Bethesda Does Denuvo Backwards: Puts The DRM On Game Released A Year Ago

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the it's-baaaack dept

It’s been quite some time since we’ve talked about Denuvo and its once-vaunted anti-piracy DRM for video games. If I’m being totally honest, I had thought that part of the company’s business was simply gone, so poorly did the DRM perform. By the end, cracking groups were getting around Denuvo-protected games in days, sometimes a single day, and even sometimes in a matter of hours. If a DRM can be defeated in hours, what’s the point of it?

Well, the answer from some was that the DRM at least offered some protection in the critical first-release window of a video game. The idea is that with a massive percentage of a game’s sales occurring within the first days and weeks of release, the protection offered within that window was worth the cost of the DRM. I’d argue that’s idiotic for a variety of reasons, but there is at least some logic to it. If you’re Bethesda, though, apparently you layer Denuvo onto a game that was released a year ago.

Bethesda Softworks has just quietly added Denuvo protections to Ghostwire Tokyo, a game that was quickly cracked after its Denuvo-free release just over a year ago. The late addition was confirmed by DSOGaming, which says it triggered the new Denuvo protections in the game’s latest Steam update by simulating frequent changes in the CPU. While fresh Denuvo protection seems unlikely to impact piracy for the long-cracked title, it could serve as a shield for new DLC and expansion content.

It doesn’t appear, however, that buying DLC is what will trigger the addition of Denuvo. Those who play the game are going to be getting it regardless. Which, frankly, is pretty shitty. Customers bought the game without Denuvo and now, after a year, they’re suddenly going to have DRM added to what they already purchased? DRM with a reputation for causing major performance issues.

Piracy issues aside, Denuvo has received widespread criticism for allegedly hurting performance when compared to unprotected versions of the same game. Ars’ testing found those allegations weren’t true for Warner Bros.’ Arkham Knight, but Digital Foundry found Denuvo caused some minor CPU-based slowdown in Devil May Cry 5.

So, will Denuvo help protect all this DLC and expansion content for Ghostwire? I doubt it, given how quickly Denuvo has tended to be defeated since roughly 2020. But, hey, maybe Bethesda can at least get its money worth by pissing off its own customers in doing all this, right?

Filed Under: denuvo, drm, ghostwire tokyo, video games
Companies: bethesda

Bluesky Plans Decentralized Composable Moderation

Content Moderation

from the power-to-the-people dept

We just wrote about Substack’s issue with content moderation and the Nazi bar problem. As I highlighted in that piece, any centralized service is going to be defined by their moderation choices. If you cater to terrible, abusive people, you become “the site that caters to terrible abusive people.” That’s not a comment on “free speech” because it has nothing to do with free speech. It has to do with how you keep your own corner of the internet and what people will associate with you and your brand.

This is why I’ve argued for years that any one particular private service cannot be “the town square.” The internet itself is the town square built on decentralized protocols that allow everyone to communicate. Each centralized service is a private plot of land on that wider open vista, and if you want it to be unkempt and full of terrible people, you are free to do so, but don’t be surprised, or act offended, when lots of people decide they don’t want to associate with you.

This is also why I’ve spent so many years talking up the importance of a protocols not platforms approach to free speech. With decentralized protocols, the questions are different, and the ability to speak freely is retained, but the central issue of abusers, harassers, nonsense peddlers and more can be dealt with in different ways, rather than looking to a centralized nexus of control to handle it.

This is why I remain encouraged about Bluesky, the decentralized social media protocol which was ever so slightly influenced by my paper. It’s been in beta testing over the past few months, and has plenty of promise, including in overcoming some of the limitations of the ActivityPub-driven fediverse.

Around the same time that Substack’s Chris Best was melting down in response to fairly straightforward content moderation questions, Bluesky put up a blog post explaining its philosophy around content moderation: Composable Moderation.

Moderation is a necessary feature of social spaces. It’s how bad behavior gets constrained, norms get set, and disputes get resolved. We’ve kept the Bluesky app invite-only and are finishing moderation before the last pieces of open federation because we wanted to prioritize user safety from the start.

