from the please-pay-me-billions-of-dollars-for-no-sensible-reason dept Fri, Oct 28th 2022 06:31am - Karl Bode Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of “Big Tech” paying “Big Telecom” billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. This taxation effort always involves some variant of the claim that popular tech services are getting a “free ride” on the Internet, so it’s “only fair” that t ...read more

from the so-it-went dept Five Years Ago This week in 2017, it was looking like the FCC would use the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday to hide its unpopular plan to kill net neutrality, while a Verizon-funded group was claiming that killing the rules would really help Puerto Rico. The DOJ subpoenaed Twitter about Popehat and others over a smiley emoji tweet as part of its bizarre vendetta against a security researcher. Senator Burr was pitching a Section 702 “reform” bill that would give th ...read more

Over the past few years, community has been a buzzword for tech startups looking to sell a product or service based on their definition of a useful network. The pandemic stress-tested these business models, with some companies seeing that consumers weren’t willing to pay fees in exchange for advice they could find on Twitter, while others realized that focusing on a target user was more important than finding the biggest total addressable market possible. It’s part of the reason I ha ...read more

India will set up one or more grievance committees to oversee content moderation decisions of social media firms, it said Friday, moving ahead with a proposal that has rattled Meta, Google and Twitter in the key overseas market but one it finds necessary. In an amendment to the nation’s new IT law that went into effect last year, the Indian government said any individual aggrieved by the social media’s appointed grievance officer may appeal to the Grievance Appellate Committee, which will c ...read more

Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus. (GeekWire Photo) Microsoft added a record number of employees at the end of its most recent fiscal year, ended June 30. But now the company is putting the brakes on hiring as it deals with various macroeconomic headwinds. The company reported its slowest year-over-year revenue growth in five years as part of its first fiscal quarter earnings on Tuesday. Microsoft beat expectations for revenue and profit but its shares fell more than 6% in after-hours tr ...read more

A quick caveat up top. This isn’t a review. TechCrunch does reviews. This isn’t one. There are several reasons for this. First, last week was Disrupt — I was busy on the other side of the country. Second, this week is my COVID week (third round, otherwise self-explanatory w/r/t a limited output). Third, we very rarely review routers here, for a lot of reasons, including resources. Even so, the Nest Wifi Pro is available now, so I’m committing some of my initial impressions to the page, ...read more

Why it matters: Users with multiple computers have probably needed to install much of the same software and perhaps the same games across all systems, drastically increasing bandwidth usage. Valve appears to be developing a solution for gamers in this situation. The creator of SteamDB recently discovered code indicating Valve is working on peer-to-peer Steam game transfers. The feature would let users copy games between PCs on the same local area network (LAN) which is usually faster than dow ...read more

NASA said Friday that its Psyche mission (named after the asteroid the mission is targeting) has been rescheduled to October next year. The news comes just a few months after the agency announced that it would definitively miss its planned 2022 launch attempt. The delayed schedule is due to late delivery of key components of the spacecraft, including the flight software and testing equipment. The launch window for this year concluded on October 11. NASA conducted an internal review to det ...read more

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept OnlineCourseHost.com is the easiest to use online course platform on the market, and is specifically designed for course creators with no design or technical skills. It’s extremely simple to create a course using OnlineCourseHost.com. Just fill in a simple form and you will have a beautiful courses sales page up and running in minutes, without needing to hire a designer. The user experience for both you and your students is top-notch and is comparabl ...read more

Center CEO Naveen Singh. (Center Photo) Bellevue, Wash.-based expense management software startup Center raised an additional $15 million to help fuel growth. Center targets mid-market companies that need help managing business expenses. It offers a corporate card and software tools. The startup makes money with a usage-based model. Center has more than 700 customers and tripled its customer base last year. Macroeconomic conditions such as inflation and the rise of hybrid work are prov ...read more