 This is a mask that I wore as a master's student at the MIT Media Lab when I was working on an art project. This art project would detect a face in a mirror and then display something like an animal or somebody who inspired me. So this project I called the Aspire Mirror. And as I was working on it, I realized that the software I was using had a hard time detecting my face. So when I put on the white mask, instead of struggling to be detected, it was flawless. And that was the moment I decided to start looking into why it was my face couldn't be detected, but this white mask could. My name is Joy Blomweeney, and I'm a public interest technologist. I started the Algorithmic Justice League when I realized we were entering the age of automation overconfident and underprepared. I look at the ways in which computers learn to detect, classify, and identify faces. I wanted to build tools to help researchers and practitioners code in a more inclusive way and also think through what they were developing with the full spectrum mindset from the design, development, and deployment of their system. So for example, one of our latest projects is Gender Shades that provided quantitative data about the failure rates of facial analysis technology from some of the leading tech companies on actually classifying the gender of somebody's face. And what we found in that study was these systems work better on male faces than female faces. They also work better on lighter skin than darker skin. And if you broke it down into different subgroups, lighter males had the best performance. No company we tested had an error rate of over 1%. Whereas if you look at darker skin females, you had error rates as high as 35%. So to have a tech company failing on one in three women of color or one in three women with faces like mine, it's very concerning. You're looking at most of the world. You're looking at women and people of color. So if you're narrowly focusing technology to serve a very homogeneous group and the technology is being developed by a homogeneous group, you're actually missing the majority of the world. One thing I've been really excited about with the Gender Shades Research is that it's now being referenced by others to justify the need for more inclusive technology and also the need for more rigorous standards. So one of the areas in which the Gender Shades Research has been used is an open letter to Axon's AI Ethics Board. Axon is a company that provides police departments with body-worn cameras and they're considering putting facial recognition technology on the body-worn cameras. The Gender Shades Research was used in an open letter stipulating specific steps that would need to be taken to make sure this technology isn't abused and also stipulating areas it shouldn't be used in at all. So there aren't easy solutions, but there are definitely practices that can be involved in the design development and deployment of these technologies. I cannot just be a white mask and a shield on my own. We need everybody to add your perspectives and to add your voice so we can create a world where technology works well for all of us, not just some of us, and center social change. Everything we do that involves a computer produces data about that interaction, what happened, who did it, where it was. That's very valuable and very personal. It's surveillance data. And we need a society to figure out how to get the group benefits of it while maintaining the security of it individually. Public interest technologists, Bruce Schneier, I guess this is take one, clap. Security is something that affects all of us at the individual level, the family level, the community level, the national level, the global level. An easy example will be Waze. I use Waze to get here today. A driver phone application that tells me about traffic based on every user of Waze under surveillance. So enormous group benefit, yet everyone under surveillance. How do we get that benefit while maintaining security? It's not just security, it's future of work, it's food safety, it's transportation or medical data. I think there's enormous value in putting all of our medical data in one giant database and letting researchers add it. Yet that's incredibly private, incredibly personal. How do we make that work? Core tech decisions have policy ramifications. Policy decisions have tech ramifications. And policymakers need to understand tech in the same way tech people need to understand policy. And to me, a public interest technologist is someone who understands that and tries to bridge the tech and policy worlds. I want everyone to think about the public interest ramifications of their work. And I want some of us to go into public interest tech as the thing we do. Maybe as a full-time career, maybe as a sabbatical, as a couple of year break from this startup and that big tech company, the demand for this kind of work is enormous. Tech is shaping the contours of the future more than anything else. And how that future looks has to depend on what we as society want. It can't just be what the tech permits. And the only way we can have these conversations at the right time with the right people is by having people who understand tech involved in the policy from the beginning. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the new Zama duty commissioner, Jeffrey Starks and commissioner, Noah Phillips. Did you hear anything I said? My children will tell you I'm a loud talker, but so my name is Manush Zamarodi and I am so pleased to be here and you clapped when I said that aren't those videos great. So I'll just say it again and we'll clap again. Thank you. So I have the weird honor of sitting with two commissioners, but not to talk about politics. Isn't that extraordinary? I want to just preface myself if I may gentlemen, but first I do want to introduce FCC commissioner, Jeffrey Starks to my left here, he is a Democrat. And FTC commissioner, Noah Phillips, who is a Republican. Thank you both so much for doing this. Thanks for having us. Yeah, and so I think one of the reasons why the Ford Foundation wanted me to be part of this conversation is because of the storytelling aspect that really has been hammered home so far. I'm not Eva DuVernay, but I am known sort of in the podcast world for telling stories about technology and society and the impact that it has on regular people. So Bruce Snire, who you