Over the past couple of weeks, a who’s who of over 500 brands, including Verizon, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Levi’s, Starbucks, Reebok, Adidas, and Ford, announced they would withdraw their advertising from Facebook for the month of July or longer. Many were responding to the #StopHateForProfit campaign, organized by a coalition of civil rights and public interest […]

Last year, Public Knowledge and Roosevelt Institute published my book, The Case for the Digital Platform Act, I argued there that we could define digital platforms as a distinct sector of the economy, and that the structure of these businesses and the nature of the sector combined to encourage behaviors that create challenges for existing […]

Libraries have been central to culture, education, and research for centuries. Libraries have been part of America since the early 18th Century; the most famous early American library, (though not the first), was founded by Benjamin Franklin and others in Philadelphia in 1731. Libraries have taken many shapes — they’ve been public and private; membership-based […]

There’s a common theme in many proposals to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — the idea that companies need to just follow their terms of service consistently and fairly. Of course, I agree. Who doesn’t? As I detailed in a paper in 2018, I believe that dominant platforms should give their users […]

Today, we’re releasing a new paper, “Tending the Garden: How to Ensure that App Stores Put Users First.” It is topical, because this week is also Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference — an annual event primarily geared toward software creators. This event gives them a preview of upcoming operating system versions and application programming interfaces (APIs) […]

This is our discussion on whether a new digital regulator is necessary — and what one might look like — to effectively promote competition and fairness on these powerful platforms.

There are very few actions as immediately and obviously intrusive as having your mail read. No matter your age or place — or how much you still use physical mail — the right to private communications is an established social norm. Whether I send a letter, text, or email, I expect no one but the […]

Bashing social media for supposed liberal bias has become pretty standard fare for some conservative pundits and politicians. This remains true despite zero evidence of any kind of bias by social media companies against conservative content or Republican politicians. In fairness, Democratic political leaders have made similar accusations. For example, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has […]

When Public Knowledge came out against the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger in 2017, we were worried that the merger would create both the incentive for the combined company to withhold, or charge more for its own content to rival distributors, and to discriminate against competing content on its own distribution services. The merger went through […]

This was our discussion on how we can use technology to make sure that students, educators, and others can continue to remotely access the collections they need, during lock-down and beyond.