 Last folks are getting the last drink to get more food themselves. I'll take control of here. If I don't have a chance, I'll meet you or for the folks who are watching the stream online. My name is Chris Lewis, Vice President of Public Knowledge. And if you're new to public knowledge, we're a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. And at Public Knowledge, we work on appropriate technology policy issues advocating for free expression and affordable access to technology. And we want to thank our sponsors. First of all, who helped us put this on tonight. First, the team of Mozilla, who sponsored for tonight, as well as the folks over at Woosman's. We really appreciate you guys supporting this event. We also want to thank the folks here at our Woosman Univ. They welcomed on it. We want to thank our folks here at Galvanize, where we're holding this event in San Francisco. The whole team here has been great. They've got a fantastic space. That's their food. The viewers, if you like the food, want to move to Galvanize, if you're in San Francisco. Heidi and Mario, Taya, Andy, Bernadette, Victoria, the whole team here. You guys have been fantastic. We really appreciate you for letting us come here. Talk to all of us. And for those who are streaming online, if you're watching this, you can follow this conversation on Twitter. Use the hashtag digitalplatformact, which is still here on the screen. Or just keep on digitalplatformact for conversations about the ego and about this conversation kind of thing, from both knowledge and all our allies. So we have two parts of the program today. So we're going to talk about one. First, I wanted to just remind folks about why, why we're holding this event and why I think this conversation is really important. Because, as I said, we're a DC-based organization and in Washington there's a lot of conversation about what people are buying, tech in Washington, back in Washington, technology companies. And that conversation that we're engaged in and the total engagement in Washington really seems to be centered around pushing certain priorities, certain values around innovation for expression, competition, and super choice. But also balanced with interest about fighting speech, fighting piracy, fighting extreme and terrorist content online, voting quality journalism, and all of those values are wrapped up in a really complicated conversation that led to both knowledge and our author Harold Feldreich and the people that we are working with today. And we don't think those values are mutually exclusive, but we think that when you make good policy around those values, it's important that we have facts raised to the top that technical experts will listen to and that all stakeholders at the table can make sure that those values are balanced. And so that's what led us to ask Harold to give us a look. And we hope that it will be a framework for ongoing conversation. We know that not everybody's going to agree with everything that both of us. That's also a good thing, but we want to have people engage with it. We want people to engage with the ideas and be a part of the conversation. We don't think that securing the digital marketplace is going to be achieved by the Google of companies alone. It requires a public conversation that leads to smart policy that's analysis-based. And so that's why we want to have this event, have fairly conversations like this. So with that, I'm going to hand things over to part one of the event, and then I'll come back to part two. Part one of our event is a one-on-one conversation with the author of a really fantastic e-book called the Case of the Digital Platform Act, Part of Structure and Regulation in Digital Platforms. And some of you, when we came in, we were handing out the check-in. We have the executive summary of the book on it. There is a QR code that can take you to where you can download the book. Or you can just go to digitalplatformact.com and download the e-book, check it out. We also have some QR codes floating around on certain accounts this year. We hope you'll read the whole book if you haven't. And get back to us with both of those and also think about it. But here to talk about the book is Harold Veldt, who was our author at both Knowledge. Harold is Senior Vice President at both Knowledge. And his book is By Your Sense Veldt on our website at billveldt.com. And today, we're very lucky that joining Harold in the conversation is journalist Mike Swift. Mike is Chief Global Digital Risk Correspondent at MLX. It's a mouthful. And I'd like to mark it inside. And Mike's a talented board winning journalist who has been covering antitrust policy and covering regulatory policy around the tech industry for many years. Before MLX, he was with San Jose Public News and Silicon Valley.com. He told me he was Chief of New England the oldest, longest running... The oldest continuously published newspaper in America. There you go. Older than our public. So if you're from Harvard... So we're very lucky that he's here to help us to get into this conversation. And so with that, I'm going to get over to Mike and then Harold. Hi everybody. It's really an honor to be here. If I keep moving around a little bit, it's because I have the sun going right into my eyes. But we'll follow through as the sun moves. Thanks for being here. I think we really want this to be a dialogue. We're going to be out of questions. I see a lot of great policy people out here in the audience. We want to have a chance for you to interact a little bit with Harold as well. So we'll make sure we do that. This morning, thanks to the magic of the international deadline, I started the day in Seoul, Korea. My news organization, Alex, has really been writing about how the Koreans are really looking at blowing up their whole privacy enforcement system. Which is kind of interesting because they have one of the strictest privacy enforcement apparatus in the world right now. But they feel like it's important to be much more in concert with the European Union. So they're basically remaking the three agencies that enforce privacy in Korea, and they're doing it down to one with the goal of getting an advocacy agreement from Europe. And sort of the basis behind that belief is that they're not doing this for the big companies like Samsung