Attaching strings to its permission gives the Federal Communications Commission a way to fund social programs Congress would never, ever pass [Stoll, Future of Capitalism] More: Josh Wright, TotM, Mickey Kaus (”backdoor bilingualism”).
Posts tagged as:
telecommunications
They’re invoking laws against wiretapping, which you might naively think were passed to protect the people from the authorities, not vice versa, [Boston Globe/Daniel Rowinski, New England Center for Investigative Reporting; Radley Balko, Reason "Hit and Run"] Now lawyer Simon Glik, who was arrested for recording an arrest, is suing three cops and the city [NLJ]
{ 5 comments }
Julia Forte of North Carolina
operates a pair of web sites — 800notes.com and whocallsme.com — that provide an interesting consumer service. These web sites include message boards that permit consumers who receive calls from telemarketers to comment on their experiences; other consumers who receive a call from a given telemarketer can take a look and make a decision about whether they want to take a particular call.
U.S. law protects her in this mission, but telemarketers who don’t like the critiques made available on her sites have begun suing, or threatening to sue her, in other countries where protections for online speech are less robust. [Paul Alan Levy, CL&P Blog]
{ 1 comment }
Marc Randazza (Dec. 12; source link he cites is NSFW):
A Rhode Island family filed a lawsuit in Kent Superior Court claiming that Verizon Communications caused “great pain, anxiety, nervousness and mental anguish,” by providing access to the Playboy Channel. Plaintiffs Robert Bourne, Denise Roy and daughters Elice Roy and Danielle Bourne are seeking compensation for “current and future medical bills.”
{ 22 comments }
The state of Kentucky enacted a new sales tax on the services of telecommunications companies. It also forbade the companies from breaking the tax out as a line item on customer’s bills — that might get people mad at the legislators, after all. The Sixth Circuit, Sutton, J., ruled that under the intermediate level of First Amendment scrutiny applied to limitations on commercial speech, the “no-stating-the-tax” provision was unconstitutional. (BellSouth v. Farris, Sept. 9).
{ 3 comments }
