Last month we wrote about the adoption of a new secret agreement between copyright holders and the major search engines, brokered by the U.K. Intellectual Property Office, aimed at making websites associated with copyright infringement less visible in search results. Since the agreement wasn’t publicly available, we simultaneously issued a request under the U.K.’s Freedom…
Healthy Domains Revisited: the Pharmaceutical Industry
Favorite Users scored an exciting victory over copyright-based censorship last month, when the Domain Name Association (DNA) and the Public Interest Registry (PIR), in response to criticism from EFF, both abruptly withdrew their proposals for a new compulsory arbitration system to confiscate domain names of websites accused of copyright infringement. But copyright enforcement was only…