Steven Melendez

The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Domino’s Pizza after a federal appellate court ruled that a blind customer can sue the chain under the Americans with Disabilities Act after he couldn’t fully use its website through screen-reading software. Domino’s had asked the Supreme Court to rule that the ADA didn’t apply to websites and apps, arguing the 1990 law predated the modern internet and that there were no firm rules businesses could comply with to make their online assets accessible.

Nowadays, students looking to go to college complete almost the entire application process online: finding schools, sending in application forms and essays, and applying for financial aid, all with the click of a mouse or tap of a screen. By fall 2014, colleges and universities received 94% of their applications online, up from 68% in 2007 and 49% in 2005, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling (the NACAC).

But between getting into college and figuring out how to pay for it, a strictly online application process can become an additional challenge for teens who have limited financial means and minimal access to the internet. Students whose application fees are waived due to family incomes often end up only applying to a single college. Meanwhile, the average American teen applies to between four and six, according to Annie Reznik, executive director of the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success, a group of more than 90 colleges including Harvard, Princeton, Penn State, and the University of Arizona working to improve application success. “This digital divide is essentially one more barrier that low-income students face,” says David Hawkins, NACAC’s executive director for educational content and policy.

Earlier in 2017, AZ officials announced a plan they say could harness more than $100 million in federal funds to bring broadband internet connections to schools and libraries across the state. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, appointed in January to head the agency by President Trump, has generally spoken in favor of the E-Rate system.“Regarding E-rate, Chairman Pai strongly supports the program,” an FCC spokesman wrote.

But the FCC retracted the largely favorable January report shortly after Pai’s appointment, and it remains to be seen whether he will seek to make changes to the E-Rate rules approved under his Democratic predecessor, and what effects that may have on the program. Whether E-Rate will continue in its current form under the Trump administration and the Republican-led FCC is still an open question. Some conservatives have spoken out against the E-Rate program altogether; a 2015 set of budget recommendations from the conservative Heritage Foundation advocated phasing out the program.

Years before Donald Trump took over the government, secure digital communication tools including Signal and Tor have been receiving substantial funding from a perhaps surprising source: the US taxpayer. Since 2012, an organization called the Open Technology Fund (OTF) has operated within an often overlooked offshoot of the US government that traces its origins back to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcasts that took otherwise censored information—and highlighted American culture and prosperity—behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

The OTF’s budget is inexpensive by the standards of government programs, and laughably small for a tech incubator—its reported budget last year was $7.5 million, compared to $27 million that Y Combinator invested in early-stage startups. Yet it faces an uncertain future under President Donald Trump.

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t commented publicly on the issue of network neutrality since his election, nor has he indicated who he’d nominate to fill Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler’s position or another open commissioner’s seat at the FCC. But some of his top tech advisers have backed calls to reduce the telecommunication regulator’s clout.

"In terms of net neutrality, I think their intention is to deregulate the cable and telephone industry completely," says Ernesto Omar Falcon, legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I think that’s their intention right off the get-go, and I think that’s a fight that we’ll have to engage in pretty quickly." Traditionally, the FCC doesn’t issue major new policies in the absence of a permanent chair, as will be the case after Chairman Wheeler’s departure, but it’s unclear whether the regulator will maintain that tradition under Trump, Falcon says. But any push to revoke the existing Open Internet Order would require a period of public comment and could potentially spur Congressional hearings as well, he says. And while Republicans and telecom groups have publicly denounced the FCC rules, business groups are also averse to regulatory uncertainty and shifting legal frameworks, says Harold Feld, senior vice president at the pro-neutrality group Public Knowledge.

Clinton generally favors continuing Obama's cyber policies, while Trump calls for more cyber warfare and surveillance.

[Commentary] It’s a little more than a year since Google launched Blink, a custom engine used by Chrome to turn HTML and CSS code into what you see on your screen.

Before that, Chrome was powered by a tweaked version of WebKit, the Apple-led open source engine used by Safari.

But developers and browser makers alike say cross-browser development is actually less painful than it’s ever been, thanks to efforts by browser providers to keep the tools as functionally compatible and compliant with published standards as possible.

“I think that browser compatibility is actually way ahead of what it used to be," says Rey Bango. "If you look at the most modern versions of browsers, things are coming off really nicely." Far from creating silos or havoc, this move by Google shows how "competition" in the technology sector can be a much more nuanced concept than usually thought.

On the web, businesses, distribution networks, and services operate across so many layers of abstraction that practically no game is zero sum. A competitive marketplace keeps individual browser makers from rolling out major features that aren’t supported by their rivals, since developers won’t make much use of a feature that only works in one browser.