Just like our approach to algorithmic choice, our approach to moderation allows for an ecosystem of third-party providers. Moderation should be a composable, customizable piece that can be layered into your experience. For custom feeds, there is a basic default (only who you follow), and then many possibilities for custom algorithms. For moderation as well, there should be a basic default, and then many custom filters available on top.

The basics of our approach to moderation are well-established practices. We do automated labeling, like centralized social sites, and make service-level admin decisions, like many federated networks. But the piece we’re most excited about is the open, composable labeling system we’re building that both developers and users can contribute to. Under the hood, centralized social sites use labeling to implement moderation — we think this piece can be unbundled, opened up to third-party innovation, and configured with user agency in mind. Anyone should be able to create or subscribe to moderation labels that third parties create.

The actual details of how this will be implemented matter, but this seems like the right approach. There is certain content that needs to get taken down: generally child sex abuse material, outright commercial spam, and copyright infringement. But, beyond that, there are many different directions one can go, and allowing third parties to join in the process, opens up some really interesting vectors of competition to explore alternative forms of moderation, and create different views of content.

Here’s the way we’re designing an open, composable labeling system for moderation:

• Anyone can define and apply “labels” to content or accounts (i.e. “spam”, “nsfw”). This is a separate service, so they do not have to run a PDS (personal data server) or a client app in order to do so.
• Labels can be automatically generated (by third-party services, or by custom algorithms) or manually generated (by admins, or by users themselves)
• Any service or person in the network can choose how these labels get used to determine the final user experience.

So how will we be applying this on the Bluesky app? Automated filtering is a commoditized service by now, so we will be taking advantage of this to apply a first pass to remove illegal content and label objectionable material. Then we will apply server-level filters as admins of bsky.social, with a default setting and custom controls to let you hide, warn, or show content. On top of that, we will let users subscribe to additional sets of moderation labels that can filter out more content or accounts.

Let’s dig into the layers here. Centralized social platforms delegate all moderation to a central set of admins whose policies are set by one company. This is a bit like resolving all disputes at the level of the Supreme Court. Federated networks delegate moderation decisions to server admins. This is more like resolving disputes at a state government level, which is better because you can move to a new state if you don’t like your state’s decisions — but moving is usually difficult and expensive in other networks. We’ve improved on this situation by making it easier to switch servers, and by separating moderation out into structurally independent services.

We’re calling the location-independent moderation infrastructure “community labeling” because you can opt-in to an online community’s moderation system that’s not necessarily tied to the server you’re on.

This, combined with Bluesky’s plan to allow anyone to create their own algorithms, and offer up a kind of marketplace of algorithms, is what makes Bluesky such an interesting project to me, in that it creates a much more decentralized social media, but without the philosophical issues that often seem to hold back Mastodon (some top down decisions and norms against any algorithms or search, and still relying on individual instances to handle moderation issues).

I’ve seen some people complain about the initial implementation of Bluesky’s content moderation system, which is in user settings, and pops up a window like this (with these defaults):

The negative feedback I heard was that setting things up this way suggests that Bluesky is “okay with Political Hate-Groups” but I actually think it’s much more interesting, and much more nuanced than that. Again, remember the idea here is that it’s allowing lots of people to put in place their own moderation rules and systems, allowing for their to be competition over them.

This approach, actually has some pretty clear advantages, in that it gets us somewhat past the nonsense about “censorship” and basically says “look, we’re not taking down your speech, but it’s not going to be seen as the default.” And, on top of that, it takes away the excuses from huffy nonsense consumers who whine about not being able to get content from their favorite nonsense peddlers. You can argue that nonsense peddlers should never be able to find a space to spew their nonsense, but that’s never going to work. Beyond being an affront to general principles of free speech, it also is simply impossible to stop.

We’ve seen that already: people banned from Twitter or Facebook found their own places to speak and spew their nonsense. That’s always going to happen. With a setup like this, it actually does help limit the biggest concern: the discoverability that drives more users down the path from reality to nonsense.

But, also, importantly, a system like this actually makes it easier for those who need to monitor the nonsense peddlers, from law enforcement to academic researchers to the media, great visibility into what’s happening, and to have better responses prepared.

Again, these are early days, but I’m encouraged by this approach, and think it’s going to be much more interesting than lots of other approaches out there for content moderation.

