The Politics of Tech Regulation

This week on the Vergecast interview series, The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel sits down with Berin Szóka, the president of TechFreedom. TechFreedom is a tech policy think tank based in Washington, DC that “digs deep into the hard policy and legal questions raised by technological change.”

Berin and Nilay have differed on a few issues regarding tech policy, like net neutrality, but what they do agree on is the state of the tech policy conversation — it’s bad. Szóka says Republicans he has previously worked with are now getting important topics like Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act wrong, and bad-faith politicians are misinterpreting it to try to score points and pass policy in their favor.

Hear Berin talk about what’s happening now with legislation like Sen. Josh Hawley’s platform moderation bills, why it’s weird for conservatives to want to directly regulate speech on the internet, and how this might play out in the future. Below is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation.

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