The lawsuit says the Trump administration is withholding details about plans to revoke a scientific determination that serves as the foundation for climate rules.

Hawaiians are taking part in a rapidly growing program that helps residents assess their communities' fire risk and make plans to mitigate it.

Thousands of firefighters in South Korea were battling at least nine wildfires across the country.

The Japanese agricultural bank has withdrawn from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a spokesperson said.

In Catalonia, the Sau reservoir has gone from holding just 3.9 percent of water capacity a year ago to 52 percent on Monday, according to a water agency report.

When most people buy cars, the sticker price is only part of the cost. The other part involves the loan, since folks usually borrow money for auto purchases. Therefore the interest rate, monthly payment size, and total repayment cost all matter too.

And yet, on aggregate, people do more comparison shopping about car prices than about lenders, and they frequently settle for relatively expensive loans. What happens when the financing costs more? The answer is, people buy older cars with lower sticker prices.

“The car they’re driving right now could be a year older because of that,” says Christopher Palmer PhD ’14, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who helped discover this phenomenon through a study examining millions of U.S. car loans. That research is like much of Palmer’s work: grounded in hard data and shining new light on issues, even familiar ones, about personal money management.

“I study household financial decision-making,” Palmer says. “Both how households make decisions and how those decisions are influenced by external factors. That covers a lot of things.”

It sure does. Palmer, often working with co-authors, has also discovered that people prefer to make monthly payments that are multiples of $100 — which can lead them to agree to worse financing terms. And since household finance includes housing, Palmer co-authored a high-profile study showing that people are remarkably more likely to use housing vouchers and move to another neighborhood when they have a modest amount of assistance from a “navigator” who helps with the move.

But he isn’t just looking for behavioral quirks: Another Palmer study found that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing efforts after the financial crisis of 2008 helped cash-strapped people refinance their mortgages — though mostly those who had been able to make a down payment of 20 percent or more in the first place.

Overall, Palmer looks at big-picture economic scenarios in which people feel a financial crunch, and at consumer behavior, especially involving credit.

“If you look at whether someone can make a monthly payment, you need to understand their labor market, their expectations for the future, and more,” Palmer says. “Credit markets are interconnected to almost everything you might care about. Part of the reason I’m trying to shine a light on consumer credit markets is that they affect all kinds of human outcomes.”

For his research and teaching, Palmer earned tenure at MIT last year.

Useful intuition

Palmer grew up in the Boston area and enjoyed math in school, while always being interested in how people made financial decisions, especially about real estate. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, he soon recognized that he wanted to use his math skills to analyze everyday phenomena.

“I like the way you can take your intuition and have it be useful as you work through problems, along with this element of being able to observe what’s happening around you and being a listener in the world,” Palmer says.

As a student, though, that didn’t mean Palmer narrowed his interests. If anything, he saw the value in widening his studies.

“I also pretty quickly realized in college that I wanted to double major in econ and math,” Palmer says. “And that became the pipeline to get a PhD.”

After graduating from BYU, Palmer entered the doctoral program at MIT in 2008. In addition to taking classes, he immediately started working as a research assistant on a study of rent control along with professors David Autor — his eventual advisor — and Parag Pathak. That research eventually turned into a couple of high-profile papers. But while rent control is a kind of household-finance issue, the subject of household finance wasn’t really an established subdiscipline at the time.

It soon would be, however. Indeed, Palmer’s graduate-school career is almost a case study in how academic research broadens and evolves over time. Just as Palmer enrolled at MIT, the subprime-lending implosion helped generate the financial-markets crash of 2008, and both became greater focal points for academic research. Suddenly the topics that had been percolating around in Palmer’s mind were in pressing need of academic research.

“All of a sudden mortgages and household finance were front and center,” Palmer says. “That allowed me the space to write a dissertation about how distressed income households make mortgage decisions. There was an appetite for that.”

After receiving his PhD, Palmer joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Haas School of Business, and then moved back to MIT in 2017.

“Household finance as a field is small, so you have to intersect it with something else if you want your question to make a difference in the world,” Palmer says. “For me, that might be macroeconomics, labor economics, corporate finance, or banking. This is partly why MIT is an amazing place to be, because it’s so easy to get exposure to all of those fields.”

Keeping a list of questions at hand

With a wide-ranging research portfolio, Palmer has to be nimble about identifying topics he can study in depth. That means looking for good data related to household finance and consumer credit, and shaping his studies around meaningful questions.