saw, a cryptographer, he was on my latest podcast, Note to Self. We talk about the implications of the internet of things on regular people. Blackouts won't just be blackouts going into the future. And also, Ford Foundation's own Jenny Toomey is featured on next week's Zigzag, which is my other podcast, and it explains how she went from her punk rock roots here in DC to giving away all this money to make sure that we live in a democracy. So the stakes aren't that high, but I want to get started talking to you too. And I think it's important to sort of lay out for everyone because we are live streaming this, that it's possible some people don't understand how these agencies work, the setup of the commissioners. I do want to make sure we touch on that. But again, what I want to do is really go behind the scenes into how these agencies work right now with technologists, how you would like to see them work with technologists going forward and how that might sort of change the makeup of the people, figuring out how we live in a civil society with technology. So Commissioner Starts, let's start with you. You are the newest commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, and I wonder, could you share your background a little bit, how you became a commissioner? And then also, this is my wild card question. If you had to choose one label, would you consider yourself, A, a techie nerd, B, a gadget geek, or C, a policy wonk? Multiple choice, I like it, it's been a while. So I'm Jeffrey Starts, I am the newest commissioner on the FCC, like many things in life, I guess the way I kind of came to be a commissioner, I'd start, first of all, with my mom, who was a public servant back in the state of Kansas, where I grew up, she was a guardian ad litem, which basically means that she was making decisions for children who were in need of care. And so the standard there is what is in the best interest of the child. And so I got to see up close and personal growing up how hard those decisions were for her, how much she wrestled with what was the right thing to do, and I think that really kind of influenced me and really moved me. And now obviously one of the standards that we apply at the FCC is what is the public interest standard? What is in the public interest on almost all the things that we do? How I became a commissioner, another brief little story is, this had to have been about 10 or 11 years ago, and I was getting a barber, a haircut back in Kansas City where I'm from and was in a black barber shop there and we had been talking about the Kansas City Chiefs because for anybody who's been in an argument about sports, a lot of people had opinions, but not everyone had the same facts I found. And so we were arguing about the Kansas City Chiefs and I remember getting up from getting my haircut and I distinctly said, well, let's all go home and look it up and when I come back and get a haircut next, we'll figure out who's right and who's wrong. And everyone in the barber shop kind of starts looking at me like, what is he talking about? Go home and look it up. And it became very clear to me that I was the only one in that black barber shop who had fixed internet to my then apartment. And I was deeply that resonated with me and I distinctly remember thinking I hope somebody is on that problem. Turns out now it's me, really it's all of us, but it is most pointedly me. And so I think that'd be a roundabout way to answer your question, which is that, from the 20,000 foot standpoint, maybe even the 50,000 foot standpoint, I think a lot of what policy folks do to answer your question, I'd call myself a policy wonk. I'd insert advocate there. I think mostly what I do is advocacy. Is we are looking at issues of inclusion, issues of equity, issues of what is fair. And so that's how I certainly approach my job. Thank you so much, Commissioner Phillips. Sure, and thank you. That was really interesting to hear. This is my first time doing an event with Commissioner Starks and it's a real privilege. So just a little bit by way of explanation for those who aren't familiar with the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission is a little bit more than a hundred years old. We were started in the first progressive era by President Wilson. And we came about at a really interesting time in American history. So about 25 years before then, Congress passed the first antitrust law, the Sherman Antitrust Act. There was a lot of concern in the public about the ubiquity of these large cartels that ran the American economy, the sugar trust and the steel trust and very famously the Standard Oil Trust. So Congress passed this law, the Department of Justice was in charge of enforcing it and people had a lot of different views about how that enforcement was going, how the courts were treating it. In came President Wilson and notably his advisor, Louis Brandeis, who would later become famous, was already famous for quite a number of things. And they set up this independent expert agency, not the first independent agency, we were the second, the first, you stole their jurisdiction. I know. For those of you history students, the Interstate Commerce Commission, set up this agency to regulate some of the bad conduct in which corporations found themselves involved. And that was at the time anti-competitive conduct and that's developed over time. And it later came to include what we think of as consumer protection, but that's unfair and deceptive acts and practices, frauds, false advertising, things like that. Privacy would be a very topical example of the kind of work that we do protecting consumers. So how do I come to this as always in life through a lot of luck? But fundamentally, my dad taught corporate law and I was raised on stories about how corporate America had changed in particular as he grew up. And he was someone who came of age when the nature of American capitalism was very much in flux. Corporations had been left to do their thing and particular managers had been left to do their thing. They didn't have to deal with shareholders. They didn't have to spend a lot of time worrying about other people. They got rich, they got sleepy. Consumers didn't see the competition they needed and markets began to change dramatically. So he sort of had little Noah on his knee. Little Noah, although he knows to be a Pats fan, was not so good with the sports