 Good afternoon, everyone. It is 2 o'clock Eastern time here in the Washington DC area. And my name is Chris Lewis. I'm the president's CEO here at Public Knowledge. And I want to welcome you to a wonderful discussion that we're going to have today on the public interest values that shape a better internet. And we thought this would be an interesting conversation to have given today's anniversary, 10-year anniversary, of the internet blackouts that marked the height of the SOPA-PIPA fight here in Washington, DC, a policy fight about the future of the internet, policy fight about what internet governance should look like here in Washington. And we want to do it a little differently. So I want to welcome everyone who's joining us here on Zoom. Also, if you're watching live on our YouTube channel, we encourage you to engage in the conversation, to take advantage of the Q&A function, and we hope to take some of your questions from the Q&A. So please feel free as we go to collect questions for us there, and I'll hopefully go to pull some for our panelists. But we do have a fantastic group of experts with us today to really take this anniversary and try to learn from it and look forward to what kind of internet do we want to have in the future and why. Let me introduce our panelists, and then I'll introduce the topic. But joining me today is a fantastic group. First, from Creative Commons, their CEO, Katherine Stiller, is with us. Also joining us is April Glazer, who is a fellow from the Technology and Social Change Project at the Shorenstein Center up at Harvard University. Also with us is Akriti Gaur, who's a resident fellow at Yale Information Society Project. And then finally, our good old friend Spencer Overton, who is a law professor, but also the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. A fantastic group. Thank you all for being with us today. And really to kick off the conversation, let me just set the table because we've hit this 10-year anniversary of the SOPA Pip-A-Fight, the Black Hapt happened today, January 18, 2012. This was before I was at public knowledge. And I've been here almost a decade now. But it was a seminal fight for the public interest community where we banded together. The public interest community, I think, looked a little different then. Certainly, it was not as diverse as it is today. And it was smaller than it is today. But still, the groups that were around banded together because of what was viewed as, and we still believe at public knowledge, a serious threat to whether the internet would function. A Congress was looking at copyright laws and the concerns of piracy of copyrighted material. And so in order to get that, they proposed two versions of the same law, SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate, in order to try and stop online piracy by allowing internet service providers to actually block websites using what is known as blocking of DNS servers. This is the guts of how the internet works and how websites are sent to each other. This would really have shut down, in our opinion, would have shut down traffic and websites that were important for building up for expression, democratic speech online, the things that we love about the internet without any real due process and based on just a few violations, but not necessarily to get at the violators themselves. And so many of us stood up at that time to oppose the proposals. And we ended up winning. And it's something we often return to and look at. And there are a number of us who were in that fight a decade ago who are having all sorts of events looking back at that fight this year. Like I said, we wanted to do something a bit different because the internet has changed so much in that last decade. We want to learn from this fight. We want also, because we have so much work to do to make the internet the best place it can be, we wanted to learn from it and also look forward to see how technology has changed and how we want to build a better internet today. So I've introduced our panelists. Let me turn to one of them now. Catherine, let me start with you. You at Creative Commons, you guys have always fought for free expression and an open internet. How would you react to and how do you think back on that SOPA-PIPA fight? Am I describing it accurately? And really, what do you think you learned from that fight that's relevant to how we should guide policymaking and technology today? Well, thanks, Chris, for organizing this event. And thanks for the question. If I am honest, I was not the CEO of Creative Commons 10 years ago, and so my reflections have to be caveated with that. But I think when you think about it, I think the first thing that's striking is the coalition of support that was brought together and that it was more than just what was on paper. It was something bigger that people could understand and coalesce around in terms of what was at stake. And I think that the success of it was really broadly down to that ability to work in a nonpartisan way, to work across a spectrum of different voices and different organizations to be able to achieve what was achieved 10 years ago. I think that the learning from it, I guess, today is that we still have copyright fights to fight. Maybe it's not caveated with the privacy, sorry, with the piracy angle, but now we're thinking about different challenges around privacy, around misinformation, around the different challenges that we look at. And as someone advocates for open access of knowledge and culture and sharing and how we do that together, then how we can do that in a better way. How can we make sure that open access to knowledge and culture for everyone, everywhere, wherever you are in the world is possible is something that is still as relevant today as it was when Creative Commons created 20 years ago, but also when the debates were going on 10 years ago. So lots to learn, lots to reflect on, but I think that we still have so many challenges and they might be slightly different, but we still have the challenges today in terms of anyone that's interested in public interests, technology or public interest, full stop. Thanks, Catherine. Like I said, Creative Commons was around, Public Knowledge was around back then. The Joint Center of Political Economics Studies was around them, but you guys really hadn't really focused on technology policy at that time. So maybe Spencer and then April and actually T, I'd love you to jump in. How do you think about looking back at that fight and what do you think you learned from