“I think a good microeconomist is always on the hunt for things,” Palmer says.

“I’ve always wanted to be question-driven,” he adds. “I try to have a list of questions in mind, so that if somebody says, ‘I have an interesting data set, what can we do with it?’ I might have ideas about what in the data we can look at.”

Take the massive study on auto loans, which arose after a co-author approached Palmer and said, more or less, that he had identified an interesting data set and was wondering what to do with it. One unresolved question was: How much do people search for the best car price or the best loan terms?

As a graduate student, Palmer recalls, “I remembered [MIT professor] Glenn Ellison once saying in class that the subject of search is a really juicy topic. Consumers face tricky decisions, and companies do not want to make it easy for people to comparison-shop. And no one had done much about search in household finance.”

So, Palmer and his colleagues based the auto-loan study partly around the search issue. The work analyzes the geographic locations of millions of buyers, and the number of lenders within 20-minute drive of them, and examines how thoroughly consumers hunt for the best deals. The study includes credit scores, auto prices, and loan terms, illuminating the complete dynamics involving credit and auto purchases. 

Best behavior

Some of Palmer’s work, meanwhile, takes the form of experiments. The paper he co-authored about what helps people move was one such case. It was set in Seattle, and the research team collaborated with local policymakers to construct an experiment on the subject.

It turns out that in Seattle, among people granted housing vouchers to move to new neighborhoods, the percentage actually utilizing the vouchers jumped from 15 percent to 53 percent — an eye-opening change — when they were given slightly more information and resources, and most of all a “navigator” helping with basic logistics.

Studying how people manage money means Palmer’s work yields plenty of insights in the mode of behavioral economics, the subfield that studies irrationalities — or lack thereof — in finance. Palmer thinks such findings are important, while emphasizing that he is not principally on a hunt for irrationality. Instead he always seeks to link the study of behavior to major economic and policy matters: how we borrow, what we can afford, and how we respond to economic stress.

“When a study of behavior is motivated by a tight connection to public policy, it satisfies the is-this-important hurdle right away,” Palmer says. “I’m always aiming to produce work that a large community of scholars would find important and that the broader world would find impactful.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 March 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02274-5

Analysis of satellite observations and in situ phenology records revealed a delayed onset of spring after drought in northern ecosystems. These delays are regulated by both endogenous memory within plants and exogenous memory of the environment, with the latter having a dominant role.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 March 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02272-7

Under climate warming, increased microbial carbon emissions could diminish the vast carbon stores held in northern peatlands. This large-scale experimental study reveals that warming amplifies carbon uptake by peatland microalgae and partially offsets warming-related increases in microbial carbon emissions.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 March 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02299-w

Cities have historically benefitted from coastal access, but sea-level rise may turn this advantage into a vulnerability. Government investment should account for future climate risks.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 March 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02283-4

Governments around the world have pledged to reduce fossil fuel subsidies, yet the actual implementation has not been measured. With a unique dataset and approach, researchers find since 2016 there are more frequent reforms, yet most of them do not survive over 12 months.

The MIT women's swimming and diving team won the program's first national championship, jumping ahead of New York University by erasing a 20-point deficit as the Engineers finished with 497 points at the 2025 NCAA Women's Swimming and Diving National Championships, hosted by the Old Dominion Athletic Conference March 19-22 at the Greensboro Aquatic Center in Greensboro, North Carolina.   

MIT entered the event ranked as the top team in the country. Overall, MIT won three individual national titles and four relay titles. The head coach, Meg Sisson French, was named the College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association of America Women’s Swim Coach of the Year. 

On day 1 of the championships, the 400 Medley Relay team of senior Kate Augustyn (Eau Claire, Wisconsin), first-year Sarah Bernard (Brookline, Massachusetts), sophomore Sydney Smith (Atlanta, Georgia), and graduate student Alexandra Turvey (Vancouver, British Colombia) touched the wall first in 3:38.48, just beating the NYU team by 0.8 second and setting a new school record. 

Day 2 highlights included Smith posting a winning time of 53.96 in the 100 fly, beating out Nicole Ranile of NYU by under a second. The 200 freestyle relay team of Turvey, Smith, sophomore Ella Roberson (Midland, Michigan) and junior Annika Naveen (Wynnewood, Pennsylvania) held off Pomona-Pitzer for the gold as Naveen brought the title home and gave the Engineers a national record time of 1:30.00. 