but very good with the corporates. And I went after college, I went to work on Wall Street doing mergers and acquisitions. Would later come back many years to doing merger review which is what I do today. And I went to be a lawyer in private practice and I sort of hit on what corporations were doing with respect to antitrust, with respect to consumer protection in my career. And then I met a girl and we got married and I came to DC and I got into public service. I went to work on the hill for a number of years. And after doing a lot of it from the congressional side, from the oversight side, I came to do it in the executive branch. Okay, and A, techie nerd. B, gadget geek or C, policy wonk. So obviously with my long answer, I was trying to avoid giving you one. Yes, it's so C. C, policy wonk. Yeah, I mean, okay. So thank you for setting me up so beautifully for my second question, which is we have two lawyers on stage. We have two self-professed policy wonks. And yet it does seem as though that famous edict by Mark Andreessen in 2011 that software was going to eat the world, it's arrived, right? So I wanna understand from both of your perspectives how much of the issues that are coming across your desk and at your agencies have to do with technology. And I should also make clear, as you rightly pointed out commissioner, that you both speak for yourselves not on behalf of your agencies. Who would like to take that first? I'm happy to take it. Yeah. So one of the things I mentioned earlier in terms of the kind of laws that we enforce with respect to unfair and deceptive acts and practices and anti-competitive conduct is that the concepts are old. They're pretty broadly applicable. And what they track roughly over time is what is going on in the American economy. What are consumers encountering? And what are firms doing? As a result, nowadays, technology is a huge part of what we do. This summer, we had a big case in settlement that we announced against Facebook. A big case in settlement that we announced against YouTube. A big case in settlement that we announced against Equifax having to do with data security and one of the worst breaches in American history. All of those implicate technology. From the big cases down to the small, I would say it is a tremendous amount of what we do. It's not the only industry we pay attention to. Pharmaceutical industry deserves a lot of attention and they get a lot of attention. But even there, we had a recent case involving monopolization, a company called SureScripts. They were involved in e-prescriptions. How your prescription gets to where it needs to go involving the doctors, the insurers, and the pharmacies. That's a tech case about a non-tech industry. As American industry develops to be focused on technology, technology isn't just Silicon Valley. It's not just Google and Facebook. It is ubiquitous. It is endemic in the economy. So not all of what we do, but a tremendous amount of what we do relates to tech. How about you, Commissioner Starks? What was? I would say that technology is playing an increasingly large role in what we do. One of the quotes that I love to kind of go by is it came from the economists and it's that the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And that really kind of seems to ring true as I am looking at kind of the tech landscape that I see. Issues like 5G is something that I'm thinking about every day. Fifth generation wireless technology and we're talking about gigabit speeds over your cell phones. And what is that going to mean? It's gonna be smart manufacturing. It's going to mean modernizing the way that you can relate to your doctor. Telemedicine I think is gonna be a real impact. But it's also going to talk about driverless cars and automation. And that's gonna affect a lot of people. There are a lot of people who drive trucks for a living. A lot of folks who drive cars for a living. And in fact, I was just reading in an Axios article this morning that that is going to disproportionately affect black and brown folks. And so I think a lot of us as citizens, as Americans and certainly something that I think about is consistently trying to see how technology is going to better serve us, right? How is technology not just going to impact elections, but how is impact, how is it going to help us solve climate change? How is it going to help us solve the future of work? These are issues that technology needs to start to work for us a little bit. And one of the things to talk specifically about code that I have focused on is Huawei. And in particular, Huawei and ZTE and their ability to have telecom infrastructure in our networks. And I meet with national security folks. I meet with DoD, I meet with Homeland Security. I meet with FBI and CIA and all these folks tell me what the risks of having China in our networks and in our infrastructure is. But the macro perspective here is that there are geopolitics behind this. There are economies behind this. And so code and technology has started to swallow a lot of these issues. But at their base, I think people are looking for us to figure out ways to make sure that technology helps to serve our communities and our everyday lives better. So I want to understand now how it kind of works. Like before we forecast and go forward and how maybe it should work. Let's talk about if an issue comes up right now, who is advising you? Latanya Sweeney, Professor Latanya Sweeney was at the FTC and advising people. But Commissioner Phillips, how does it work right now? We talked on the phone earlier and you had mentioned one particular app that you were looking into. Just walk us through what the process is and then if you wouldn't mind doing the same thing. Sure. So it may be helpful to explain. A lot of what we do at our agency is what we tend to think about as law enforcement. Meaning we're presented with an issue. We evaluate it to see whether it's illicit or not. And if it's illicit, we go after the company and we try to seek a remedy that benefits the American consumer. So a case comes to us in a variety of different ways. It can be the press calling our attention to it. It can be politicians on Capitol Hill. It can be consumers complaining that's a major source of what we do. But another really critical source is the engagement that we try to have with the literature, the academic literature and that's a really