Yaël Ossowski

Consumer Choice Center

  • If you want fewer Internet outages, more data centers!

    The US-east-1 outage of October 20th, 2025 explains why we need yet more data centers and energy capacity. Yesterday, Internet users in the US and abroad awoke to some kind of errors and issues when loading their favorite websites and services. A global outage!  Hundreds of thousands of users flocked to real time monitoring websites…

  • The Aussie experiment with ‘online safety’ is going about as well as you would expect

    The Australian eSafety Commissioner is using the Online Safety Act to force online platforms to take down certain videos, or else. The Anglosphere is in the midst of yet another drawn-out battle questioning the limits of freedom of speech, online safety, and the ability for online users to share information on their social media networks.…

  • The Shutdown’s 800-pound Gorilla: Healthcare is political because the federal government dominates it

    Like a broken clock, a reboot of a superhero movie, or a rehabilitation of Charlie Sheen, Americans faced with yet another shutdown of the federal government. With funding that expired on September 30th at midnight, the usual partisan fights are evolving and devolving in Washington, D.C., breaking open the fissures of the cobbled-together mess of…

  • The direct primary care reform that may supercharge healthcare competition and patient choice

    Nudged within the “One Big Beautiful Bill” is a small tax provision that may only apply to a small number of consumers, but it could have outlasting positive impacts on how healthcare services are delivered to American patients. Beginning in 2026, American patients who engage the services of a doctor at a direct primary care…

  • The government’s weak case to “break off” Instagram

    For the last five weeks, an agency of the Federal government has attempted to convince a judge that Meta should be forcibly broken up for parts. FTC v. Meta is nearing closing statements and could be decided in the weeks to come. Social media influencers, small businesses advertisers, and roaming bands of phone scrollers have their…

  • The FTC’s shell game on social media ‘monopolies’

    In Washington, D.C. this week, government lawyers wrapped up their antitrust lawsuit arguing that Instagram should be broken off from its parent company. The same for WhatsApp. The company Meta, formerly Facebook, has been in a long protracted legal battle over its decade-old acquisitions of the photo sharing app Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp. While those acquisitions…

  • Congress set to neuter its authority to counter Trump tariffs

    As Congress debates yet another Continuing Resolution to hastily fund the federal government for a few months, the House yesterday passed a resolution that mixes together several bills. Tucked within these provisions was a legalistic quirk that would end Congress’ ability to end President Trump’s “State of Emergency” that has so far given him some legal latitude…

  • Oops, your data’s been exposed. What can you do?

    This week, I received a letter from an employer of mine from when I was in high school, a local car wash. It turns out there was a “data breach” that resulted in “unauthorized access” to my social security number. Millions of Americans receive letters like this each year. Usually, the company will offer free access to…

  • Open-source is for everyone, even your adversaries

    Last week, an investigation by Reuters revealed that Chinese researchers have been using open-source AI tools to build nefarious-sounding models that may have some military application. The reporting purports that adversaries in the Chinese Communist Party and its military wing are taking advantage of the liberal software licensing of American innovations in the AI space,…

  • FCC Comments to protect radio frequency for open-source projects and ham radio

    This week, the Consumer Choice Center submitted comments to the Federal Communications Commission on its proposal to reconfigure parts of the 900 MHz band, opposing the effort that would end up granting exclusive use for one specific company. The lower end of the 900 MHz band is popular with open-source radio projects, amateur radio operations,…