MIT opened day 3 with another national title, this time in the 200 medley relay. Augustyn led off, followed by Bernard and Naveen. Ella Roberson brought the title home for MIT as she completed her anchor leg in 22.02, which gave the team a combined time of 1:39.51. Roberson was able to hold off a late charge by Kenyon College, which finished second in 1:40.26 as the Engineers set another national record. Augustyn later defended her title in the 100 backstroke as she clocked in with a time of 53.41, tying her own national record. 

The final day of action saw MIT pull ahead of NYU with two more national titles. In the 200 backstroke, Augustyn held the lead through most of the event, but Sophia Verkleeren of Williams College caught up to the defending champion in the last half of the race. With just 25 yards left, Augustyn pulled away to defeat Verkleeren with a time of 1:55.85. Augustyn shaved almost 2 seconds off her preliminary time and fell just short of the national record time of 1:55.67. With the win, the Engineers pulled to within one point of NYU for the top spot. 

The Engineers sealed the overall national championship by winning their fourth relay of the championship, besting the team from NYU. Turvey set the pace with her lead-off, followed by Smith and Augustyn. Roberson, swimming the anchor leg, held off Kaley McIntyre of NYU, who earlier set the national record in the 100 freestyle, to give MIT the win with a time of 3:19.03 as the Violets took second in 3:19.36.   

Augustyn defended her title in the 200 backstroke while sweeping the National Championship in both the 100 and 200 backstroke in consecutive years. She concludes her career as one of the most decorated swimmers in program history, collecting four individual national championships, four relay national championships, and 27 all-America honors, the most in program history. 

Bar graphs and other charts provide a simple way to communicate data, but are, by definition, difficult to translate for readers who are blind or low-vision. Designers have developed methods for converting these visuals into “tactile charts,” but guidelines for doing so are extensive (for example, the Braille Authority of North America’s 2022 guidebook is 426 pages long). The process also requires understanding different types of software, as designers often draft their chart in programs like Adobe Illustrator and then translate it into Braille using another application.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have now developed an approach that streamlines the design process for tactile chart designers. Their program, called “Tactile Vega-Lite,” can take data from something like an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into both a standard visual chart and a touch-based one. Design standards are hardwired as default rules within the program to help educators and designers automatically create accessible tactile charts.

The tool could make it easier for blind and low-vision readers to understand many graphics, such as a bar chart comparing minimum wages across states or a line graph tracking countries’ GDPs over time. To bring your designs to the real world, you can tweak your chart in Tactile Vega-Lite and then send its file to a Braille embosser (which prints text as readable dots).

This spring, the researchers will present Tactile Vega-Lite in a paper at the Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. According to lead author Mengzhu “Katie” Chen SM ’25, the tool strikes a balance between the precision that design professionals want for editing and the efficiency educators need to create tactile charts quickly.

“We interviewed teachers who wanted to make their lessons accessible to blind and low-vision students, and designers experienced in putting together tactile charts,” says Chen, a recent CSAIL affiliate and master's graduate in electrical engineering and computer science and the Program in System Design and Management. “Since their needs differ, we designed a program that’s easy to use, provides instant feedback when you want to make tweaks, and implements accessibility guidelines.”

Data you can feel

The researchers’ program builds off of their 2017 visualization tool Vega-Lite by automatically encoding both a flat, standard chart and a tactile one. Senior author and MIT postdoc Jonathan Zong SM ’20, PhD ’24 points out that the program makes intuitive design decisions so users don’t have to.

“Tactile Vega-Lite has smart defaults to ensure proper spacing, layout, and texture and Braille conversion, following best practices to create good touch-based reading experiences,” says Zong, who is also a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an incoming assistant professor at the University of Colorado. “Building on existing guidelines and our interviews with experts, the goal is for teachers or visual designers without a lot of tactile design expertise to quickly convey data in a clear way for tactile readers to explore and understand.”

Tactile Vega-Lite’s code editor allows users to customize axis labels, tick marks, and other elements. Different features within the chart are represented by abstractions — or summaries of a longer body of code — that can be modified. These shortcuts allow you to write brief phrases that tweak the design of your chart. For example, if you want to change how the bars in your graph are filled out, you could change the code in the “Texture” section from “dottedFill” to “verticalFill” to replace small circles with upward lines.