important thing to stress here. The work that people in the academy do, studying how technology is working, looking for some of the places where companies are falling down and consumers are getting hurt, we pay attention to those things. And there are people, technologies at the FTC, who spend their time in part looking out at the world, talking to people in the academy and elsewhere, also talking to media about what is going on, what should we be looking at? So let's say we spot a case, the app that I mentioned to you, the InMovie case, there was a lot of writing on it in the public. This was about a service provided by a Singaporean company that did location tracking. So what's the first step in an investigation? The first step is asking questions. And when you ask questions that involve technology, having people who are adept at technology is really important. What kind of information am I looking for? If I were to the question in this subpoena, this way, will I get the answer that I need? Or am I asking the wrong question entirely? Those kinds of questions are questions that technologists at the FTC help us deal with every day, figuring out just what questions to have. And then of course there's the answers, right? We are looking at a product, what is the code in the app? In that case that I mentioned, we did that. We monitored some of the traffic involving that app. And then there is the, okay, we figured out what the world looks like or at least our interpretation of the facts. And we're talking to the company and they come in with explanations or excuses. Or we want something to happen. We want you to stop that practice. And they've got a reason why they can't or they shouldn't stop the practice. How do we evaluate that? At every step of the way, there's important input that technologists can give. But surely they're, well, before I press you on that, let me turn to you, Commissioner Starks. How does it work for you right now? Is there a dedicated team or what's the process? Unfortunately there is not a dedicated team that I have. I have, and the commissioner and I were comparing stats yesterday, I have three legal advisors who are all lawyers. I have a special advisor who's not a lawyer but handles other significant matters for me. And then I have kind of like a staff assistant, somebody who helps me with scheduling and stuff. So it's a very tight team that is handling a very wide aperture of tech issues, telecom issues. And I have also very pointedly struggled to have the right way to talk to companies in particular. It wouldn't be appropriate to name names. But on privacy, I do think there are significant authorities that we have even at the FCC in particular with regard to how your cell phone service operates. And we know that a lot of privacy information is actually flowing through your phone. And so I did call in one large company and told them how passionately I felt that the American people need to have a better understanding of how their data is being collected and mined and monetized. And through part of that conversation, they ended up bringing an engineer to see me. And I gotta tell ya, that engineer started talking engineering, which, you know, for those in the room that are engineers, I'm sure, you know, I was flustered and frustrated with the conversation because I believe that they know what I wanted but they were able to kind of keep crafting a statement around why they were able to handle this data a certain way on engineering principles. And it wasn't happening the way that I was saying that was going to happen. And I'm reminded, of course, of the Upton Sinclair quote that if somebody's livelihood depends on them not understanding what you are asking them, they're not going to understand it. And so even as a policy maker, having these technologists that can help bridge some of these conversations can understand both the policy aspects of it, the technology aspects of it is going to be critical and is going to be critical to helping effectuate the work that the American people need. Thank you for admitting that it made you feel flustered. Oh, I was angry actually, so yeah. Okay, pissed off and flustered. No, I think that that's really important to acknowledge that there's a knowledge gap here that's going on and nobody feels very comfortable in it. And I'm also reminded of how I got into covering some of these specifically because of a technologist, Chris Sagoyan, who actually is spending time on Capitol Hill thanks to Tech Congress and I was hanging out with him talking about privacy and he's one of the few people who can really talk to journalists who do not have backgrounds in technology which is me, but I love the issues that come out of it, the humanities issues that come out of it and he really was the person who secured my interview with Senator Warner who really has become very knowledgeable in a lot of these topics. Can I just respond very specifically to that? So Chris is a really great example of a technologist who has plopped into a public policy context that really helps a lot of people learn. I still remember the first time and so I'm a Republican staffer at this point. I'm working for Senator Cornyn. Alvaro Badoia is working for Senator Franken and Alvaro invites a bunch of us to his office just to hear from Chris about what's going on and what we're hearing. Those questions and those conversations could not be more important. Chris Sagoyan's ears must be burning because I too have relied on Chris Sagoyan. So okay, so if there's people in the audience thinking how do I become the legendary Chris Sagoyan? What do we do? How do we, if you're graduating right now or you're thinking I wanna be part of this PIP program? So last night there was a dinner associated with, are we calling it PITUN or P-I-T-U-N but this great project that everyone's involved in. PITUN, that doesn't work for me. Cecilia Munoz used a really important word I thought which is hustle. One of the things that I learned as a lawyer trying to get a job on Capitol Hill is that it's very different from a lot of the traditional jobs that you look for and it isn't immediately apparent who to talk to, what to say and if you haven't spent any time on Capitol Hill it can be a really alien place. Maybe you've seen it on TV and you weren't so impressed but actually there are a lot of really important conversations going on and if