looking at it? Yeah, you remember Horgan, John Horgan and the Colterner Lee were doing our technology work. I think they focused a lot on broadband access. I don't know how involved we were in this fight. I think it's different. I have a different orientation with this in part because I came to take policy differently. My problems involved Facebook, for example, saying that they're not responsible for housing or employment ads being delivered or targeted or delivered to whites and not to African-Americans or Latinos. And my problems have to do with the Russians basically suppressing black votes by creating these imposter accounts. So I haven't necessarily looked, I think that a lot of folks looked at platforms as allies to a certain extent against the Motion Picture Association of America and you had this kind of corporate, public interest connection and everything was good. And your all's question was, how do we keep government out to a certain degree? And my question really is, what is the role of government with regard to these platforms as opposed to just trying to stop government? So I kind of come at it, I think in a different way than many of you all who were leaders in the SOPA fight. April? Yeah, if I could speak to that, hi everyone. Thanks so much for having us. It's so great to be on this panel on the internet about the internet. But yeah, I think what Spencer's talking about is really important because at that time in 2012, 2011, when this was happening, a lot of the groups that were mobilizing civil society around protecting the internet, even then we're really kind of foundationally grounded in the idea of protecting people's constitutional rights online and not necessarily protecting communities. Now when it came to organizing around SOPA and PIPA, because not everybody gets constitutional rights or gets their rights kind of protected in the same way as when like the rubber hits the road, especially when we see things like privacy and police surveillance or things like that. But with SOPA and PIPA, what we saw was really almost like a amazing mechanics of the internet, right? Like we saw the people able to mobilize in just tremendous ways to fight something that is a really complicated kind of tech policy idea. And what it really showed is that, using the benefit of the internet, so you're fighting the thing that you're using to organize with, people could really understand complex things, could understand these kind of like complex tech policy debates and get engaged with them and mobilize to really make political change online in ways that we hadn't seen before. So when I looked at SOPA and PIPA, I mean, it's great that those were stopped because they were draconian bills, they were poorly worded, it would have been bad for free expression. All of that internet companies really get behind that. We saw civil society really get behind it. We saw a unified message and the ability to mobilize quickly to stop something. And that was just like kind of in the mechanics of the act, so incredibly impressive. But the values behind it were, and are good, are really, really important about protecting free speech, right? About making sure that we can continue to use the internet in an unfettered way. But I think what Spencer's getting to is that there's another side of that. I mean, it's also about making sure that people aren't getting hurt online as well, right? Or through like not seeing companies regulated. And SOPA and PIPA really, I think was just so impressive and so obviously not, I think, I know, so important. But then when we think about how that kind of extended into the next 10 years of internet advocacy, one thing that really stayed, I think, was the centrality or their priority on civil liberties. The look at how communities are interacting online, how communities are being harmed or discriminated against. So it's really such an important turning point to look at both in terms of the political value focus, but then also just like, wow, look at how the internet mobilized and how- Well, I'm gonna keep going. If the rest of you not, if you're also seeing April freeze up, April froze a bit. All right. Oh, I'm so sorry. Okay. Sorry, April, do you wanna finish your last thought there or we may have missed out on it? Oh, I'm sorry. I was saying, and my tech froze up a little bit, go figure, because of access issues, right? I'm in a very rural place with very kind of low socioeconomic kind of baseline when it comes to people's, like just the poor area. So we don't have really great access internet out here. But what I was saying is that, you know, SOPA FIPPLE was just such an impressive, fascinating turning point in terms of seeing the mechanics of how people organize online and what's possible with that and then how people picked up that torch and ran with it was so many issue areas. But it also kind of represented a kind of a path that was broken in terms of focusing on civil liberties as like the essential kind of value rubric or compass rose for what a healthy internet looks like. And that's only part of it because when we see civil liberties protected without adjacent calls for social and economic justice, we see those values begin to collapse, right? So we end up seeing neo-Nazis having free speech rallies, right? We end up seeing as Spencer was saying, you know, discriminatory housing ads and these kinds of civil rights issues begin to percolate online because it's not just about free speech, we also need to protect communities. And so, you know, it's just such an important point to look at and examine where we went from there, both in really positive ways and perhaps limited ways as well. Great, thank you. Actually, see your research and your study, your academic work has been a globe from a global perspective. Do you feel like the conversation is the same and do folks have the same sort of reaction to what was, you know, a US-centric discussion? Thanks for the question, Chris. And thank you very much for having me as a part of the panel today. It's so exciting to be here and to be talking to everyone. I think what I want to say about the SOPA-PIPA fight and, you know, the sort of activism that followed after, it makes me optimistic because, you know, that was a moment where there was a lot of global collectivism, collective action and collaboration to come together because, I mean, at the end of the day, the internet, it's the same. It's homogenous. But I think what we also need to sort of be thinking about because, you know, it's been a long time. It's been 