To understand how these abstractions work, the researchers added a gallery of examples. Each one includes a phrase and what change that code leads to. Still, the team is looking to refine Tactile Vega-Lite’s user interface to make it more accessible to users less familiar with coding. Instead of using abstractions for edits, you could click on different buttons.

Chen says she and her colleagues are hoping to add machine-specific customizations to their program. This would allow users to preview how their tactile chart would look before it’s fabricated by an embossing machine and make edits according to the device’s specifications.

While Tactile Vega-Lite can streamline the many steps it usually takes to make a tactile chart, Zong emphasizes that it doesn’t replace an expert doing a final check-over for guideline compliance. The researchers are continuing to incorporate Braille design rules into their program, but caution that human review will likely remain the best practice.

“The ability to design tactile graphics efficiently, particularly without specialized software, is important for providing equal access of information to tactile readers,” says Stacy Fontenot, owner of Font to Dot, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Graphics that follow current guidelines and standards are beneficial for the reader as consistency is paramount, especially with complex, data-filled graphics. Tactile Vega-Lite has a straightforward interface for creating informative tactile graphics quickly and accurately, thereby reducing the design time in providing quality graphics to tactile readers.”

Chen and Zong wrote the paper with Isabella Pineros ’23, MEng ’24 and MIT Associate Professor Arvind Satyanarayan. The researchers’ work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant.

The CSAIL team also incorporated input from Rich Caloggero from MIT’s Disability and Access Services, as well as the Lighthouse for the Blind, which let them observe technical design workflows as part of the project.

Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — could cut down the amount of polluting runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.

A team of researchers at MIT and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.

The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash PhD ’22 and Sreedath Panat PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.

A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.

Pesticides take a significant toll on global health and the environment, the researchers point out. A recent study found that 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution. And agricultural chemicals are a major expense for farmers: In the U.S., they spend $16 billion a year just on pesticides.

Making spraying more efficient is one of the best ways to make food production more sustainable and economical. Agricultural spraying essentially boils down to mixing chemicals into water and spraying water droplets onto plant leaves, which are often inherently water-repellent. “Over more than a decade of research in my lab at MIT, we have developed fundamental understandings of spraying and the interaction between droplets and plants — studying when they bounce and all the ways we have to make them stick better and enhance coverage,” Varanasi says.

The team had previously found a way to reduce the amount of sprayed liquid that bounces away from the leaves it strikes, which involved using two spray nozzles instead of one and spraying mixtures with opposite electrical charges. But they found that farmers were reluctant to take on the expense and effort of converting their spraying equipment to a two-nozzle system. So, the team looked for a simpler alternative.

They discovered they could achieve the same improvement in droplet retention using a single-nozzle system that can be easily adapted to existing sprayers. Instead of giving the droplets of pesticide an electric charge, they coat each droplet with a vanishingly thin layer of an oily material.

In their new study, they conducted lab experiments with high-speed cameras. When they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. But when the researchers coated the surface of the droplets with a tiny amount of oil — making up less than 1 percent of the droplet’s liquid — the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.

“When these droplets are hitting the surface and as they expand, they form this oil ring that essentially pins the droplet to the surface,” Rufer says. The researchers tried a wide variety of conditions, he says, explaining that they conducted hundreds of experiments, “with different impact velocities, different droplet sizes, different angles of inclination, all the things that fully characterize this phenomenon.” Though different oils varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. “Regardless of the impact velocity and the oils, we saw that the rebound height was significantly lower,” he says.

The effect works with remarkably small amounts of oil. In their initial tests they used 1 percent oil compared to the water, then they tried a 0.1 percent, and even .01. The improvement in droplets sticking to the surface continued at a 0.1 percent, but began to break down beyond that. “Basically, this oil film acts as a way to trap that droplet on the surface, because oil is very attracted to the surface and sort of holds the water in place,” Rufer says.

In the researchers’ initial tests they used soybean oil for the coating, figuring this would be a familiar material for the farmers they were working with, many of whom were growing soybeans. But it turned out that though they were producing the beans, the oil was not part of their usual supply chain for use on the farm. In further tests, the researchers found that several chemicals that farmers were already routinely using in their spraying, called surfactants and adjuvants, could be used instead, and that some of these provided the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.

“That way,” Varanasi says, “we’re not introducing a new chemical or changed chemistries into their field, but they’re using things they’ve known for a long time.”

