Techdirt

The origins of Techdirt lie in a newsletter that Mike started over 20 years ago, and in all that time, the business models for online journalism have never stopped evolving and changing, especially when it comes to independent reporting. Now, newsletters are making a comeback with a new model, driven especially by writers flocking to the Substack platform. One such person is technology journalist Casey Newton with his new Platformer newsletter, and this week Casey joins the podcast to discuss his experience and what it can teach us about the future of independent journalism online.

We've got another cross-post episode for you this week, featuring Mike's recent appearance on Robert Amsterdam's Departures podcast. The conversation touches on many aspects of internet regulation, Section 230, and related issues — but the main focus of discussion is one big mess: Trump's executive order about TikTok, and what it means for innovation.

This week, we're featuring another panel discussion that Mike participated in. At the recent DWeb Meetup, Mai Ishikawa Sutton moderated a discussion with Mike, Cory Doctorow, Jay Graber, and Amandine Le Pape with a focus on how to build a better, more decentralized web that isn't controlled by a few big tech firms. You can listen to the full audio of the panel on this week's episode.

The third book in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother series is coming soon — but as usual, Cory is doing something different as part of the release. Fans and Techdirt readers know he's an outspoken opponent of DRM who makes sure all his work is available DRM-free, but that isn't so easy when it comes to audiobooks, where Audible's market dominance forces DRM onto everything. So while publishers eagerly picked up Attack Surface for printing, he retained the audio rights and is running his first-ever Kickstarter to release a nice non-DRM version. This week, Cory joins Mike on the podcast to discuss why he's doing it, what he's giving up, and the industry changes he hopes to inspire.

Late last year, we designed Threatcast 2020: a brainstorming game for groups of people trying to predict the new, innovative, and worrying forms of misinformation and disinformation that might come into play in the upcoming election. We ran a few in-person sessions before the pandemic hit and ended our plans for more, then last month we moved it online with the help of the fun interactive event platform Remo. We've learned a lot and hit on some disturbingly real-feeling predictions throughout these events, so this week we're joined by our partner in designing the game — Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play — to discuss our experiences "threatcasting" the 2020 election, and our plans to keep doing it. We really want to run more of these online events for new groups, so if that's something you or your organization might be interested in, please get in touch!

There's a lot of talk about tech companies and antitrust these days, and a great deal of the focus falls on Amazon. But is antitrust law really the right approach, or even capable of achieving the results many people want? This week, we're focusing on one specific complaint that comes up a lot, about Amazon being both a marketplace and a seller in that marketplace and gaining various advantages including, supposedly, from the data it has access to. We're joined by Greg Mercer, founder and CEO of Jungle Scout, to talk about whether Amazon really has a data advantage, and how much it really matters.

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, and as it rages on we're learning a lot about technology's role in a situation like this — but it's also worth looking forward, and thinking about how tech will be involved in the process of repairing and recovering from the damage the pandemic has done. This week, we're joined by TechNYC executive director Julie Samuels to discuss the role of technology in a post-pandemic world.

This week we've got another cross-post, with the latest episode of The Neoliberal Podcast from the Progressive Policy Institute. Host Jeremiah Johnson invited Mike, along with PPI's Alec Stapp, to discuss everything about encryption: the concept itself, the attempts at laws and regulations, and more.

The standard operating procedure for most companies is to freak out about copycat products, and usually to use intellectual property laws to fight them tooth and nail — even at the expense of other aspects of the business that could use a lot more attention. Today, we're talking to the founder of a company that takes a more nuanced, less panicked approach: Dan Vinson is the creator of Monkii Bars, which launched with a Kickstarter that embraced and celebrated people making DIY copies, and he joins us this week to discuss a better way to think about copycats, and the advantages it brings.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, nobody really knows what's going to happen — especially if kids start going back to school. Statistical models of the possibilities abound, but this week we're joined by some people who are taking a different approach: John Cordier and Don Burke are the founders of Epistemix, which is using a new agent-based modeling approach to figure out what the future of the pandemic might look like.

