Bobby Allyn
Bobby Allyn is a business reporter at NPR based in San Francisco. He covers technology and how Silicon Valley's largest companies are transforming how we live and reshaping society.
He came to San Francisco from Washington, where he focused on national breaking news and politics. Before that, he covered criminal justice at member station WHYY.
In that role, he focused on major corruption trials, law enforcement, and local criminal justice policy. He helped lead NPR's reporting of Bill Cosby's two criminal trials. He was a guest on Fresh Air after breaking a major story about the nation's first supervised injection site plan in Philadelphia. In between daily stories, he has worked on several investigative projects, including a story that exposed how the federal government was quietly hiring debt collection law firms to target the homes of student borrowers who had defaulted on their loans. Allyn also strayed from his beat to cover Philly parking disputes that divided in the city, the last meal at one of the city's last all-night diners, and a remembrance of the man who wrote the Mister Softee jingle on a xylophone in the basement of his Northeast Philly home.
At other points in life, Allyn has been a staff reporter at Nashville Public Radio and daily newspapers including The Oregonian in Portland and The Tennessean in Nashville. His work has also appeared in BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, a former mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Allyn is the son of a machinist and a church organist. He's a dedicated bike commuter and long-distance runner. He is a graduate of American University in Washington.
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A fight between a Seattle man and AOL in the mid-1990s led to what has been called "the most important Internet law ruling ever." Decades later, the decision still governs how the web functions. -
A federal appeals court on Tuesday issued a stunning ruling: It said a decades-old legal shield preventing platforms from lawsuits should not apply to Snapchat in a case involving a fatal car crash.
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The trial is about one app developer, Epic Games, but the outcome could have far-reaching consequences for Silicon Valley and the future of how money moves on smartphones and other devices.
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The civil rights group says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised Congress and the public the network would move fast to take down posts that break its rules, but anti-Muslim bigotry is still present.
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The popular platform also reported on Monday that it deleted more than 300 communities, known on the site as "servers," that were dedicated to the conspiracy theory QAnon.
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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said social media companies are "sufficiently akin" to a common carrier, like a telephone company, and should be "regulated in this manner."
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The social networking app has exploded in popularity during the pandemic, far outgrowing its gaming roots. Now, Microsoft is in talks to acquire Discord for $10 billion.
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John Matze, the co-founder and former CEO of Parler, has sued the site's financier, Rebekah Mercer, over his ouster from the company, which he alleges took millions of dollars away from him.
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Following Apple's move, Google has slashed commissions by half on purchases made on its mobile app stores. Those fees attracted criticism from small developers, lawmakers and other Big Tech critics.
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After Amazon took Parler down over violent messages on the site, no tech services firm would help it come back online. Then an obscure Los Angeles-based company offered to help.