Filed Under: at protocol, composable moderation, content moderation, decentralized, protocols
Companies: bluesky

New Colorado Bill Protects Farmers’ ‘Right To Repair’

Policy

from the fix-your-own-shit dept

Starting next year, Colorado farmers will have a much easier time repairing their equipment thanks to a new state law protecting their “right to repair.”

Colorado’s new bill, the Consumer Right to Repair Agricultural Equipment Act, requires that agricultural equipment giants like John Deere provide consumers and independent repair shops the “parts, embedded software, firmware, tools,” and other documents needed to repair increasingly complicated hardware they own:

Starting January 1, 2024, the bill requires a manufacturer to provide parts, embedded software, firmware, tools, or documentation, such as diagnostic, maintenance, or repair manuals, diagrams, or similar information (resources), to independent repair providers and owners of the manufacturer’s agricultural equipment to allow an independent repair provider or owner to conduct diagnostic, maintenance, or repair services on the owner’s agricultural equipment.

Numerous companies have attempted to monopolize repair by acquiring competitors, suing independent repair shops, implementing annoying DRM, or just generally making it difficult to obtain needed parts, documents, and tools. It’s been a problem that has touched numerous sectors, from agricultural and medical equipment to everyday consumer electronics.

John Deere’s been one of the worst offenders. The company’s draconian repair restrictions on agricultural equipment often result in customers having to pay an arm and a leg, or drive hundreds of additional, costly miles to get their tractors repaired. The company routinely claims to have seen the light and promises to change, only to further double down on its efforts to monopolize repair.

Lobbyists have increasingly been attacking such reform efforts, usually by falsely claiming that cracking down on these companies’ attempted repair monopolies would create all manner of privacy and security risks for U.S. consumers. Automakers in Massachusetts went so far recently as to lie and claim the state’s right to repair efforts would embolden sexual predators.

Most of the companies keen on monopolizing repair (John Deere, Apple, Verizon, Microsoft, U.S. automakers, U.S. medical equipment makers) have worked tirelessly to ensure any federal legislative solution remains sidelined, despite widespread, bipartisan support for such measures (polls consistently show public support for reform ranging anywhere from 75 to 95 percent).

Filed Under: colorado, farmers, independent repair, monopoly, reform, right to repair

Microsoft Ditches Twitter From Its Ads Platform… So Elon Announces Plans To Sue Microsoft

Overhype

from the not-how-any-of-this-works dept

Elon Musk seems to take a personal affront to anyone who says “dude, we’re not going to pay your crazy prices for stuff.” For example, he pulled the NY Times “verified” badge weeks before everyone else was set to lose it after they announced they wouldn’t pay.

Now, Microsoft has announced that it is dropping Twitter from its Smart Campaigns advertising platform, in part because of the $42,000 per month API fee (the “small” package) that Musk is trying to charge. This comes right after Intercom, one of the giant customer support companies, which many organizations use to manage their customer support work on Twitter, announced that it was also dropping Twitter support from its platform over Musk’s API fees.

The Microsoft move is a big deal, because it means even fewer advertisers will likely be putting ads on Twitter. But, Microsoft realizes that it’s just not worth it to pay the ridiculous fee for very little benefit, so it has told customers that Twitter will be gone as of next week.

Musk, in his typical fashion, responded by throwing a little tantrum, and suggesting he’s going to sue Microsoft… for “illegal” use of Twitter data.

“They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time” the man says.

This is another tell from Musk. I mean, he made the same bullshit claim about Substack after he had the company (temporarily) block users from interacting with any tweet that had a Substack link in it, claiming (falsely) that Substack was “trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone.”

So, yeah, this lawsuit is not happening, or if it does, I don’t expect it to go well for Musk and Twitter. Contrary to Musk’s belief, he doesn’t have any sort of intellectual property rights over data on Twitter. Claims that Microsoft did something “illegal” in using Twitter’s data seems massively unlikely. I’m guessing he’s making some sort of swipe at OpenAI, which Microsoft backed and which Elon is at war with (despite helping to found it).

Musk has complained a few times in the past that some of OpenAI’s training data was from Twitter, but… that’s legal. “Training” on data means reading the data, and as long as the data is public, then it’s open to be read, and used in such a manner.