At the end of May, we launched the Techdirt Greenhouse — a new project to foster long-form conversations with a wide variety of experts about the most challenging and nuanced tech policy questions of our time. Since then we've been focusing on our first topic: privacy. Now we're wrapping that up and getting ready to launch a series of posts on our next subject, but first we wanted to sit down with one of our Greenhouse editors, Karl Bode, to look back on all the excellent pieces that we've published over the past few weeks. Check out the Greenhouse page here on Techdirt to catch up on the posts, then listen to the podcast for a wrapup of all the ins-and-outs of privacy policy challenges that our many great contributors brought to the project.

Attacks on Section 230 are relentless and coming from all sides — so we've got another podcast all about the attempts to ruin the most important law on the internet. This week, we're joined by Riana Pfefferkorn, the Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, to discuss what is currently the most serious threat of all: the latest incarnation of the disastrous and nonsensical EARN IT Act.

As the debates about content moderation rage on, it is becoming increasingly clear that most people don't know a whole lot about how large internet platforms actually handle these decisions — namely, that they have teams of people who have been working and studying under the "trust and safety" umbrella for a long time. Recently, an association and related foundation were launched to help bring these experts into the public conversation, and this week we've got two of the founding board members — Adelin Cai and Clara Tsao — joining us on the podcast to discuss the actual process of addressing tough content moderation choices.

Last week, the attacks on Section 230 kicked into high gear with Senator Hawley's bill and the DOJ recommendations both coming out on the same day. As usual, the content of the bill and recommendations — and the discussion around them — is a huge mess, so this week we've got returning guests Emma Llansó and Cathy Gellis joining us to discuss just what's going on with Section 230 and what these proposals would do.

COVID-19 has thrust old questions about privacy into the spotlight, often with new and different framing, and raised the big question of whether our conception of privacy needs to change entirely in the midst of a pandemic. On this week's episode, we're joined by reporter, analyst and investor Esther Dyson to discuss the challenging ethical quandaries raised by the pandemic. Also, as a bonus, Dyson (who is a former founding chair of ICANN) takes a moment at the beginning to respond to our recent episode with Mike Godwin.

This week, we've got a special cross-post from 16 Minutes On The News — an excellent tech podcast by a16z that's well worth subscribing to. For the latest episode, host Sonal Chokshi interviewed Mike all about Section 230 and Trump's recent executive order about social media — and as you might imagine, it took a lot longer than 16 minutes! We've got the complete interview here on the Techdirt Podcast.

We're back! It's been a while since the last podcast, for obvious reasons, but today we've got a new episode following up on something we discussed with Mike Godwin in January: the Internet Society's proposed sale of the .org domain registry. That deal has since been cancelled, and some groups including the EFF assert that it showed ISOC can't be trusted to handle the registry, so this week Godwin joins us again to discuss what happened in more detail.

Last week, we featured the first half of a panel discussion organized by Lincoln Network, all about the concept of open internet protocols versus proprietary walled-garden platforms. The panel is moderated by Marshall Kosloff and features Mike Masnick, Cory Doctorow, Ashley Tyson and Mai Sutton, and this week we've got the second half of the discussion plus the audience Q&A.

Today on the podcast, we've got the first part of a panel discussion organized by Lincoln Network on a subject we've been talking more and more about around here: a return to an internet based on open protocols instead of closed platforms. The panel, which took place last week, is moderated by Marshall Kosloff and features Mike Masnick, Cory Doctorow, Ashley Tyson and Mai Sutton. In next week's episode we'll have the second half along with the Q&A at the end, but this week you can dive in to the first part of this wide-ranging discussion about protocols versus platforms.

Remember HQ Trivia? A couple years ago it was taking the world by storm and raising a lot of interest, and not without reason: it looked like it was resurrecting a shared live experience that seemed to be dead in the on-demand era. We featured a discussion about it on Episode 146. But the company has faced a rocky road since then, and recently announced that it would be shutting down — although, after this podcast was recorded, a subsequent announcement suggested it might get a lifeline. Either way, it's worth looking at what happened, so erstwhile podcast co-host Dennis Yang — who was both an early adopter and, to this day, one of the dwindling regular players of HQ — has returned for this episode to discuss the fate of HQ Trivia.

Last week, we announced the winners of our second annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. The entries were so great this year that they deserve a close look, so this week myself and Randy Lubin — who was instrumental in conceiving, launching, and judging these jams — join the podcast to discuss all six of the winners from the game jam, and what makes them special.