10 years. The internet has progressed in so many ways in so many countries of the world is that, I mean, while the services, the platforms remain the same and their affordances are very similar to each of us, the laws and the cultures and the people that they impact are quite fragmented. And I think that's where there needs to be some sort of a common ground when it comes to understanding what shared global challenges are, what particular cultural contexts are. And as Spencer said, I mean, that was a time when platforms were sort of allies. There was a public interest value in working alongside. And now the picture is quite different. I mean, not just in the US, but we all are aware of the big tech damages that are happening in various contexts in the world. To add to that, I think one difference that I see, especially in countries like India, is that it's not just platforms which aren't allies anymore. It's also the government which needs a lot of oversight, which needs a lot of responsible functioning. And I feel like those are some of the sort of considerations that we ought to have. And just to give you an example, of course, misinformation, hate speech, electoral interference, there are so many ways in which platforms are affecting our daily lives. But a lot of the sort of movements, for instance, the stop hate for profit campaign that started in the US around the elections, there haven't been many similar or of equal magnitude. There haven't been sort of movements like that in other parts of the world, which are equally forceful. And I think those are some of the areas which need more collective thinking and work. Wonderful, wonderful. Well, so if folks who are tuning in hadn't seen, I had actually put out a blog post last week, really started some of my thinking on this. And I know I shared it with the panelists, but it did reflect on just the turning point in power for the public interest community that SOPA PIPA represented to have that sort of victory against what have been long-time powerful interests in Washington, especially medicine, the MPAA and others. So it was a fantastic victory and it certainly did happen in partnership with a lot of major tech companies. Tech companies big and small, actually. I think the driving force behind the blackout was Wikimedia and so many people use Wikipedia for their own research and looking up information today. And so hopefully folks will check out that blog post, but as we think about the values that drove that fight and then the values that are driving the newer challenge and you guys have started to name some of them already, let me ask the group here, are there changes to technology that have driven the addition of new values and what values do you think are most important when you think about how an internet needs to grow and change to be better today? Or is it something other than that? Is it the change in the perspective of the companies and the power that they have? Or is it something else? But I'd love to focus in on what values you think are key public interest values as we look forward to a better internet. I didn't point to anyone, but Catherine- I'll jump in first. I mean, clearly for Creative Commons it's still about access to knowledge and culture and we still see so many things hidden behind key walls and even with what we've seen with the research for vaccines in the pandemic and all of those things, there's still so much that we don't have access to which is in the public interest and which is not accessible. And so how do we get that balance right? Because it is about how do we share better? How can we make a difference with this and how can we ensure that when we're thinking about the public interest, we're thinking about that common good, that public domain that we have that front and center and sometimes when I'm looking at as a former policy maker and looking at how regulation is headed, it seems to me that civil society in the public interest is often an afterthought and that those that have power and have a voice are very much heard and often unintended consequences of regulation which we may see this decade could have a detrimental impact on access to knowledge and culture for everyone everywhere. And so those are the things that I keep thinking about public interest, about how we can better shape that and part of Creative Commons new strategy is about thinking about better sharing, what that looks like, what that means. And that is really very timely for a discussion about what is a better internet too. So Catherine just mentioned free expression and access to information. What other values do you guys think must be lifted up? Yeah, well, I wanna get to this value. Some folks would call it equality, inclusion, et cetera. But you made this point in your PSU identified a harm in terms of misinformation, disinformation. We talk about ad targeting, hate speech in terms of communities. And one quick note here, Chris, is that this isn't just discrimination by third party players against other folks, right? This isn't just sometimes we collapse concepts like the First Amendment Free Speech and 230 and kind of look at it all the same like 230 is the First Amendment or something, right? Basically the law is not neutral. And a Facebook is basically saying even though another company may have to go in to court and defend itself and make an argument, we just don't because of 230, even though we may be making a material contribution in terms of the distribution of those ads or whatever. And so the law not being neutral and us not simply saying if it's laissez faire, it's First Amendment in terms of a special exemption here, right? I think another big point that you made in terms of your piece was just this notion of, what are the values in terms of us being affirmative as we think about the role of government in terms of public policy and the internet? And I just really looked back to past innovations in terms of myself and I've mentioned this before in terms of cotton and this great industry here that brings all this wealth to the United States and basically the United States is suddenly a competitor with the UK in terms of global capitalism, but there are these real costs in terms of externalizing these costs in terms of system of slavery, which we continue to pay for in terms of externalizing those costs. We think about global warming that came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution here and the fact that those costs, great economic growth, great things came from it, we've all benefited, but