The Guardian

More than 20 internet pioneers and leaders including the “father of the internet”, Vint Cerf; the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee; and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have urged the Federal Communications Commission to cancel its vote to repeal network neutrality, describing the plan as “based on a flawed and factually inaccurate” understanding of how the internet works. “The FCC’s rushed and technically incorrect proposed order to repeal net neutrality protections without any replacement is an imminent threat to the internet we worked so hard to create.

[Commentary] Are Facebook and Google's practices of privileging certain information really analogous to what newspaper editors do, and therefore similarly protected by the First Amendment? The answer is no. Making decisions about what and how information is conveyed does not automatically make one an editor entitled to First Amendment protection. 

A businessman who has launched a legal bid to erase online articles about his criminal conviction in the first “right to be forgotten” case in the English courts should not be allowed to rewrite history, lawyers for Google have said.  The claimant, referred to only as NT1 for legal reasons, was convicted of conspiracy to account falsely in the late 1990s and wants the search engine to remove results that mention his case, including web pages published by a national newspaper.

Facebook’s default privacy settings and use of personal data are against German consumer law, according to a judgement handed down by a Berlin regional court. The court found that Facebook collects and uses personal data without providing enough information to its members for them to render meaningful consent. The federation of German consumer organisations (VZBV), which brought the suit, argued that Facebook opted users in to features which it should not have.

British Appeal court judges have ruled the government’s mass digital surveillance regime unlawful in a case brought by the Labour deputy leader, Tom Watson. Liberty, the human rights campaign group which represented Watson in the case, said the ruling meant significant parts of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 – known as the snooper’s charter – are effectively unlawful and must be urgently changed. The government defended its use of communications data to fight serious and organised crime and said that the judgment related to out of date legislation.