Varanasi and Jayaprakash formed a company called AgZen to commercialize the system. In order to prove how much their coating system improves the amount of spray that stays on the plant, they first had to develop a system to monitor spraying in real time. That system, which they call RealCoverage, has been deployed on farms ranging in size from a few dozen acres to hundreds of thousands of acres, and many different crop types, and has saved farmers 30 to 50 percent on their pesticide expenditures, just by improving the controls on the existing sprays. That system is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in 2025, the company says, including some in California, Texas, the Midwest, France and Italy. Adding the cloaking system using new nozzles, the researchers say, should yield at least another doubling of efficiency.

“You could give back a billion dollars to U.S. growers if you just saved 6 percent of their pesticide budget,” says Jayaprakash, lead author of the research paper and CEO of AgZen. “In the lab we got 300 percent of extra product on the plant. So that means we could get orders of magnitude reductions in the amount of pesticides that farmers are spraying.”

Farmers had already been using these surfactant and adjuvant chemicals as a way to enhance spraying effectiveness, but they were mixing it with a water solution. For it to have any effect, they had to use much more of these materials, risking causing burns to the plants. The new coating system reduces the amount of these materials needed, while improving their effectiveness.

In field tests conducted by AgZen, “we doubled the amount of product on kale and soybeans just by changing where the adjuvant was,” from mixed in to being a coating, Jayaprakash says. It’s convenient for farmers because “all they’re doing is changing their nozzle. They’re getting all their existing chemicals to work better, and they’re getting more product on the plant.”

And it’s not just for pesticides. “The really cool thing is this is useful for every chemistry that’s going on the leaf, be it an insecticide, a herbicide, a fungicide, or foliar nutrition,” Varanasi says. This year, they plan to introduce the new spray system on about 30,000 acres of cropland.

Varanasi says that with projected world population growth, “the amount of food production has got to double, and we are limited in so many resources, for example we cannot double the arable land. … This means that every acre we currently farm must become more efficient and able to do more with less.” These improved spraying technologies, for both monitoring the spraying and coating the droplets, Varanasi says, “I think is fundamentally changing agriculture.”

AgZen has recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture. “The knowledge we are gathering from every leaf, combined with our expertise in interfacial science and fluid mechanics, is giving us unparalleled insights into how chemicals are used and developed — and it’s clear that we can deliver value across the entire agrochemical supply chain,” Varanasi says  “Our mission is to use these technologies to deliver improved outcomes and reduced costs for the ag industry.” 

This post is part four and the final part in a series of posts about EFF’s work in Europe. Read about how and why we work in Europe here.  

EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. While our work has taken us to far corners of the globe, in recent years we have worked to expand our efforts in Europe, building up a policy team with key expertise in the region, and bringing our experience in advocacy and technology to the European fight for digital rights.   

In this blog post series, we will introduce you to the various players involved in that fight, share how we work in Europe, and discuss how what happens in Europe can affect digital rights across the globe.  

EFF’s Approach to Competition  

Market concentration and monopoly power among internet companies and internet access impacts many of EFF’s issues, particularly innovation, consumer privacy, net neutrality, and platform censorship. And we have said it many times: Antitrust law and rules on market fairness are powerful tools with the potential to either cement the hold of established giants over a market even more or to challenge incumbents and spur innovation and choice that benefit users. Antitrust enforcement must hit monopolists where it hurts: ensuring that anti-competitive behaviors like abuse of dominance by multi-billion-dollar tech giants come at a price high enough to force real change.  

The EU has recently shown that it is serious about cracking down on Big Tech companies with its full arsenal of antitrust rules. For example, in a high-stakes appeal in 2022, EU judges hit Google with a record fine of more than €4.13 billion for abusing its dominant position by locking Android users into its search engine (now pending before the Court of Justice). 

We believe that with the right dials and knobs, clever competition rules can complement antitrust enforcement and ensure that firms that grow top heavy and sluggish are displaced by nimbler new competitors. Good competition rules should enable better alternatives that protect users’ privacy and enhance users’ technological self-determination. In the EU, this requires not only proper enforcement of existing rules but also new regulation that tackles gatekeeper’s dominance before harm is done. 

The Digital Markets Act  

The DMA will probably turn out to be one of the most impactful pieces of EU tech legislation in history. It’s complex but the overall approach is to place new requirements and restrictions on online “gatekeepers”: the largest tech platforms, which control access to digital markets for other businesses. These requirements are designed to break down the barriers businesses face in competing with the tech giants. 