there aren't there ought to be. Trying to figure out to raise your hand, trying to figure out who to speak to, how to connect is really difficult and that's why this project today, what you all have been working on over the past few days is so important. Yeah and I completely echo that. You know I think it is, first of all I don't necessarily think that it is only again apropos of this conversation, folks on the hill that are in need of these types of technologies. I think at every level, federal level, state level, local level because one of the things that we're working on 5G is how to get pole attachments and how to get the microcells that we're going to need in order to get 5G out there to cities, to localities, to municipalities and so they are evaluating the engineering. They are evaluating the various specifications that folks are coming to in order to roll 5G out there and so they are very much in need of somebody else who's both technology savvy but policy savvy and can toggle between these two worlds. You know I would say it's important, again Chris Segoian is somebody who has mastered a specific very technical set of ways to think through issues and he's able to share that and so some of the soft skills and persuasion and advocacy is also going to be incredibly powerful here. You can hear even on the hill, Democrat or Republican, if somebody is trying to help you think through issues regardless of which side of the aisle they're on, that is going to be helpful conversations for us to further figure out what the American people need and so back to my point, you know I think even at independent agencies, at again various levels it's going to be important to make sure that we have what we need in order to make sure that folks are thinking very critically on these issues that cross cut a lot of different ways. Can I add one little thing? Please. And I agree with what Commissioner Stark said entirely. There's another side of this, we've sort of been talking about the supply side, right? Like how do people with these really important skill sets get to the policy makers and come to work with the policy makers that are making decisions about things about which they know more. But the other side is how do we as policy makers help ease that path. And so the thing I learned through my process of getting a job on the hill is that a lot of getting jobs in Washington and in policy relies on mentorship and a real ethic of paying it forward meaning you're going to have, if we're asking a group of people to do what I said a moment ago to hustle to knock on doors and ask for favors from people that they don't even know, those people have to be receptive. And you have to be willing to have coffee and to sit down and to say to a person, you know, I don't have anything for you right now but I really like you. And maybe I'm aware of another job or maybe six months from now, I'm just gonna think of something and you have the right to bug me, right? You can annoy me and take a little bit of my time so that I keep you in mind. And so there's a two-sided aspect to this that I think is really important. And to riff on that as well, I think it is gonna be imperative not only for technologists to come on the public sector but also to be on the private sector aspect of it as well because I do think whether you wanna call it a tech clash or whatever, I think there is a very clear realization by a lot of private companies that they're going to need to engage further, engage more probatively with those of us that are on the regulatory side. So making sure it behooves both them and us to have more fruitful conversations, more productive conversations. And so I think both sides of the equation would benefit from folks that are able to broker conversations better. I wanna make sure that we are gonna get to questions from the audience. So if you have one, please do, is it up there? Yes, submit it. You bring up a point about the, thank you, the private sector. It just reminded me, when I first started really trying to deep dive into explaining digital privacy before it became like a big thing with Cambridge Analytica, I tracked down one of the philosophers who, at Oxford, who was brought into advise Google on the right to be forgotten. And it just struck me as so weird that this guy, you know, quite literally in an ivory tower, thinking about philosophy and the good and bad was brought in and he's a wonderful guy and he just sort of described the conversation at the table with some of the Google engineers and he just said they were like, what are you even talking about that this is a ethical issue that's been debated through the ages? Like it had never, the historical implications, the World War II, all of the different ways that in Europe the right to be forgotten and privacy are viewed in very different ways than here in the United States. And I wonder if you think, is it about changing who's in the room as much as it's about what sort of educational background people have? Is it about people who have interdisciplinary skills or is it about making sure that the deepest experts in their fields are brought together as well? What's the right mix? So I think the short answer is both, right? I don't know that they're mutually exclusive. Last year I had the real privilege to attend something called the ICDPPC which is this big international gathering of data protection authorities from around the globe. And it took place in Brussels and it was organized by the European Data Protection Supervisor, a man, Giovanni Budorelli, who recently died, who was really a giant in the world of privacy. His death was just tragic. This was in the months after Europe adopted the General Data Protection Regulation GDPR which is a huge regulatory scheme to deal with data privacy. The Europeans are very proud of their handy work. And just months later, the topic of the ICDPPC to the frustration of many of the people who had worked on GDPR was not about GDPR. It was about ethics. It was about precisely the thing, the niche that you're talking about. And the idea is the following. When you have a dramatic change in the economy and how things work, one response is, it's all great. Another response is, it's all awful, stop it, make it go away, that's not going to happen. If you really want to change how the world works, you need a common ethic, you need the private sector, you