there are some real costs that we're dealing with now. And so a question here is as opposed to just looking at this as kind of a libertarian government, no government almost overly simplistic ideological approach to this, right? Like how do we really grapple with these costs and figure out ways for innovators to internalize their costs as opposed to externalizing their costs? So yeah, definitely equality in those values, but this fundamental question about what is the role of law and government and also the transnational aspect of that with regard to the internet and public policy. Particularly expensive and things are free. And I think that what you're saying about costs is so different from, I think that's a real challenge. And that free piece here, Chris also touched on that in terms of the privacy issue. Are we gonna have a scenario where basically people buy privacy here and everybody else gets the free products and you got no privacy in your tracks and then some folks who have resources can buy privacy. So, what is the role of government in terms of navigating the relationship or dictating the relationship between consumers, companies, the government, et cetera? On that, I just wanna add that, I don't know like the original question, Chris, about harms and values. I would say that since more people are online now, then worth it that the harms are amplified and I'm sorry if I'm freezing, that the harms are amplified and more people are online and seeing them and more felt. And I really agree with what you say, going back to the past values, I mean, it's true that under section 230 from 1996, with the Communications Decency Act, we don't see online platforms have the liability kind of mechanism that other industries are subject to that kind of helped to right wrongs and forced corporate responsibility. And then going even further back, like this concept of public interest is actually one of the oldest and most debated concepts in the history of telecommunications in the United States period, right? Going back to the 1920s or 1912 even if you wanna go that far to the idea is this technology, this broadcasting technology being used in the public interest and necessity, right? Is it hurting people? Is it benefiting society? Is it harming society? And those laws were very much tethered to the idea that there's a limited amount of spectrum and only a few people get licenses and therefore they have fiduciary responsibility to the public to be serving the public interest by getting this kind of free license allowing them to kind of print money essentially or to have access to all these people. But this has been debated since it was deregulated out of existence since public interest laws kind of were deregulated out of existence in the 80s. But the concept of the public interest wasn't about protecting the sanctity of the electromagnetic spectrum, right? It wasn't about protecting the values of radio broadcasting it was about protecting democracy. And I think it's really, really important to understand that like, yeah, we really need to look up back at, I believe we need to look back at the Communications Decency Act and see if that liability is still the right structuring now in terms of like that legal liability is still the immunity rather still the right structuring now in terms of how users interact with the internet and the harms and the inability to get right wrongs if that's really serving people. But I also wanna return to the idea that the public interest and when it comes to telecom and broadcasting functions is about making sure that we can continue to have the information that we need to meaningfully participate in democracy. And we need to think about what those laws look like in our current telecommunications environment which is the internet, which isn't tethered to a limited resource of broadcast but still is allowing one person to reach millions of people and can have really deleterious effects on how our politics function. We've seen that through all kinds of misinformation campaigns hates and also targeted advertising and the real harms that that could have particularly invulnerable groups. It's interesting as well, April just now you talk about that about the history of public broadcasting in the United Kingdom just now the BBC is being threatened by the UK government. And so you've got these contradictions, don't we? Because here's a really important part certainly in the United Kingdom in terms of public interest being under pressure and being threatened at a time where we should be promoted. And so it's real challenges in terms of how we protect democracy. Yeah, people frame public interest. I'm sorry, I just want to, people frame public interest as if it's this extreme concept or the idea of like regulating internet companies in the public and just going back to the broadcasting as if that was like some far end but that was actually the cornerstone bedrock kind of thinking behind the vast majority of US telecom policy and the fact that we don't have any sort of values thinking behind our policy now in the same way is really a stark moment. So it's not like an extreme idea but it's often labeled as an extreme idea and it's in the idea of the public interest. Akriti, I wanted to get you in here, you've been patient, yeah. No, I just wanted to, I think April, you made such a great point about the section 230 debate and the sort of internet regulation that's emanated from the US. And I think I just want to add to that and say that there has been this trend in the past 10, 15 years where global internet laws whether it's intermediary liability or governing platforms have tend to take the structure on from Western countries. So we can get into a debate about 230 but there are laws which now, we think require a relook or we think require reconsideration is probably but they're already being reproduced and implemented in so many countries across the world which sort of brings me to my, like the value that I think merits some consideration is to sort of relook internet governance law especially in the non-Western countries, even the Western countries and see how they align with global human rights norms because that's a very big missing piece especially if you look at the Germany, the Network Enforcement Act or even the Indian Intermediary Liability Rules which were inactive recently. So they're big threats to privacy and free speech. The second value, I mean, if I can just add that because this is, I mean, this sort of ties into my point on looking or thinking