Let’s break down some of the DMA’s rules. If enforced robustly, the DMA will make it easier for users to switch services, install third party apps and app stores and have more power over default settings on their mobile computing devices. Users will no longer be steered into sticking with the defaults embedded in their devices and can choose, for example, their own default browser on Apple’s iOS. The DMA also tackles data collection practices: gatekeepers can no longer cross-combine user data or sign them into new services without their explicit consent and must provide them with a specific choice. A “pay or consent” advertising model as proposed by Meta will probably not cut it.  

There are also new data access and sharing requirements that could benefit users, such as the right of end users to request effective portability of data and get access to effective tools to this end. One section of the DMA even requires gatekeepers to make their person-to-person messaging systems (like WhatsApp) interoperable with competitors’ systems on request—making it a globally unique ex ante obligation in competition regulation. At EFF, we believe that interoperable platforms can be a driver for technological self-determination and a more open internet. But even though data portability and interoperability are anti-monopoly medicine, they come with challenges: Ported data can contain sensitive information about you and interoperability poses difficult questions about security and governance, especially when it’s mandated for encrypted messaging services. Ideally, the DMA should be implemented to offer better protections for users’ privacy and security, new features, new ways of communication and better terms of service.  

There are many more do's and don'ts in the new fairness rulebook of the EU, such as the prohibition of platforms to favour their own products and services over those of rivals in ranking, crawling and indexing (ensuring users a real choice!), along with many other measures. All these and other requirements are to create more fairness and contestability in digital markets—a laudable objective.  If done right, the DMA presents an option for a real change for technology users—and a real threat to current abusive or unfair industry practices by Big Tech. But if implemented poorly, it could create more legal uncertainty, restrict free expression, or even legitimize the status quo. It is now up to the European Commission to bring the DMA’s promises to life. 

Public Interest 

As the EU’s 2024–2029 mandate is now in full swing, it will be important to not lose sight of the big picture. Fairness rules can only be truly fair if they follow a public-interest approach by empowering users, business, and society more broadly and make it easier for users to control the technology they rely on. And we cannot stop here: the EU must strive to foster a public interest internet and support open-source and decentralized alternatives. Competition and innovation are interconnected forces and the recent rise of the Fediverse makes this clear. Platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky thrive by filling gaps (and addressing frustrations) left by corporate giants, offering users more control over their experience and ultimately strengthening the resilience of the open internet. The EU should generally support user-controlled alternatives to Big Tech and use smart legislation to foster interoperability for services like social networks. In an ideal world, users are no longer locked into dominant platforms and the ad-tech industry—responsible for pervasive surveillance and other harms—is brought under control. 

What we don’t want is a European Union that conflates fairness with protectionist industrial policies or reacts to geopolitical tensions with measures that could backfire on digital openness and fair markets. The enforcement of the DMA and new EU competition and digital rights policies must remain focused on prioritizing user rights and ensuring compliance from Big Tech—not tolerating malicious (non)compliance tactics—and upholding the rule of law rather than politicized interventions. The EU should avoid policies that could lead to a fragmented internet and must remain committed to net neutrality. It should also not hesitate to counter the concentration of power in the emerging AI stack market, where control over infrastructure and technology is increasingly in the hands of a few dominant players. 

EFF will be watching. And we will continue to fight to save the internet in Europe, ensuring that fairness in digital markets remains rooted in choice, competition, and the right to innovate. 

Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon’s spyware:

Key Findings:

• Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds of spyware abuses that NSO Group and other vendors are notorious for.
• Infrastructure Analysis of Paragon Spyware. Based on a tip from a collaborator, we mapped out server infrastructure that we attribute to Paragon’s Graphite spyware tool. We identified a subset of suspected Paragon deployments, including in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore. ...

The order marks the second time in a year that the justices have declined to bring back the landmark case against the federal government.

The Homeland Security secretary added to the confusion about the agency’s future with a seemingly offhand remark.

The lawsuit comes as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested walking back mandatory reporting for big polluters.

Democrats had hoped the plans would drive locally driven action. But states assumed a level of federal investment unlikely under President Donald Trump.

The International Energy Agency found demand for air conditioning is driving an uptick in both energy usage and climate pollution.