need consumers, you need government all across the board to be thinking about these things. So we talk in privacy world about privacy by design, those Google engineers taking what they learned from the professor of philosophy and applying it in their daily work. It's like disease, right? Now we all just wash our hands, but that wasn't always so. Inculcating socially, like within society at every level, in understanding of what is going on and having an informed discussion allows us to address real issues. And so I think the concept of ethics, A is really important, and B is best understood not just as something in the ivory tower, right? We think about ethics in medicine. We think about ethics all across the board. And that understanding of having to learn things at every level and having to think about them and apply them, I think is really critical. And to kind of further some of the thoughts that I had earlier, technology is moving so fast and it is impacting our world so quickly. And I think there is, folks are starting to pick up on a little bit of a dissonance because technology is further empowering some people, but it is leaving others further behind. And so 5G is a perfect example. In the most densely populated areas, fifth generation technology is going to be coming in the next year or two. But there are a lot, millions of Americans that are living with no Gs, truly. Cause I get out to a lot of rural areas and I see people that are exasperated, that people are talking about gigabit download speeds. I can't even get three one here when I'm in the middle of Southern Ohio. And so I think it is, again, to reflect, I think a lot of folks are looking for technology to work better for them. Technology in a lot of ways is going to be a tool where is it going to further exacerbate some of the inequalities that we see consistently through our society and reify some of those ways that people get more and others get less? Or is it going to be something that breaks down a lot of those silos and cuts through and further emboldens a lot of folks? You're reminding me, I went to speak at a school and during the day, it was a middle school and I talked to the kids in the morning and then the parents came to hang out with me at night and I was like, how do I talk about digital privacy with these kids? So I talked about the Fourth Amendment, we were talking about the 13th Amendment earlier. This was, I talked about the Fourth Amendment and the right to privacy and how the word privacy doesn't even appear in the Fourth Amendment but it's your house. So does that apply to your phone? And this like spark, this huge debate with these 12 and these 13 year olds and I don't know if it does, I think it does. I don't know. Anyway, they were all excited and they left and then the parents came in the evening and they said, you've been talking about privacy. I'm not allowed to look at my kids' text messages anymore. They say it's the Fourth Amendment, right? And I was like, excellent, that's awesome. You know, if they're doing it for the right reasons. All right, I wanna ask this question that I definitely wanted to ask. So this was a good one. How can regulators be forward looking and proactive instead of reactive in terms of regulating emerging technologies? How do we close the gap of emerging technologies not being regulated properly until we fully understand them? I think those are two very separate questions, right? The first one being, I think, you know, a lot of tech journalists like to pat themselves on the back and be like, the only reason like Facebook stopped doing something was because we like got the data, which is exactly what we, you know, as journalists, that's what we try to do. But it is again, a reactive sort of thing. And then the second question being, you know, we can't look into our crystal balls. Like how do we, we might need to start putting into motion protections for technology. We don't even know may exist. How do you tackle those two things? Yeah, I mean, some of this may come to make up institutions. I'll be eager to hear your thoughts, commissioner. We obviously have rulemaking authority. And so I do think we, at our best, very much do try to set forth policies that will allow a thousand flowers to bloom. You know, spectrum is certainly something that comes to my mind. Sometimes we auction off and license very specific spectrum. So Verizon has spectrum and AT&T has spectrum and that and so forth. But we also set aside unlicensed spectrum so that, you know, Wi-Fi basically was an innovation out of unlicensed spectrum. And we all know how much we truly rely on Wi-Fi now. So I do think there are ways that we can set forth policies that will see where innovation and technology starts to grow and bloom. And I think that's an important aspect of what we do. And in terms of the proactive sort of regulatory aspect of that, is that impossible in some ways? You know, I mean, it certainly is, yeah, none of us have a crystal ball. And, you know, whether, you know, years and years from now, all of this will, you know, the tech telecom will, you have cross siloed vertical mergers. We obviously have seen a real media and telecom merging over the last couple of years. We don't know where that's going to go, where content is going to go. So I think the best we can do certainly as regulators is make sure that we have flexible policies in place that will allow to some degree the market to dictate. And then of course, as a former DOJ, an enforcement lawyer, where there are violations, where there are folks who have gone outside of the bounds, that's where the enforcement capacity, I think, is always critical. Yeah. I mean, it's really important when you do regulation or even when you do law enforcement where you're sort of setting markers in individual cases that the market will pick up to recognize the limits of your own understanding. It is very easy, and you see this a lot right now in a lot of the public discussion, to pick a technological development, stoke fear, and then argue for the end of it. That's not the right way to approach these questions. That's why what you all are doing is so important. It is really important that when people are talking about things, they understand it. You know, AI isn't the Terminator movie, right? That doesn't make it all good. It doesn't mean it's without risk. It means we need to understand what