Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, a court slowed Trump’s roll on the TikTok ban because the DOJ couldn’t show any actual national security threat. Meanwhile, the attacks on Section 230 were coming in waves, with a stupid new bill from Joe Manchin and John Cornyn quickly followed by two more anti-Section 230 bills, and then yet another one from Jim Jordan. We wrote about how crazy it was for congressional Republicans, who had no strategy on the pandemic or anything else, to decide that the internet is the real problem, and how baffling it was that although we expect that kind of thing from the GOP, they were getting help from Senate Democrats.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, not yet knowing just how insane things would get, we wrote about the increasing number of attacks on Section 230. Meanwhile, a look at Rightscorp’s copyright trolling phone script revealed some of the lies they told to their targets, Malibu Media woke the beast when it decided to try to push Verizon around, and a German copyright trolling operation announced plans to step up its efforts in the UK. This was also the week that, after years of supporting users who want to use AdBlockers, we officially made it possible to disable ads on Techdirt via your user settings.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, as the Senate was pushing the COICA bill, we wrote about all the technologies and industries that Senators Leahy and Hatch would have banned in the past, as well as all the current things it might end up being used to censor, and also looked at how the White House was already asking registrars to censor “infringing” sites even without the law in place, before finally the bill got shelved for the time being. Meanwhile, Privacy International was hatching plans to sue ACS:Law (whose shakedown scheme was not looking very profitable), and an appeals court told ASCAP that a download is not a performance.

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