Last month I wrote a long post explaining why I could not support Larry Lessig's new lawsuit against journalists and the New York Times for what he referred to as "Clickbait Defamation." Lessig argued that a NY Times headline and lede was false, while I argued that it was a different interpretation, but not "false," and thus not defamatory. I also argued that his lawsuit was a SLAPP suit, potentially harming the individuals named. Larry wished to respond to my post and I invited him on the podcast to discuss. Larry is a Harvard Law professor. I am not. This immediately puts me at a disadvantage in arguing things in a live debate, and while I don't think either of us convinced each other of anything, l definitely understand his argument more clearly, though I still disagree with it. As I said in my intro to the podcast, I think it's worth reading all of the background information to understand what we're talking about, including: - Lessig's original Medium post: https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7 - The NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/business/lessig-epstein-ito-mit.html - Larry's response to the NY Times: https://medium.com/@lessig/on-the-careful-reading-of-the-new-york-times-editors-8f543418c1df - Larry's new ClickbaitDefamation.org website, including his legal complaint: https://clickbaitdefamation.org/ - My post about this case: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200113/18320443724/dear-larry-lessig-please-dont-file-slapp-suits.shtml Also, for the first time, we are providing a transcript with this podcast. This is an experiment. We have wanted to do transcripts for a while, but it is usually quite expensive and/or time consuming. In this case, given the likely interest in the discussion, we felt it was worthwhile. We are testing an automated transcript service, and while we've gone through it and tried to correct the errors, it is likely that some still made it through. We apologize for any such errors and will try to correct them if you alert us in the comments. You can read the transcript on Techdirt: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200211/11583043904/techdirt-podcast-episode-238-larry-lessig-defends-his-clickbait-defamation-lawsuit.shtml

Privacy laws are often well-intentioned, but rarely without terrible unintended consequences. And some of these fly right under the radar, like the fact that various privacy laws have made it harder for defense teams in criminal trials to access critical information, even as law enforcement and prosecutors don't seem to face the same problem. This week, we're joined by Berkeley Law's Rebecca Wexler, who has been tracking this issue and working on an upcoming paper about it, to discuss how privacy laws are harming criminal defendants.

If you're a baseball fan, you've probably heard of Jomboy (aka Jim O'Brien) by now. And if you're not, you still might have — because he's been getting attention by building a successful new media network online with his baseball explainer videos. And of course, that includes facing some familiar copyright and ContentID obstacles along the way. This week, Jomboy himself joins us on the podcast to discuss the experience, the challenges, and yes, the baseball.

Once again, it's time for the CES post-mortem! Unlike past years, Mike didn't make it to the 2020 show, but our regular guest and unrivaled CES veteran Rob Pegoraro is back with all the important details from the ground. Listen in to find out what new consumer tech, both expected and unexpected, the industry is pushing this year.

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.

The future of the internet is... uncertain. We've always been optimistic about what technology and innovation can achieve, and that hasn't changed, but right now it often feels like we're facing more new challenges and more reactions to them (including dangerous ones) than ever, and pessimism about the internet seems to be at an all-time high. This week we're joined by EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, who recently wrote an essay (pdf link) about internet pioneer John Perry Barlow and how his famous tech optimism was more complex — and more aware of challenges — than it is often portrayed, to discuss a positive future for the internet, and how we get there. Cindy Cohn's Essay: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1341&context=dltr

By now, you likely all know the story of David Karpf's mild "bedbugs" joke that drew the personal, professional and journalistic ire of the New York Times' Bret Stephens. As it turned out, Karpf — a professor with expertise in media and political communication — was more than capable of responding to Stephens and talking about what was happening in a variety of media outlets, with far more insight than the Pulitzer-winning columnist himself, turning what started as a very silly incident into an exploration of very serious topics. So this week, David Karpf joins us on the podcast to talk about his experience, and what we can all learn from it.