we're doing, and we need to keep in mind the limits of our understanding, and there are of course limits, to everyone's understanding there are limits, and certainly that includes federal regulators. Another thing I'd mention though is this, even as technology develops, things bad guys do, there's a lot of consistency over time. So there are definitely areas at the margin or areas where we see kinds of conduct that couldn't have been achieved without technological development, but like pyramid schemes, fraud, oldest time, and whatever development you're talking about in the economy, it's going to be used, right, to try to extract value unfairly from people. We had a case a couple of years ago, and just pretty garden variety scammers, but it was a blockchain scam, right? Had nothing to do in particular with blockchain, but it was capitalizing on the ubiquity of the term and the hype, and it's also important that we sort of keep our minds focused on traditional bad things that happen to people and traditional ways that people suffer, like losing their money, which really, really hurts. I really like this next question too, which is, we've been talking about federal government, but what is the role of state governments in promoting public interest technology? How do federal agencies, such as yours, work with different levels of government to address this area? I mean, I think this is particularly interesting as we see the state's sort of race ahead with legislation regarding the privacy issue, for example, it's like California's like a completely different country when it comes to certain stuff in some ways. How do we make sure, and presumably like public interest technologists should be working at city, state, and federal, and that there needs to be a cross sort of section of them all talking to each other? Wonder what your thoughts are on that. First thing that came to mind is net neutrality, and I see the incomparable Gigi Sohn here in the audience, because there are certainly instances where, now net neutrality has just last week as of the DC circuit, has basically said that states are empowered now to figure out what they wanna do on a state-by-state basis. And so there are certainly issues, again, the issue that I mentioned about actually rolling out 5G is going to be something that is very much on a locality and municipality, and each kind of community is gonna have to make the best decisions for themselves and how they're going to allow 5G to roll out. Some communities have said, we're all for 5G. Come on, put up your microcells as quickly as you can. Other communities have said, as we're seeing that the network and the edge of the network is gonna get closer and closer, we're not so sure we're comfortable with that. And so you have had communities that have had some push and pull. Communities need to make the best decisions for themselves, but to come back to what we're doing here today, you know, again, I just think it is incredibly important that each part of this has their smartest, their most best informed. We know that in a lot of small towns, they don't have a CTO because they're just underwhelmed. And so making sure that we have folks that are being thoughtful on how technology is best for them and for their communities is gonna be critical. You're reminding me, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the chief innovation officer of San Jose, Shireen Santasong. I know her well. So she's, if you're interested in sort of an example of someone creating their own position when it comes to public interest technology, I'd really suggest you look her up. She has really young, incredibly bright woman who has spearheaded a public-private partnership when it comes to 5G in that she's asking the telecoms companies to give money essentially to poor-income neighborhoods to help grow, so, or... And it gets back to internet access, which is, of course, one of the most fundamental issues of who has and who has not that we deal with from a telecom perspective. Commissioner Phillips, how do you see the relationship with the states? So let me touch on two things. The first thing is the power of technology to reinvent and make better government is certainly not limited to the federal government. At the local level, at the state level, technology can, has the capacity to improve processes across the board. That's thing number one. With respect to our relationship with the states, I think there are sort of two ways in which I think about it. One is the law enforcement that I was talking about a minute ago, so I'll pick out that YouTube case. That was a case we did with Letitia James, the attorney general of New York. That was the feds and one particular state attorney general working together to change how YouTube works to protect children. We were enforcing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. So states and the federal government can work together and achieve really great things. We're really proud of that. States can also, as you know with respect to CCPA, the privacy bill or privacy law in California, they can legislate and they can regulate. That is something that states are free to do under the Constitution, under their police powers. And we have the states of the great laboratories of democracy, so there can be a real benefit in diversity. There are, however, also benefits to having a regular interstate commerce, and that is as old as the Constitution which gives Congress the authority to regulate, make regular interstate commerce. And certainly when you're talking about technologies that cross borders in a nanosecond, there is a tremendous benefit where we can to arriving at coherent federal policy that allows a business person in Massachusetts to market in Texas and vice versa. Fascinating. All right, I wanna ask one more question from the audience, and this is less about figuring it all out and more about enforcing. What are the major hurdles to enforcement of existing regulations and laws aimed at promoting or safeguarding the public interest? Yeah, I mean the hardest part of enforcement as ever is finding the bad guys where they are. There's obviously so much more conduct out there than any, there is an enforcement bureau at the FCC which is probably the largest of the bureaus at the FCC and that's all in probably 250 lawyers, something like that. And then there are countless number of tech