Tech Policy Podcast

What is driving Europe’s aggressive antitrust enforcement against American tech companies? Are there legitimate antitrust concerns? Or are all the fines, taxes, investigations, and restrictions better thought of as protectionist tariffs? Dirk Auer, director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, joins the show to discuss.

Is the end near? In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—and with the specters of political violence, debt crises, secular stagnation, climate change, and resource depletion before us—the potential for societal collapse is (unfortunately) a hot topic. Is collapse inevitable? What are the signs that a society is on the road to collapse? Where are we along that path? Dr. Joseph Tainter, author of the seminal 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, joins the show to discuss these questions and more.

Content moderation is, as ever, an interesting, contentious, and fast-paced policy area. TechFreedom’s Corbin Barthold, Andy Jung, and Santana Boulton sit down for a late-summer content moderation news roundup. They cover (among other things) Andy’s recent article on AB 2408, a misguided attempt by California to combat teenage social media addiction; YouTube’s recent Supreme Court brief in Gonzalez v. Google, a case about whether Section 230 protects algorithmic recommendations (spoiler alert: it does); Santana’s essay arguing that algorithms are speech protected by the First Amendment; and Corbin’s recent piece in Techdirt, “Two Dogmas of the Free Speech Panic,” a response to those who equate content moderation with “censorship.”

Hello from TechFreedom’s 2022 Policy Summit! The panelists at this year’s gathering discussed truth decay and misinformation, the collapse of trust in experts, and the future of free speech and social media. In this live recording from the event, Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic explores those themes and more while discussing the January 6 Committee, Trump’s election “Big Lie,” the difficulty of combatting online extremism, the insanity that is Steve Bannon, and the fraying of American civic life. For more, see “The Great Rage,” a must-read essay Quinta published in The Atlantic.

Is “Big Tech censorship” really a thing? If so, are the social media giants facing effective competition from sites that style themselves as free speech alternatives? What does it mean to be a free speech platform, anyway? Parler’s Chief Policy Officer, Amy Peikoff, discusses these questions and much more with TechFreedom’s Corbin Barthold and Ari Cohn. Needless to say, the talk of the deal between Elon Musk and Twitter, at the top of the episode, was recorded before Musk declared that he wants out! Amy’s law review article on privacy, mentioned toward the end of the show, is available here.

Last year, Florida and Texas passed draconian social media speech regulations. Each law violates the First Amendment, and, not surprisingly, each was blocked by a federal trial court. On appeal, however, things got weird. Although one appellate court affirmed most of the ruling against Florida’s law (SB 7072), another let Texas’s (HB 20) go into immediate effect. In an emergency order, the Supreme Court re-blocked the Texas law—for now. A further ruling by the justices, probably next year, is all but inevitable. TechFreedom’s Corbin Barthold and Ari Cohn break down the situation. For more, see a recent article by Corbin, “Trumpism on the Bench?,” published at The Bulwark; a recent article by TechFreedom’s Berin Szóka, “Mass Shooting Videos Are Protected Under These Awful Laws,” published at The Daily Beast; and Corbin’s and Berin’s joint essay “No, Florida Can’t Regulate Online Speech,” published at Lawfare.

Commissioner Noah Phillips joins the show for a wide-ranging discussion about the Federal Trade Commission. Topics include “unfair methods of competition” rulemaking, the history of the FTC, merger guidelines, the consumer-welfare standard and free-of-charge products, administrative tribunals, the history of the Sherman Act, and neo-Brandeisian antitrust in a time of inflation.

Ever since his (putative) deal to buy Twitter was announced, Elon Musk has hijacked the debates around content moderation, the design of social media, and online speech. His comments on these subjects are a mish-mash of (sometimes contradictory) slogans. Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Berin Szóka, founder and president of TechFreedom, join the show for a more informed exploration of these topics. Along with host Corbin Barthold, they discuss the nuances of social media transparency, the value of user anonymity, the promise of decentralized protocols, and more. Mentioned on this episode: the Santa Clara Principles; articles on the Musk/Twitter deal by Jillian, Berin, and Corbin; and EFF’s new Tracking Global Censorship project.

Evolving technology—not to mention evolving norms in Silicon Valley—has sparked fierce debate about online speech. Are social media platforms too powerful? Do their content moderation policies strike a good balance between free speech and healthy conversation? Should the government get involved in policing disinformation? In this episode, we home in on how the American Right views these issues. Nate Hochman, an ISI fellow at National Review, and Rachel Altman, TechFreedom’s director of digital media, join the show to discuss the federal government’s new “Disinformation Governance Board,” Elon Musk’s planned acquisition of Twitter, and what conservative political philosophy might tell us about how to approach content moderation. For more, see Nate’s recent piece at National Review: “Elon Musk’s Town Square.”

In 2017 or so, people started to assert that the FAANG companies—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google—were unstoppable juggernauts. Lately that claim has taken some hard hits, as Facebook (now Meta) and Netflix, facing stiff competition, have seen their stock prices tumble. Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, joins the show to discuss how the Schumpeterian “gale of creative destruction” unseats dominant market players, why government antitrust cases so often look foolish in hindsight, and why we should celebrate innovation (spoiler: it leads to progress and human betterment). Adam also discusses his book Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments. Corbin’s piece on monkeys and double pendulums—mentioned around 20:30—is “Can Experts Structure Markets? Don’t Count on It.”