about the socio-political cultural aspects of technology and which makes me feel that at a global level perhaps a one-size-fits-all approach that may, may not work for so many countries, just the way misinformation affects communities in India versus another community in Australia. There are so many differences that, I can't even begin to unpack right now in the few seconds I have and but yeah, happy to discuss that more as well. Wonderful. Just a reminder to help me mark folks who are tuning in, if you're with us on Zoom, you can write in your questions in the Q&A section and I'm happy to then read some of those out for our panelists to answer. And if you're on YouTube, you try to find a way to send it to us as well. I see my tech team in the background did have a question from YouTube. I'm not sure how that question got asked, but if there's a way to do it, we'd love to have you guys spit with the questions as well. So thank you. But let me ask one more before I look to see what we've got coming in from the Q&A. And really, you guys have already started to highlight that there may be differences of opinion based on not only how folks approach some of the different harms we're now seeing, especially that you raise or even competing values that different public interest groups may bring a different perspective on. So as we think about the power that the public interest community can have in shaping technology and shaping the laws around technology, how should we think as a community about best dealing with when we disagree? Priming something you guys raised, section 230, something that public knowledge is traditionally defended. And yet, there's an active conversation right now about should there be adjustments to that law? So how do we deal with when values or perspectives of public interest community rub up against each other? I think having a debate, I mean, actually talking about the challenges because we had the same issue in when I was working on copyright reform in the European Union around platform liability and how you get that balance right. And we can see in the EU that the balance of using filtering technology is not getting that balance, right? And yet we're coming forward with more regulation which is not going to get a decent balance that is necessary. And these issues are complex and there's no getting around it. And we will have different opinions but unless we talk about it in a very measured informed way and trying to put it on the table, then we will not find solutions to this. And I think having honest conversations around it which I think in the copyright debate we try to have that back in the day in the EU but that was sadly we failed in some respects. So it's a good question Chris and it's one where I think there's going to be more of trying to get it right. But this comes back to how do we produce regulation that is ahead of the technology changes and so much of what we're regulating just now is not going to solve the future problems the solving past problems and even then it's not solving the problem at all. So this starter. Maybe I'll add is it possible to keep up with the pace of technology changes that we're seeing in regulation but others as well. Yeah. Yeah, just building off from Catherine's point I think obviously we've got to work through and grapple with and put these on the table and have real discussion, right? And we got to figure out a way to deal with evolving challenges, right? Now what is one of the prerequisites I would pose of that is that we need philanthropy and others to invest in infrastructure so that different communities can participate in the discussion in a meaningful way, right? If I'm going to, you know, CVT to get my talkers in terms of how I talk to Catherine, I don't have agency, right? Like the black think tank needs its own capacity and some other communities do. Also when we talk about the global south being able to participate where there's gonna be the most economic growth over the next 50 years if folks aren't a part of this conversation in a meaningful way and that really involves capacity it's not a situation where a problem comes up five years from now and then we can go out and hire the person and then get up to speed, et cetera. We need capacity now and start to build capacity so that we can have those conversations in an intelligent way and a real discussion so that we can both understand where we're aligned in terms of public interest values and also where we may differ with one another here. So I just think that that infrastructure and building that infrastructure not just in one organization but kind of across the board is important so that communities have agency to participate in the debate in a thoughtful way because it's part of the issue is the tech but part of the issue is just the facts and the changing world. So there's notion where you have two kind of evolving issues and you got to get up to speed it just requires concerted and focused energy effort and attention. Akriti. Thanks. I think I just want to take forward the points Catherine and Spencer made because when we look at the trends in global internet regulation and to answer the question whether the law can even keep up with tech I think it's so important to look at the ecosystems in which these laws are being made. And I mean, just to give an illustration of the way we're regulating social media platforms across the world because that's really been such a big trend in the past couple of years. The conversations there are very adversarial and I think that's the problem. It's a state versus platform debate in many instances neither of them is right in a lot of instances. In many cases there is state platform collusion. So there are so many questions about who should regulate platforms? How should they be regulated? I feel one major sort of focal point when it comes to global sort of activism or acknowledgement when we come together and talk about this is that to avoid an adversarial scenario it's important for platforms and the state to sort of be in the table together because what happens otherwise is that in a rush to sort of defend rights of users or rights of communities governments are passing very difficult very problematic laws. And I think to avoid that as in taking forward the point of infrastructure and community representation is really important. No, April, let me ask you then based on what I created you just said really interesting point so much of the debate is about how the power of government can impact the power of tech