Techdirt

We're back! It's been a lull over the holidays and we've gone a while without new podcast episodes, but now we've got several lined up for the coming weeks — and today we kick things off with a very interesting discussion. Many of you probably know about the controversy and concern over the Internet Society's sale of the .ORG domain registry to a private equity firm, but one prominent defender of the deal is ISOC trustee Mike Godwin, and today he joins us to explain his reasoning and try to convince Mike that the sale is a good idea.

When Kashmir Hill last joined us on the podcast, it was to discuss her experiment with cutting big tech companies out of her life. This week she's back to discuss something even harder to escape, and subject of her recent article in the New York Times: the low-profile companies that track consumers and assign them secret scores, and the disturbing amount of power they wield.

We've said it before (and even put it on a t-shirt) and we'll say it again: copying is not theft, and intellectual "property" is anything but. In September, the Niskanen Center published an excellent paper exploring this issue and explaining why IP is a misnomer — and this week we've got one of the authors of that paper, Daniel Takash, to discuss in more detail why property is simply the wrong lens for looking at copyrights and patents.

GET YOUR COPY OF THE ANTHOLOGY AT https://workingfutur.es/ A few weeks ago, we sat down with some of the authors from Working Futures, our new anthology of short stories about the future of work. Today we're back with three new guests whose stories are featured in the collection: Andrew Dana Hudson, N. R. M. Roshak, and Randy Lubin (who helped design the scenario-planning game we used to spawn ideas for many of the stories). We hope you enjoy this second instalment in our discussion all about Working Futures and the intriguing, challenging stories therein.

We've written a lot about Backpage ever since it replaced Craigslist as the favorite target of grandstanding prosecutors, and especially since it was used to help pass FOSTA. Now history's being rewritten to claim FOSTA took Backpage down, despite that not being the order in which things happened. The biggest issue, though, is that taking down these sites makes it harder to fight sex trafficking — and the feds know it. This week, we're joined by Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown to discuss documents she recently obtained in which federal investigators repeatedly acknowledge that Backpage helped them do their job, and wasn't run by a bunch of criminals.

A couple of months ago, we were surprised when a WIPO employee showed up in our comments to defend the organization's new database of supposedly infringing sites against our many criticisms. In that post, we highlighted a Twitter thread from lawyer Rick Shera — who represented Mega — and this week, Shera joins us on the podcast to further discuss the inefficacy and negative impact of these kinds of pirate shaming lists.

GET THE BOOK: http://workingfutur.es/ As we hope you know by now, last week we released Working Futures, an anthology of short stories about the future of work in our world of rapidly advancing technology, inspired by settings we developed with a specially-designed scenario planning exercise. For this week's special episode of the podcast, we've brought in three of the authors whose stories are featured in the book— Katharine Dow, Christopher Hooton, and James Yu — to talk about the process of developing future scenarios and, of course, about their stories.

With all the misconceptions, political projects, and flat-out panics about tech in Congress these days, it sometimes feels like any positive legislative progress regarding technology is impossible. But once in a while you find a lawmaker who is out there pushing smart bills about tech, such as one that aims to help solve this whole mess by restoring and redesigning the Office of Technology Assessment to help educate Congress in the digital age. This week, we're joined by Rep. Mark Takano to discuss his plans to bring tech literacy back to Congress.

The latest big news in the ongoing discussion about social media moderation is the release of Facebook's official plans for its independent oversight board, which will review content moderation decisions in an attempt to bring some transparency and due process to the system. This week we're joined by returning guest Professor Kate Klonick, who was present as an observer at Facebook covering the entire planning process, to discuss the many interesting questions around what Facebook would probably prefer people stop calling the "Facebook Supreme Court".

"Dynamic pricing" is an idea that sounds efficient and effective in economic theory, but often collapses under the weight of customer anger when put into practice. But while that is true of some of the most egregious approaches, other forms of dynamic pricing are ubiquitous and largely accepted — in part because of how the systems work, and in part because of how they present themselves to customers. This week, we're joined by Perfect Price CEO Alex Shartsis to discuss the many facets of dynamic pricing, and whether it deserves the hate it gets.