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Canada has recognized the obvious and declared high-speed broadband internet access a “basic telecommunications service” that every citizen should be able to access.

Previously, only landline telephone services had received this designation from the country’s national telecoms regulator, CRTC, and the change is supported by a government investment package of up to $750 million to wire up rural areas. “The future of our economy, our prosperity and our society — indeed, the future of every citizen — requires us to set ambitious goals, and to get on with connecting all Canadians for the 21st century," said CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais. “These goals are ambitious. They will not be easy to achieve and they will cost money. But we have no choice.” As part of declaring broadband a “basic” or essential service, the CRTC has also set new goals for download and upload speeds. For fixed broadband services, all citizens should have the option of unlimited data with speeds of at least 50 megabits per second for downloads and 10 megabits per second for uploads — a tenfold increase of previous targets set in 2011. The goals for mobile coverage are less ambitious, and simply call for “access to the latest mobile wireless technology” in cities and major transport corridors. The CRTC estimates that some two million Canadian households, or 18 percent of the population, do not currently have access to their desired speeds.

A year into its expensive investment into live video, Facebook is adding an audio option. The company said that the feature, which is first being made available to publishers, is designed to complement video streams with a lower-bandwidth option.

Initial partners include Britain’s LBC radio, the BBC World Service, Harper Collins, and authors Adam Grant and Britt Bennett. It will be made available to everyone in 2017. Listening to live streams on iOS will require that you have Facebook open on your mobile device the entire time, Facebook said — a feature that seems likely to limit engagement among listeners. Android users can close the app and continue to listen.

Google tentatively agreed to a series of changes in the way it collects data from Gmail, as part of a proposed settlement in Northern California District Court. If the court approves the settlement, Google will eliminate any collection of advertising-specific data before an email is accessible in a user’s inbox.

The result likely won’t be noticeable to users, but it represents a real change to the way Google’s systems work, brought about after a voluntary settlement rather than a legal ruling. The case, called Matera vs. Google, began in September 2015, when plaintiffs alleged the email scanning violated California and federal privacy law, calling it “the twenty-first-century equivalent of AT&T eavesdropping on each of its customers’ phone conversations, or of the postal service taking information from private correspondence.” The suit was specifically brought on behalf of non-Gmail users, who haven’t agreed to have their emails scanned under Google’s Terms of Service.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son made a surprise appearance at Trump Tower where he appears to have worked out a deal with the President-elect to invest $50 billion in the US over the next four years and create 50,000 new jobs. Details of the planned investment are basically nonexistent, but it’s more than likely that it involves Sprint, which represents SoftBank’s main presence in the US. Sprint has been struggling since its acquisition by SoftBank in 2012, falling into fourth place among wireless carriers, behind T-Mobile, and cutting jobs in the face of rocky financials. "I just came to celebrate his new job. We were talking about it. Then I said I would like to celebrate his presidential job and commit, because he would do a lot of deregulation,” Son said. “I said this is great. The United States would become great again.” It wasn’t stated what Trump offered, aside from a lighter regulatory environment, to entice SoftBank.

The fake news problem we’re facing isn’t just about articles gaining traffic from Facebook timelines or Google search results. It’s also an issue of news literacy — a reader’s ability to discern credible news. And it’s getting harder to tell on sight alone which sites are trustworthy.

On a Facebook timeline or Google search feed, every story comes prepackaged in the same skin, whether it’s a months-long investigation from The Washington Post or completely fabricated clickbait. While feed formatting isn’t anything new, platforms like Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News are also further breaking down the relationship between good design and credibility. In a platform world, all publishers end up looking more similar than different. That makes separating the real from the fake even harder.

Nov 28, AT&T made a dim prophecy official by announcing that its new DirecTV Now streaming service would be zero rated: it won’t count against its customers’ data caps. Zero rating isn’t new — T-Mobile has been writing the manual on how to get away with it — but now it’s finally happening at a scale that matters. And AT&T’s version is much worse than T-Mobile’s.