companies. And I had attempted to point out just the importance of us continuing to center public interest values that public interest values are not neither about the power of government nor the power of industry. We're a 20 year old organization and often or not often sometimes folks have said that we came out of kind of this utopian thinking is that utopian to think that we can do something other than put the power in the hands of industry or put the power in the hands of the state? Is that possible? Is that pie in the sky? Well, I absolutely think it's possible I'm not a pessimist or try not to be a pessimist but when I guess one thing I wanna say here is the centrality of technology to all processes of political justice or social change, social change, political justice everyone wanna put it means that there are so many groups that need a functioning internet and need not just a functioning internet but one that where people have access to it I think over 20% of Americans still lack reliable access to broadband here in the United States, not on phones and that number is not even a good number because we haven't even been studying it that well in the United States. We can't even pass basic laws right now or like we've seen politicians try around election integrity when it comes to just who bought a political ad there have been so many attempts to have these kinds of ad transparency laws that we have for every other medium but when it comes to the internet we've been unable to do it. There are so many groups that would benefit from just small like regulations that would make our internet better, safer less harmful to our elections and our politics and need of working internet to function but we're not seeing a lot of the advocacy cross currents fully like we did I guess with silver people we saw a lot of groups jump on so I guess, you know, people who specialize in digital rights and technology advocacy understand how to communicate the goals of a healthy internet to millions of people like what we saw with net neutrality over 20 million people are not many of those were fake commented to the FCC we know how to communicate complex things in a way that the public grasps onto and cares about we know the public cares about technology policy and we know so many groups care about it but we're not seeing a lot of the communication kind of cross pollinate into different issue areas to see the unification to have a working communications infrastructure in the US in the public interest and it's interesting to me to like why are we seeing such an action why aren't we unable to get anything past and I'm curious if it has to do with the fact that we haven't done a good enough job with these issues with the current issues that are facing us like misinformation whatever it may be election integrity people not getting scammed online if we're not doing good enough job communicating what that means to the public into different groups and expanding that fight because we know how to do this but for some reason there's a real reticence in the digital rights community to do what I would consider to be that really like ground-based coalition building not just with companies but with the Murad of issue areas like the AARP when it comes to online scams you know what like let's get all of these different groups together to make a healthy internet but we're not seeing that as much as being getting involved with tech policy recently and we've certainly been talking to them I wanted to go to the questions coming in from the chat but Spencer did you have something to add? Yeah I was just gonna make a quick note that yeah civil society definitely has a big big role play and it needs to be healthy I don't think though that we should give up on the ability of government to reflect the public interest and I don't think our skepticism of big institutions should basically just say yield and say hey it's gonna be captured or it's just it can never keep up obviously FDR and others created a lot of regulatory agencies to deal with industry and keep up with innovation and there are definitely some changes that need to be made in terms of the role of government and technology but I don't think we should assume oh we're so advanced and innovation is so far ahead that democracy just can't keep up and can't do anything effective I think that's our challenge as a public interest community in terms of how can you ensure a solid, uncorrupted and competent government response to innovation in the tech sector. Great thank you. So it's interesting some of the questions coming in over the chat and over the Q and A. One person in fact the question came from YouTube I'm not sure how they did it but they asked how have our approaches to partnership and alliance building changed in recent years and this is another question in the chat also talks about do you see a strategy of importance of outside the Beltway versus inside the Beltway strategy going forward and let me ask the group how do you think about alliance building and partnership and what do you think about that dichotomy that was raised inside and outside the Beltway as well? Well I'll just say that we definitely see politicians trying to do things we see bills being written we just don't see them passing or going very far people have been trying to pass private legislation forever but we're not getting that wind behind the sails that we saw with soap and pimple when there was just such a snowball effect and they went from 31 people opposed to 101 people overnight in the house just wild turnover and so yeah how do we get that type of energy behind getting these internet companies or whatever regulations are required back to protect our communications platforms? Yeah, April I always worry that it feels easier to stop something like we did with soap and pimple than it is to proactively create protections. Well with net neutrality, I mean yeah we were kind of stopping something bad and then pushing for something better that was very complex and that's totally true but even if we stopped something I mean yeah it's easier to stop a bad bill than it is to write a good bill, that's for sure but it's just where we're at now so I'd like mobilization. Do others have thoughts on approaches to smart partnerships and alliances? Go ahead, go ahead. I was just gonna say about communication and about how a lion's building is we need to build partnerships that's how you're more effective, that's how but the communication part to that I think is really, really critical to getting that message