and LG, they're doing it for really small medium-sized company startups. They really want to open that market to Europe. They want to open up Europe to those small players. And I just think that's kind of interesting because the Koreans believe, in this case, that more regulation can actually mean more products, better products, more information. And I think people like me in Silicon Valley for the past 15 years have always had that belief. I think after 15 years reporting here, I often thought that thanks to Section 230 and the fact that Washington got out of the way of San Diego Road and Y Combinators, the reason why we have these amazing products that we do today. And I think 2018 they told us that that approach is not going to work anymore and we need to find a different one. And that's why I'm really excited to be here talking to Harold about his book, The Starfish Problem. And so why don't we jump right into that. So just a few hours ago, Mark Zuckerberg said that the government should not take a big hammer to Facebook or the other big platforms. And as we speak, Elizabeth Warren's on the stage debating with other Democratic candidates, no doubt talking about antitrust. This year's going to be the first, 2020's going to be the first time since 1912 where antitrust is actually a real issue in the presidential campaign. And so much of when we hear about this debate, it's really about should we just break up the big tech companies, take a big hammer, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, and you know, it sounds good because it sounds like what Teddy Roosevelt did with standard oil in the back a century ago, but why is that the wrong way to think about this problem? Well, I call this the Starfish Problem precisely because you think you spent a lot of time in New England, I grew up, but in New England, and one of the things that I used to hear a lot was that the law enforcement would have this problem with Starfish. They'd come in and they'd get into the law for traps and ruin the catch. So initially what they would do is tear up the Starfish to kill them and throw them back to the water. And what happens, of course, is the Starfish grow back. Not only does a Starfish grow new arms, sometimes you tear a Starfish up into a bunch of different pieces and you get three or four new Starfish because they just regenerate. So what I call the Starfish Problem is when you look at the tech sector and particularly this area of digital platforms which I argue in the book is a clearly definable sector of the economy. We have to ask ourselves why did this end up this way? It wasn't a standard oil thing where there was one genius who was a master of cartel who put all of this together. What happened was economic forces drive these companies to particular strategies of market dominance and we've had a bunch of reports coming out from antitrust experts in Europe, in the United States, in the UK and pretty much the consensus is that these platforms experience really huge network effects. They get enormous economies of scale and can scale up quickly. That creates the urge to do lit scaling. Just crank it up until you dominate your segment of market. So we can't just smash them up and expect that they'll stay smashed up. We need to have in place a regulatory regime that addresses pretty much all of the issues and concerns that are coming up because these problems are not just different and separate. I don't know whether I agree with Mark Zuckerberg about don't break up Facebook. I think that has to be on the table even though we shouldn't get ourselves about how easy that would be. But the answer might be that he's right and shouldn't, that there are other things we should do like interoperability and unbuckling, but the one thing he said that I totally agree with is that Facebook is not going to solve the conflict problem and we need to understand what we're trying to do when we're intervening in the market whether it's regulation to make market work better whether it's regulation to preserve our fundamental values about democracy and whether it's antitrust intervention to break up companies that have got to be we've got to know what we're trying to do. So you don't have to go down to the book of Ecclesiastes to know there's nothing new under the sun, right? And a century ago we had many other innovative, then-innovative communications technologies, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio. What sort of issues did they have that they raised and can we learn from what the response was to those technologies? Right, and it's important to understand that a lot of the issues that we're talking about, the network effects, economies of scale, concerns about democracy all go back to this 150 years of evolving this abruptly communications technology. Student beings are at heart communicating creatures and we think to ourselves well Facebook is the first thing that is linked together with 2 billion people, actually the telegraph was the first thing that linked together with 2 billion people. Not all at once. It wasn't exactly the same, we shouldn't just think it was exactly the same, but if you look at the question of what was enabled by these new disruptive technologies, news from around the world, commerce happening almost uniquely as compared to the old standards when it used to take months to send a message. It's a good side of how the telegraph companies became information aid keepers, how they manipulated elections, how we couldn't confirm, and we see this over and over again. I have a great article from Columbia Law Journal in 1939, the Federal Communications Commission and radio censorship, which asks, well, we don't like all the hate speech that was on radio and we don't like the set of advertising, but we really want the government to be making these decisions through license renewals and private censorship, government censorship. If you scratch out radio and put it in Facebook or YouTube, a lot of the arguments that you see they are resonating with us today. What is the consequence of doing nothing, because it's clear that over the last year the regulators have gotten the attention of Facebook and Google and the other platforms. Can't we really trust that now the heat is on that they know they need to change, that Facebook's army security