telecom folks that are under our jurisdiction. And so finding out where there is fraud, where there is bad conduct, how you're going to pursue that from an investigatory standpoint, how you're going to actually subpoena them or issue letters of inquiry. Enforcement is one of those where you do have to typically see something in the marketplace that has failed. You have to have heard about it. This is again why local journalism and journalism generally is so important. They really can be the tip of the spear in terms of investigatory abilities. And then consumer complaints. We really do rely on consumers where they have been defrauded, where they have been harmed to raise their hand. And almost any good agency has a consumer complaint line or a tip line where you can let us know of issues. I think the last thing that I would say riffing on the commissioner is a lot of state PUCs will also refer cases to us. And so if there has been something on the federal level that needs enforcement, that's another way that we hear about a lot of things. But I think the most critical of course is probably consumers, where a consumer has been harmed, he or she needs to let us know. I think that's absolutely right. Spotting the bad conduct, resources constrain, laws constrain, those are all things that constrain. But certainly spotting the bad conduct is a very important thing. In particular, where things are more complex, sometimes that's more difficult to do. I just had this vision of this world where it's Thanksgiving and they're like, little Johnny or whatever, we should choose something more diverse than that. But he's majoring in public interest law and you should tell him, grandma, about that app that you were using that did that thing, like just changing the whole conversation around what it means to be a consumer or an intergenerational awareness that we as members of the public also have a responsibility. So I'll tell you a personal story about this. So some months ago, last year, we settled a case at that point, our biggest children's privacy case involving TikTok. I had not yet heard of TikTok. A few months after that, I was talking to my seven year old and she was concerned because she'd heard on the school bus about the Momo hoax which was this online internet hoax. And at some point after my wife and my spending a bit of trying to reassure her that it was in fact a hoax, I asked her, I said, when are you online when we're not there? And she said, oh, I go to, I won't say the name publicly, but I go to this friend's house and we do TikTok. I'm an FTC commissioner. We had just settled the case against them. Unbeknownst to me, my seven year old is on this Chinese owned app. There needs to be a lot of intergenerational talk. There needs to be a lot of interdisciplinary talk. People see things they experience. They may experience something as a privacy harm that maybe doesn't occur to you. And this is something a lot of really good academics are spending time on. Danielle Citron, one of my carter for her incredible work that she has done on privacy harms, that kind of cross-generational, cross-disciplinary discussion about technology is important for everyone. It helps inculcate that ethics. It helps educate consumers. It helps educate us as federal enforcers. It's so critical. It makes me wonder if we, and I'd love to hear Latanya, I'm gonna ask you after this, but like if it almost changes the power dynamics between professors and their students in that they must come to you with, I wanna research this, and you're like, oh, what's that? You know, that it's not top-down. I certainly see that as an older journalist, ways of researching platforms that again, I've not heard of, but you know, there's as much information flowing up as there is down. And I wonder if there is some message to the provosts and the presidents of the universities who are here about how you integrate the younger generation's input into developing these programs. And so I agree with all that, certainly inter-generationally, but talking to the provosts and the presidents and all those folks there, I think to widen this a little bit more, I think diversity is extremely important. And as you all are thinking about actually executing on this pit on, I would certainly encourage folks to make sure that there is this pipeline that we are creating that is both inclusive of women and is inclusive of folks of color as well. Here, here, do you have a message to the, this might be your only chance to have a message directly to the presidents and provosts. Here's what I would say to the presidents and provosts. The work that your technologies do has a clear impact on public policy. We as public policy makers benefit tremendously from that work. So my message would be think about that impact, listen to your students, listen to your kids, in helping to think about curriculum, in helping to think about funding, in helping to think about tenure, something that might just seem like, oh, you're just applying my framework to that new thing that no one serious cares about. That's the wrong way to think about that. Applying that framework, economics, computer science, what have you, to those new things, which is what consumers are doing, which is what grownups are doing, but also kids are doing, is really important. Commissures, thank you so much for taking the time out of your very busy days. Please give a hand to commissioners Phillips and Starks. Thank you. Okay, we've almost done it. We've almost completed the first ever PITUN network conference. That was so wonderful. We really hoped to have a conversation, like the one we just had, and it was better than I thought it was gonna be. And I'm gonna run out there and catch both of them before they leave to thank them for coming and speaking to us. But before I do that, I wanna thank you all for coming. I wanna thank everyone that I've already thanked again. And I also wanna ask Andrine Soli, if she is around, to come jump up here because we've got a complicated set of things that we're planning to do for the next hour. Some of us will cluster and work on something. Other ones will cluster other places and work on other things. A small cluster will be somewhere else. And we're done clustering. We're all gonna come back and raise a glass to the first ever PITUN conference here at Georgetown University. And thanks again for hosting us.