Still, there’s a larger point here: beyond the stupidity of his current API pricing, why would any business feel comfortable trusting important business to Twitter when the company’s owner and CEO acts like a petulant child in response to a company not wishing to pay his extortionate fees?

This is why Twitter is failing. Elon Musk himself is a liability. He’s the one driving advertisers and partners away.

I keep seeing others in Silicon Valley trying to tiptoe around this, and try to piece together some grand plan here, just like Republicans did with Trump during his administration. You have to get over it. There is no grand strategy. There is a petulant, immature, rich kid, who has spent too long surrounded by suck ups and yes men, who has no one who will tell him that he is the problem.

Twitter wasn’t a great business, and was primed for a big shakeup. And maybe it needed new management. But there were ways to shake up Twitter that didn’t literally drive away much of its revenue due entirely to the CEO’s own antics. Even when he has good ideas (encrypting DMs, promoting the premium subscription features) he seems to still fuck it up. There were wide open ways to improve Twitter.

And instead he’s throwing temper tantrums when faced with the consequences of his own actions.

Filed Under: api, data, elon musk, lawsuit threats, pricing, temper tantrum, training
Companies: microsoft, twitter

Florida Legislators Push Bills Aimed At Making It More Difficult To Film Cops

Free Speech

from the who-decides-what-14-feet-actually-is dept

A number of stupid lawmakers have attempted to basically outlaw filming cops by proposing imaginative legislation that would prevent all but the most ineffective documentation of public employees performing their public duties.

You can’t outlaw filming police. The First Amendment pretty much prevents that, even if case law in judicial circuits is still not completely settled. What you can do is create new offenses that give officers a reason to arrest people for filming then, including people wandering within a circumference that’s wholly defined by the officer enforcing it.

So far, it’s only the state of Arizona that has managed to outlaw recording of cops, as long as the recording isn’t far enough away from the scene of the action. Other states have tried (Texas said 25 feet before shrinking it to 20 feet, which was then followed by an abandonment of this effort) but Florida legislators seem intent on limiting outside documentation of police activities.

This opinion piece published at Yahoo attacks the law, but it unfortunately opens with a poorly worded paragraph that might muddle the issue before anyone can get to the rest of the piece. It calls it this effort “witness intimidation legislation,” a term that suggests the state wants to limit witness intimidation when, in fact, it’s actually trying to intimidate witnesses of police misconduct.

This is more to the point:

If passed, this legislation would allow police officers greater authority to harass and criminalize people for documenting their use of excessive force. It would make it illegal to approach within 20 feet of a police officer (and, in the case of the Senate bill, other first responders) effectively criminalizing, with fines and jail time, the filming of police at close proximity.

All of this is true. The state Senate version makes it illegal to approach any “first responder” within 14 feet with the intent to “impede, provoke, or harass.” The House version is pretty much the same thing, but with a 20-foot radius. Both define harassment as any act that “causes emotional distress” and “serves no legitimate purpose.” That last stipulation might prove handy in court. Many courts consider filming police officers to be a legitimate act of public service and preemptively covered by the First Amendment.

Both versions are equally terrible in other ways. They both criminalize the production of sound — the criminality of which will apparently be left up to the discretion of the police officer at the scene.

Harass the first responder or make so much noise that a first responder is prevented from performing their official duties or providing medical aid.

I have yet to hear any first responder (referring only to EMS units and/or firefighters) being so deterred by bystanders’ noise they could not do their jobs. In fact, I’ve never heard about any first responder being sued by someone for violating their First Amendment rights by preventing them from recording the incident and/or being too close to the action. Almost everyone understands first responders of this sort are there to save lives and prevent/limit injury. They give them their space and respect their requests to give them more space.

That’s one of several reasons this legislation is bullshit. It tries to treat cops as first responders when first responders are always there to save lives, rather than harm them. First responders don’t mind being filmed because they’re generally engaged in actually heroic acts.

Cops, on the other hand, wander into bad situations and make them worse. They aren’t there to save lives. Even when they’re specifically asked to save lives, they often prefer to take them. That’s why cops don’t want to be filmed and that’s why shitty legislators are writing shitty legislation and pushing it through the legislature by pretending people are routinely harassing actual heroes, rather than just bad cops doing bad things.

