• Stop Verizon's Backroom Deal

    Josh Levy
    March 19, 2012

    Your cable and wireless companies are getting into bed together.

    Verizon has struck a sweetheart deal with a cartel of cable companies — including Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications — in which they’ve agreed to stop competing against one another. The new plan? To divvy up the spoils of the growing mobile market.

  • There's No Such Thing as the Tooth Fairy --- or Data Hogs

    Josh Levy
    February 27, 2012

    Let’s not sugarcoat it: The wireless industry is a big racket.

    Here’s one reason why: AT&T and Verizon are slowing down — or throttling — Internet access on smartphones, supposedly to manage congestion on their networks. Yet a new study supports what many of us have been saying all along: These companies aren’t throttling to save bandwidth.

    They’re doing it to rip us off.

  • Mutant Broadband Bills Are Infecting Our Communities

    Josh Levy
    February 22, 2012

    Should communities have a right to decide how residents get online? It sounds like a simple question. It isn’t.

    The notion of self-determination is fundamental to our self-identify, our politics and the way we construct our communities. And while we all have different interpretations of what “the right to self-determination” means, most of us can agree that it’s a bad thing when governments try to take it away.

  • The Payroll Tax and the Public Airwaves: What's It All About?

    Josh Levy
    February 17, 2012

    Congress just voted on a bill that extends the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. A significant provision will determine the future of a large portion of the public airwaves, or spectrum. That the New York Times gave this issue — ordinarily covered only in tech journals — front-page treatment speaks volumes.

  • The SOPA/PIPA Money Trail

    Josh Levy
    February 7, 2012

    Before the Web blacked out to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) — the Internet-censorship bills that faced massive opposition online — there was another SOPA blackout. This one came courtesy of the TV news networks, which almost uniformly ignored SOPA and PIPA until it was impossible not to.

    A Media Matters report showed that in the run-up to Jan. 18, when Wikipedia, Google, Reddit and other big sites joined millions of Internet users in one of the biggest online protests to date, only CNN mentioned SOPA and/or PIPA in its nightly news coverage.

  • Censorship U?

    Josh Levy
    February 3, 2012

    Great news. Last night, thanks to the rapid response of Free Press activists, Arizona State University lifted its blocking of student access to Change.org.

    We hope ASU understands that it must put the free speech rights of its students first. Free Press has asked the university to scrutinize its Internet-use policies to ensure they don’t compromise these online freedoms. 

  • A Push for Privacy in the Wake of the Carrier IQ Controversy

    Josh Levy
    January 31, 2012

    Remember Carrier IQ, the company that makes the secret spying software that’s installed on more than 140 million phones? You know, the software that can record our most sensitive personal data?

    Cellphone companies including AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile use Carrier IQ to track what smartphone users are doing on their phones, but it’s unclear what data is being tracked and what is being done with that information. While both these companies and Carrier IQ claim they want our most sensitive information only to diagnose hardware and software problems, the public — and some members of Congress — still have questions about what, exactly, this powerful software can do.

  • Media Literacy Students Create Anti-SOPA Video

    Josh Levy
    January 24, 2012

    Under the leadership of our friends at New Mexico’s Media Literacy Project, ninth graders Jack Folkner, Martin Jencka and Jay Jewell-Roth created a video about the recently shelved Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

  • Web Blacks Out, Senators Defect

    Josh Levy
    January 19, 2012

    Yesterday was unbelievable. In an unprecedented show of strength, millions of Internet users rose up against the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s Protect IP Act, with Wikipedia, reddit, Boing Boing, SavetheInternet.com and thousands of other sites going black to join in the protest (even Google hid its logo behind a black bar for the day). Millions sent letters to Congress, and tens of thousands picked up the phone to urge their senators to vote “no” on PIPA, which is scheduled for a Jan. 24 vote.

  • Momentum Builds Against SOPA and PIPA

    Josh Levy
    January 17, 2012

    Tomorrow you might be wondering who turned out the lights. Don’t worry — it will simply be one of the biggest days in the history of the open Internet.

    Thousands of websites — including Wikipedia, reddit, BoingBoing, FreePress.net and SavetheInternet.com — will go dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), bills in the House and Senate that could open the door to widespread censorship online.

Pages