This Week In Techdirt History: December 24th – 30th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, a dangerous court ruling said colleges may be required to block access to certain websites, while we wrote about how ridiculous it is to make domain registrars liable for content on domains. Rep. Louie Gohmert was pushing to strip Section 230 immunity from social media platforms that aren’t “neutral”, the Indian government wanted to force tech companies to break encryption and give cops access to user data within 24 hours, and the EFF won its FOIA lawsuit over the DEA’s Hemisphere program. We also looked at the extraordinary number of takedown notices that Google receives for URLs that aren’t even in Google, and at a startling example of the potential privacy nightmare of the GDPR.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, the conflict-ridden journalist behind 60 Minutes’ NSA propaganda piece was lashing out at his critics, while the show was happily continuing to do the same thing again. Rep. Mike Rogers went on TV to lie about the NSA and Edward Snowden, while some agency defenders were ramping up their rhetoric and calling for Snowden to be hanged. A former CIA boss was saying that even though metadata collection hasn’t been useful, it should be expanded, while the author of the infamous torture memo was saying judges are too out of touch to determine if the NSA violated the 4th Amendment. Also, the USTR was sued for failing to reveal TPP details in response to a FOIA request.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, record labels were continuing their war on music startups (though learning they didn’t have as much leverage as they wanted over YouTube), while the RIAA announced that it would finally stop suing thousands of alleged downloaders… but really just as a way of sidestepping due process, and not every ISP was going along with its new plan. Australia unveiled plans to censor the internet even more by filtering BitTorrent, and the Minister in charge quickly turned off his blog and closed commments upon seeing the backlash. Meanwhile, Vietnam outlawed “subversive” blogs and put liability on ISPs.