These are proposals solely meant to push people bringing accountability to cops further back. This gives cops a reason to arrest people for filming them. This is an attempt to codify an imaginary radius, where 14-20 feet will be whatever a cop needs it to be when too many citizens are doing too much filming. Laws like these were never proposed before every citizen started carrying a camera in their pocket. Now, with most of the population wielding smartphones, suddenly laws like these are “needed” to protect insanely powerful public employees from the people they serve. It’s bullshit. And hopefully both of these proposals will die under the weight of their own pretenses before reaching the governor’s desk.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, filming police, florida, harassment, transparency

Daily Deal: Extra Savings On Rosetta Stone

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The benefits of learning to speak a second language (or third) are immeasurable! With its intuitive, immersive training method, Rosetta Stone will have you reading, writing, and speaking new languages like a natural in no time. You’ll start by matching words with images just like when you learned your native language as a child. Then you’ll move onto interactive lessons where speech recognition technology works to evaluate and improve your accent with instant feedback. Use the code VACATION15 and get an additional 15% off of the $189.99 sale price.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

The Elon Musk Mind Virus: Spreading Easily Debunked Misinformation That Confirms His Own Biases

Stupidity

from the dangerous-to-our-democracy, dept

Elon Musk has been on a tear of late, attacking the “mainstream media” at every turn. It’s true that this started about five years ago, when Tesla started getting some negative press (after about a decade of extremely positive press), and Musk seemed to absolutely lose his shit. It kinda comes with the territory, though, that every single successful tech company eventually goes through a round or two of media scrutiny, and some of it will be wrong and unfair.

But Musk seemed to take it extremely personally, and never let it go.

And, look, we’ve regularly highlighted how the mainstream media picks up narratives that it can report in extremely misleading ways. So, we’re not exactly mainstream media boosters around here. But, the difference is that I can actually understand how media folks get sucked into certain narratives. And, I mean, the very folks who regularly mock the mainstream media are guilty of the same sort of confirmation bias on stories like the supposed (but not actual) crime epidemic in San Francisco.

But, a key argument that Elon seems to have glommed onto is that this kind of confirmation bias (which he falls for all the time himself) is some sort of proof or example of “someone pulling the strings.” In Elon’s case, he seems to be convinced that it’s the “woke mind virus” and that the mainstream media is somehow controlled by it. This is silly, and disconnected from reality, but Musk now seems to go searching for confirmation bias at every opportunity. It was almost certainly a big part of the reasoning behind Musk’s chaotic decision to label NPR as state-affiliated media, because he often seems to suggest that the current administration and Democrats are behind this “woke mind virus” and the talking points and narratives that go with it.

So, it wasn’t much of a surprise that Musk went a little nuts last Thursday after one of his biggest fans, the guy behind the “Whole Mars Catalog” Twitter account, tweeted out a video of a bunch of newscasters repeating the same script with the key line being “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

This video was initially created by reporter Timothy Burke at Deadspin, and highlights how Sinclair Broadcasting, an extreme rightwing owner of tons of local news channels, often requires its newscasters to read scripts it provides:

This video got a ton of play back in 2018 when it was created.

However, over the intervening years, a bunch of right wing folks have reposted it, without the context of the name Sinclair Broadcasting, or the fact that Sinclair was a huge Trump booster, and presented it as proof that the left wing media gets all its talking points from a single source. A quick search on YouTube and Twitter will show you a ton of examples of this video being reposted with the assumption that the video is highlighting a leftwing conspiracy from the mainstream media, rather than a rightwing conspiracy from a business that gobbled up tons of local news stations.

Here are just a few examples:

There are many, many more. Anyway, the dude behind the Whole Mars Catalog tweeted it with the “dangerous to democracy” line, and it got a shit ton of views:

And Musk replied to the video multiple times, freaking out about who is writing the script, and how they’re “marrionettes” and whatnot:

But, of course, as tons of people pointed out, this wasn’t some vast leftwing conspiracy. It was rightwing talking point driven by an ideologically-driven media company that has scooped up a ton of local news channels to spread its slanted message. And you know who would have told these dipshits all of that? The very media they hate:

What’s truly amazing is that a ton of people responded to both Musk and “Whole Mars Catalog” pointing this out, and the two of them just kept on going as if it was somehow unclear who was crafting this narrative, and never admitted that it was actually the opposite of what they were implying.