across and bringing people on board and if we are really gonna reflect the public interest we need to think about where the public are at and where we want to position in terms of the change that we can actually make and so I think that so much boils down to healthy communication and understanding and being really in touch with where the public's interest rests with some of this and I think it sometimes can be different from what we think is the public's interest which was actually the public interest so I think there's a lot of work in that space but that can be done through partnership and alliance building and I think that's where you can make a change and not be, as you said it's easier to be opposed something than to build and create and that takes energy and time and a lot of not for profits in terms of where civil society rests are all with grappling for funding and for having I think Spencer, you mentioned that having that stability to be able to build and to be able to make the change is really important as we think about the future. Yeah, just quickly, real relationship outside of the Beltway with organizations where we learn and informed is not like it's just disseminating talkers or information to other folks so like real relationship I think is important. I also think that real relationship with membership organizations where we're being informed by them where we're sharing info with them I think that is important and that these membership organizations can do a lot of things that public interest organizations that are solely focused on policy just cannot do can't move, right? One of the fascinating things with SOPA and PIPA is that how industry got involved, right? And so, Google's homepage Wikipedia not industry amazing nonprofit group but Reddit, right? These private companies were aligned on this. The problem now is that we're kind of I think public interest policy is not going to be as aligned with the values of the corporate actors here and so because of that, we're not going to have that huge push with the they're very monopolized websites and platforms also urging people to take action on this. And so it's going to take a lot more coalition across issue areas, right? Which I think both Spencer and Catherine have spoken to real relationship building but this is just that this is a very different era of what's being asked for and the power dynamics behind it. Then the point you make about relationship building maybe being a global pandemic where it's been very difficult as well to build those connections which we had normally done in person too and I hope that in 2022 maybe we'll have more opportunity to build those kind of relationships because it does take time and it also is about building trust with different cultures and different organizations and different perspectives even as we've been saying about the definition of public interest that need different things even in a small group. Hi Krithi. Yeah, I think I just like to add to that when we're thinking about future approaches of global activism and public interest advocacy I think we need to maybe also think about how past movements have been successful of course the net neutrality movement in the US and even in India as in the Facebook free basics movement failed because there was so many of us and so many organizations and people who led that movement and while we haven't seen such a movement of that magnitude in the last couple of years I would also like to stress on the fact that it's numbers and markets or the geopolitics of the country which determines a lot of these things. So free basics, I mean Facebook did manage to roll out a lot of these things in other countries I think there's 70 other countries the last time I looked which have that and these are countries which don't have enough either user numbers or markets or political influence to change platform behavior and I think maybe we can consider focusing on such nations, such user bases as well when we think about orienting future approaches. Just taking personal privilege here I wanna go back to Spencer, you made a great point about not giving up on government as a way to vocalize and enact the public interest is I guess my way of saying what you said I hope that's not putting words in your mouth because I know I didn't say it exactly the way you did and I completely agree with that. I do worry in the global perspective but even here in the US as we start to see cracks in some of the foundations of our democracy how do we ensure that government is acting on behalf of what the public and a democratic society wants and it's a real challenge and so I start to wonder these days if as technology public interest groups where or when is it important that we speak up for democratic values and democratic institutions so that we can have conversations about what our communications networks for the public look like. And I think that's gonna be a challenge we continue to face. I did an interview this week where public knowledge we've always advocated for free expression online and advocated for diverse voices including voices we just agree with to have outlets but we've been questioning why we came out against direct TV carrying the one American network it was because of how they were tearing down and challenging our institutions of democracy in the United States with their disinformation and their lies about the recent election. That's not a tech policy issue but we felt the need to take that stand and so when those meld it's a challenge I think we're gonna face as a sector because of how foundational is to then be able to have the conversation about technology policy. We've got a few minutes left you guys have been fantastic. I know I asked you guys to stay high level and think about values and think about harms think about how the technologies change our questioners really can't avoid asking about policy questions so I'm really quickly lightning round style there's a couple have been out here one person asked do you think breaking up Facebook and implementing strong anti-trust laws has a role to play in this conversation? Anyone have a quick response to that that might be a whole other panel on its own because we certainly work on that issue here. You know I would just say the competition is obviously important in protecting consumers is very, very important but I do also think that we should recognize there are other challenges I'll just say racial discrimination, et cetera and we have to recognize those other challenges as well. I know that