AT&T’s zero rating model is pretty much the nightmare scenario that Internet advocates and pro-competition observers have been warning us about. That’s because AT&T owns DirecTV, and is now giving DirecTV Now privileged access to AT&T’s wireless Internet customers. The corruption is so obvious here that it doesn’t need a fancy network neutrality metaphor — AT&T is clearly favoring a company it now owns over competitors. And that’s just the beginning of where AT&T is screwing us. The company stands to reap massive tolls on the other end of that “most favored nation” deal with DirecTV, because it also offers something called “sponsored data” to other companies that want the same kind of privileged access to AT&T customers. So, for example, if Netflix wants to compete fairly with DirecTV, it would need to pay AT&T to exempt its video traffic from data caps. This is what Internet service providers really want the Internet to look like: a bundle of premium services that run up the cost of access to their networks.

An interview with one of the Black Lives Matter movement's most prominent voices, DeRay Mckesson.

With his now-iconic blue vest, DeRay Mckesson, now the interim chief of Human Capital for Baltimore City Public Schools, has balanced using his platform online and off in order to draw attention to matters such as public safety and law enforcement reform. He has protested against police violence in places like Ferguson (MO); Baton Rouge (LA), and Charleston (SC). Through Campaign Zero, he and other BLM activists designed a policy plan calling for police reform. He even ran for Baltimore mayor in 2016, and though he lost, he drew widespread attention to his effort to bring BLM to the halls of government, where real change happens.

Donald Trump used Twitter to make outrageous claims during the entire 2016 election, and he’s still making them after winning the presidency. He is now turning Twitter into a state-media machine capable of quickly and widely spreading disinformation.

In the middle of a rant about the Electoral College, President-elect Trump tweeted a preposterous claim: that millions of people voted illegally in the election he just won. (He also trashed democratic norms before the election, saying it would be rigged and that he would not accept the results if he lost.) President-elect Trump made the false claim about illegal voting in the middle of saying there should be no vote recount in Wisconsin. President-elect Trump has given no indication that he will restrain his careless speech or improve his standards for evidence. He has used Twitter to tweet and retweet false and misleading information at a volume that has challenged the bandwidth of fact checkers. In many cases the fact-checkers don’t get a word in before the false claim. When President-elect Trump becomes President, his Twitter account won’t just be the ramblings of a private citizen — it will be the remarks of the chief executive of the US government. And if his Twitter account is the most open part of his administration, the platform could effectively become the White House press office.

A Q&A with Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University.

Tim Wu is perhaps best known for coming up with the phrase "net neutrality." In his last book, The Master Switch, Wu traced the history of modern communications and media consolidation. In his new book, The Attention Merchants, Wu delves into the history of advertising, propaganda, and media. Wu writes a history that begins with Benjamin Day’s idea to sell his paper, The New York Sun, for less than the cost of production and make up the difference through advertising; now, ads are even displayed in public schools. Many media companies — including this one — aim to attract the attention of readers or viewers. That attention is then directed, at least theoretically, toward the ads the company serves. That model has expanded, however, with companies that consider themselves the tech sector — like Google or Facebook — borrowing the media model of serving ads to a captive audience, either through search results or through your social media feed. I spoke to Wu about the long view on advertising, the role of propaganda in politics, and the rise of celebrity culture.

The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations’ worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to President-elect Donald Trump.

It’s still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it’s not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government gives the president almost unlimited discretion in matters of national security, with few limitations or mechanisms for oversight. That includes National Security Agency surveillance, as well as the expanding powers of the drone program. And from what President-elect Trump has said on the campaign trail, his targets for using those powers may cut against some of America’s most important civil rights. The crown jewel of that system is the NSA, and there’s reason to think it will grow even more secretive and voracious in the Trump Administration. President-elect Trump’s current transition team includes two of the NSA’s foremost defenders — Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA) and former congressman Mike Rogers — a move that suggests the agency will be moving toward more invasive collection and less transparency than ever before.