And yet, since then I’ve seen more and more people on Twitter sharing this very video as proof of the leftwing conspiracy. Some are even arguing that this proves that “Donald Trump was right about the ‘fake news media’” not realizing the script was written by one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters.

And there are a ton more like that. And the end result is that Elon Musk is responsible for spreading all sorts of misinformation, which tons of his fans and friends are using as confirmation bias about how the “leftwing, mainstream media” is all “government controlled” by “woke mind virus” when the actual video is showing… how rightwing corporate controlled media actually was set up to push pro-Trump messages.

Thomas Burke, who created the original video… is not happy.

The mainstream media gets stuff wrong. They get stuck in confirmation bias like everyone else. But it’s truly bizarre (and, yes, stupid) to see people like Musk get sucked into a grand conspiracy theory when the facts are literally a Google away at the very mainstream media sources he’s trying to trash.

But, alas, that’s too much work. Must be the woke mind virus.

Filed Under: basic research, confirmation bias, dangerous to our democracy, elon musk, mainstream media, whole mars catalog
Companies: sinclair broadcasting, twitter

Study: Universal Broadband Will Cost $230 Billion, Way More Than The U.S. Is Investing

Broadband

from the a-job-half-completed dept

We’ve long noted how entrenched broadband providers have historically refused to upgrade areas that don’t deliver immediate, favorable returns (quite often poor, minority, and low income neighborhoods). That, combined with a monopoly assault on competition and regulatory oversight in most markets, has left the U.S. with patchy, substandard broadband networks we’re still struggling to track the full impact of.

On the plus side, the U.S. government is currently in the process of investing more than $60 billion in broadband thanks to American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). And while that’s going to be an historic investment, it’s still not enough to get the job done, according to a new report.

A report by fixed wireless equipment provider Tarana Wireless claims the full cost to the federal government to bring fiber broadband to every U.S. household that NTIA considers “unserved” or “underserved” would be approximately $230 billion:

Tarana estimated fiber deployment costs based on an analysis of 132 fiber broadband deployments that received funding through state-level programs in five states – Alabama, California, Michigan, Nebraska and Virginia. The goal was to select a group of states that would be representative of deployment costs nationwide.

There’s a narrative stumbling around the telecom policy space that between ARPA and the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding included in the infrastructure bill, that we’ve got this whole “digital divide” thing pretty much whipped. But Tarana (which is trying to position itself to receive subsidies for fixed wireless) insists that’s simply not the case.

A hard number has traditionally been difficult to pin down, given our sloppy failures at broadband mapping, and the complications of estimating the final combination of taxpayer subsidies and other, often long-term investments in last mile and “middle mile” networks.

How we invest the billions we do have remains the more pressing issue.

The lion’s share of this new broadband funding is already being hoovered up by the same telecom monopolies largely responsible for the nation’s broadband gaps, via their relentless attacks on smaller competitors. Unsurprisingly, those industry giants have been working overtime to redirect this historic round of funding into their pockets, and away from smaller, local businesses, cooperatives, utilities, or municipal broadband builds.

U.S. policymakers generally aren’t willing to stand up to powerful, entrenched telecom monopolies tethered to our first responder and intelligence gathering systems (most can’t even acknowledge monopolization is a problem). So what we get is a kind of policy theater, in which policymakers throw billions of dollars at a problem but refuse to address the real, underlying cause of dysfunction.

In the U.S. (and in much of the world), that cause is telecom giants who’ve monopolized the market and captured all federal and local regulators, ensuring their geographical fiefdoms never see meaningful competition. That, in turn, results in high prices, slow speeds, patchy availability, and terrible customer service; issues we generally only pay lip service toward.

So while the huge infusion of funding from ARPA and the IIJA are most certainly going to help, the impact’s going to be muted if the lion’s share of an already insufficient funding amount is thrown at the monopolies most responsible for the sector’s biggest issues. Investing a large chunk of this funding instead into open access, community-owned fiber networks would also help dramatically, but that’s generally been a message captured U.S. policymakers don’t want to hear.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband maps, community broadband networks, digital divide, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, open access fiber, universal broadband