there are a lot of people who almost have like if you have a hammer like everything is a nail and would use one tool to try to deal with a variety of problems and I would just say there are a variety of problems and obviously again competition is important consumers are important even in a unique world where a product is given out for free. Okay. And one of the, April did you want to jump in? Oh, just that, you know if the FTC is able to find harms there are a lot of different things that that agency can do whether it's discriminatory harms or whatever that could be and one of the tools available in the United States to kind of rein in corporate power that's harming people is through legislation or make them less smaller, right? Through antitrust. So I think it's definitely, you know an avenue to consider when we're talking about just making the internet a better place if these companies are unable to regulate themselves. And I think this is happening across the world antitrust debate is not just in the US it's certainly in the UK and in the EU. And I think that's really an important factor. Fantastic. Another kind of combination of questions we're seeing one person asked how can we maintain public interest in terms of making sure everyone has free and easy access to information while making sure journalists and creators are getting necessary payment or credit. Another person talked differently about why are online publishers not liable for the content the same way that print publishers are. Again, I think those are things we can have whole conversations about here but is there, let me just say as the technology of the internet grows and changes and moves so quickly where it is so difficult to moderate content the same way that a print publisher would or it is shareable at such a speed or a scope that folks may be worried about it being shared but not getting credit. The speed and scope of the internet is just something that requires a public interest value created around it to get at some of these policy questions or is there a give and take with a technology like this that is so powerful in those ways? Akriti? So I mean, I don't think I have the answer to the whole question but I would also like to just point to the fact that there is a definite threat that there is to access to information that a lot of especially when it comes to the future of the newspaper or future of news gathering and sustainability of journalism. There's a real threat that you can see in even in countries like India and even in the US I think two or one or two bills which have been suggested on sort of gaining temporary competition protections to protect newspaper groups. So there's definitely a lot of activism and movement to make sure that there are temporary or permanent protections which are given to news gathering and journalism. And I think one of the public interest values around that would be sustainability of authentic authenticity of news because that's not only core value of society but that's also a tool that we can use to fight speech harms which is misinformation, hate speech, et cetera. And right now with news aggregators with these big tech intermediaries a lot of that is under threat. You know, just quick, go, I'm sorry, go ahead, Katharine. Go ahead Spencer, it's okay. Okay. Right, so just, yeah. Yeah, just quickly. You know, it is incumbent upon us to devise institutions that address these problems. I mean, again, folks in the past have created institutions to deal with emerging problems. This is what is incumbent upon us. And again, these problems aren't just the problems we're seeing today like, you know, the local newspaper dying, right? You know, I just read this piece, you know avatars are being priced differently on the metaverse based on the perceived race of the avatar here, right? My sister, she actually changed her avatar from a black woman to a large balding white man so that she would no longer be assaulted on the metaverse. Audie Cornish on NPR asked Meta's VP, you know if you can't handle comments on Instagram, you know how can you handle the t-shirt that has hate speech or the hate rally that happens in the metaverse or the racialized assault? And, you know, when we talk about a concept like, you know Web 3, how does an increasingly decentralized web allow for, you know, law or policy to prevent racial harassment or discrimination here, right? So I just think that we've got to continuously focus on the emerging issues and come up with solutions and not kill ourselves for not having the silver bullet solution like this is the process. It's always been the process in terms of innovation causes new challenges and public interest folks figure out solutions and that's what we do. It's well put, Spencer. I think this is why PK, we've argued for a regulator, a digital platform, saying we had regulated for communications networks. We've argued at least that's necessary in addition to antitrust laws and other existing laws in order to move with the pace of change of technology, great point to the metaverse, no one knows what it's going to look like and how do we govern it? No one knows that yet, but that's something, you know that coming in the future, perhaps we need to make sure we don't wait until we see harms to question what those harms may be. So folks, we're running out of time. And as I said, you know, this is a conversation that I want us to continue on certainly throughout this year. So I really appreciate you guys participating in it. Participating in it is a little different than what we normally do where we usually zoom in on clear policy questions, but I really firmly believe that a lot of the questions that you guys were raising or the values that you were lifting up are going to guide the policy answers we're looking at as technology develops. So again, I really appreciate you all of you tuning in as we have more of these conversations, continue to follow public knowledge or you can subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can find us at publicknowledge.org and please support our friends across the public interest community, check out the work they're doing at Creative Commons at the Shorenstein Center, at the Joint Center at Gail, ISP and all our other allies so that you can see the breadth and scope of the work that we're doing in the public interest community and how we're all trying to shape the future of technology. So thank you for joining us today and we'll see you next time. Thank you, thanks Chris. Thanks guys. Thank you, thanks Chris.