Weekly Writers Round-Up: Internet Rights, Alcohol Regulation, and Banning Cashless Businesses

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Applications for the summer session are now open!

We Need to Stop Turning a Blind Eye on the Real Threat by Krisztina Pusok (Fall 2017) in Morning Consult
With multimillion-dollar lawsuits related to data misuse and data breaches peppering the news in the past few years, it’s hard to keep track of the many cases exposing how the internet is being misused and manipulated at the expense of consumers, the economy, national security, and our democratic system. We have become highly dependent on the internet for everything, but we have also become ignorantly myopic towards the biased practices and nontransparent behavior.

The battle over whether and how government should regulate the internet has been going on for well over a dozen years, with no optimism that it will be over soon. Wherever one stands in the net neutrality debate, one thing is clear: Net neutrality principles should either apply to everyone or to no one…

Is government stopping you from getting your bottle of wine? by Hunter Estes (Fall 2019) in the Mississippi Business Journal
Mississippi’s laws that limit who can sell alcohol and where you can purchase it need to be modernized.

Let me paint a picture with a short story: The year is 2020, on a sunny day you decide to stop by the grocery store on the way home to pick up a bottle of your favorite wine. Unfortunately for you, Mississippi grocery stores aren’t legally allowed to carry wine…

Why Banning Cashless Is Baseless by Janson Prieb (Summer 2019) in the Observer
On Thursday, the New York City Council voted to ban stores from going cashless. Claiming that cashless stores are discriminatory, Bronx Councilman Ritchie Torres said, “Cash is the great equalizer, it is the universal currency.” While his intentions were noble, it’s this kind of fear—that society isn’t ready for improvement and increased efficiency—that slows the progress we all want to see.

Fear of technology and advancement, of course, is nothing new. With the media issuing warnings of job loss and people being left behind, there’s an increasing number of Americans who are afraid that technology will “take over.” Yet these fears are mostly unfounded, as technology has already displaced 90% of jobs humans used to do, but we’ve adapted just fine (the world doesn’t have a 90% unemployment rate)…