We've talked a lot about how many of the controversial, challenging problems that exist online could be addressed by refocusing on making the internet what it was always supposed to be: a network of open protocols, not a cluster of walled gardens. Mike's recent paper on the subject lays out the reasons in detail, and on this week's episode of the podcast we're joined by one of the people working towards that goal: Anil Dash, whose Glitch community aims to bring development back to the masses. Mike's Paper - https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech Glitch - https://glitch.com/

Last week, we featured part one of our discussion with lawyer Joshua de Larios-Heiman, about the details of the FCC's Facebook settlement, beyond the headline-grabbing fine. It was a long conversation that we cut off right in the middle, so be sure to listen to part one first and then come back for part two, in which we finish picking apart the settlement item by item. PART ONE: https://soundcloud.com/techdirt/whats-really-in-the-ftcs-facebook-settlement-part-one

Ever since the FCC announced its proposed settlement with Facebook, the headlines have focused on the largest-ever privacy fine that came with it — but few people paid attention to the many, many important details. This week, we've got the first half of a two-part podcast with lawyer Joshua de Larios-Heiman, who helps us go through the entire settlement from start to finish, and pick apart what it means.

There's a new but growing desire, both within the tech industry and among onlookers, for more technologists to get involved in public policy and doing work to serve the public interest. Various plans to help make this happen are starting to appear, and an especially interesting one is the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, which aims to help establish a new generation of tech policy entrepreneurs using an incubator model in the vein of Y Combinator. This week, Mike is joined by director Betsy Cooper to discuss the Hub's resources and programs, its inaugural cohort of technologists, and what comes next.

Moral panics are nothing new, but they've taken on many new forms in the internet era, and their patterns have rubbed off on other kinds of techno-panics. This week, I join Mike on the podcast to discuss the way we talk about the potentially scary aspects of tech, how to spot a tech panic, and how to start changing the conversation into something more constructive.

Bruce Schneier is a name most Techdirt readers are very familiar with — he's a famous computer security expert who most recently has taken up the mantle of Public Interest Technologist, and been exploring exactly what that means. This week, Bruce joins us on the podcast to discuss how technologists can dedicate themselves to the common good.

Josh Hawley's bill that aims to force "political neutrality" on social media platforms has caused a lot of stir for something so obviously unconstitutional and doomed to failure. There are so many problems with the bill that we've got three experts this week — Daphne Keller, Jeffrey Koseff, and Aaron Mackey — to help dig into all the ways this attack on Section 230 sucks.

Live streaming is here to stay, and it seems to be getting more popular by the minute — but for many people, it still seems like a foreign land and evokes a cliched "I feel old" response. This week, Mike is joined by not-so-regular-anymore co-host Dennis Yang, who has been experimenting with Twitch, to get a beginner's perspective on the platform, the community, and the medium of streaming.

In all the attempts to understand just what happened with the 2016 election, a lot of blame has fallen on the internet and especially on Facebook. The attention, which often focuses on the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian interference, is not unwarranted — but it often seems to lose track of the fact that Facebook is just one part of a broader media ecosystem, and not necessarily the most important one. This week, we're joined by Yochai Benkler of the Berkman Klein Center to discuss why Fox News, not Facebook, might deserve the lion's share of scrutiny.

Once upon a time, there was something called the Office of Technology Assessment, charged with the critical if unenviable task of educating members of congress about issues related to technology. Since that seems like a pretty good thing to have, recently some people have been pushing to re-establish the office. This week, we're joined by two of those people — Daniel Schuman from Demand Progress and returning guest Zach Graves from the Lincoln Network — for a discussion about bringing back the OTA.

The topic of what (if anything) to do with Facebook was hardly fading from public discourse anyway, but it received a bump when co-founder Chris Hughes called for the company to be broken up. This week, we've got two returning guests on the podcast with plenty to say on the subject — UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye, and famed internet lawyer Mike Godwin — to discuss the many sides of the Facebook question.

The regulation of technology is an extremely important issue that impacts all our lives, but it tends to take a back seat in the world of mainstream politics, and when it does come to the fore, the lack of knowledge on display among elected representatives can be... disheartening, to say the least. In some ways that's starting to change as a generation of people who grew up with modern technology gets more and more involved in politics, but we're still a long, long way away from having a majority of tech-savvy (or even tech-literate) lawmakers. This week, we're joined by lawyer and pioneering law blogger Denise Howell to discuss the challenge of even determining whether a politician knows what they are talking about when it comes to tech.

Whether it's from his novels, or his work for the EFF and others, most of you probably know all about Cory Doctorow. He last joined the podcast two years ago to discuss his book Walkaway, and this week he's back to talk about his latest book, Radicalized — a collection of four novellas, the first of which is directly based on the issues with the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. Check out the episode for a discussion about the book, anti-circumvention, tech companies, and more.