specialists and their new AI tools are really going to be able to deal with this problem? Well, first of all, they can't. Number one, this isn't about a single company. It's not like, do I like Facebook? It's not, do I like YouTube? It's not, do I like Facebook and YouTube? Twitter doesn't matter. This is about a sector of the economy and if we take off the hat that wants to make this a revenge story about evil people doing bad things or kind of a Frankenstein story of people tampering with that which is not to be proved. And actually start thinking about this in terms of policy and recognize, look, this didn't happen by accident and there's no good way for companies to deal with it internally even if they want to. One thing, they have all wrong incentives. For the other thing, there is no person named Facebook. Even Mark Zuckerberg doesn't actually control the day-to-day operations of Facebook and let me pick on some other companies because it's very easy to pick on Facebook right now but Reddit just suspended the Donald Trump subgroup because there were physical threats of violence and Reddit is by no means a dominant platform by any single measure but if we care about consequences of content moderation depending on what we're trying to do then we do or don't care about what happens on Reddit. So I think first of all my message to everyone about who cannot get it over their techno determinism and hardcore libertarianism get over it. Please, get over it. Every time you drive down the street you are not engaging in micro negotiations with people about whether to stop at red light or on which side of the road to drive on. Believe me, those are totally arbitrary decisions that we could have let the market resolve but it turned out to just be so much easier to say, okay, you drive on this side and this little light turns red, you stop and we all agree to it not because it was extrinsically more efficient than having it be green if you stop at red light but because you had to choose something. Rules make markets work better. Now you can write rules that make markets work worse. You absolutely can do all sorts of crappy things with rules. It's not like all rules are good but the plain fact is that you do nothing and this is the world we're going to get and it's going to keep being this world because if you look at what drives it it's not because, oh, we just need to twist the tail of these guys to make the nerd harder there's real underlying issues of economics limitations on human beings and finally, I will acknowledge this really in the introduction I call it a lot of people disagree I believe it is the fundamental role of government to set the rules for society that in a free democratic society we don't outsource this to a handful of giant companies but they promise to behave that it is actually the job of government to set the core rules about what kind of communications are we going to allow what threats of violence or negative things that we find for society at risk and what kind of a business environment are we going to have in terms of moderating these enormous network effects and economies of scale? So let's talk about the term platform because if we give guilty to this I throw that term around a lot in my writing and I think I probably have kind of a hazy definition of what it actually is how do you define it and why did you choose it as really the organizing principle for Starfish Health? Yeah, first let me say in the last couple of months we have seen a number of reports come out from the European Union the United Kingdom different antitrust centers here in the United States that have come out with conclusions that echo a lot of what I have in the quote for which I am always grateful because I actually was thinking about this from the perspective of telecommunications and kind of from a telecommunications background and history background and it's nice to see that the antitrust and economics analysis works in the same way and we reach pretty similar results from different avenues but everybody focuses in on a couple of things one, delivery through internet solves one of the biggest problems traditionally associated with networks which is the enormous expense of being built out it's not cheap to build something as big and distributed and reliable as you do on Twitter but the fact that you don't also have to build the last model network out to the customer enormously reduces cost as compared to say the telegraph or cable systems or broadband number two the multi-sided platform which creates particularly strong network effects what we generally do by network effects are this idea that the more people are on the network the more valuable it is and most of us think this is a fairly straightforward relationship but there are different types of networks some relationships are stronger than others the fact that these platforms are capable of allowing people to perform multiple functions simultaneously to self-organize into different groups gives them a particular economic power and stickiness that goes beyond say cable television or other sorts of traditional network impacts and finally the fact that these businesses are able to control the information so then there's what I call perfect information asymmetry between the business and the consumer you see the interface you have no idea what lies behind the interface that means that it is particularly difficult to identify when there is an issue so the ability to vote with your feet if you don't like a particular platform is virtually non-existent the fact that we discovered that it's from 16 Facebook was doing things with our personal data that we didn't like may make it so that in 2018 some people may be but the reality is we have another two or three years of built-up investment in the platform the platform is that much bigger its network effects are that much more powerful and there is simply no way that the market can respond to what's going on behind the curtain so typically anti-trust law looks at factors like market dominance, concentration and you're proposing really a new metric the cost of exclusion which is really a fresh idea could you talk about that a little bit explain that to us one of the things that pretty much all of the competition reports that are in red don't agree with is the traditional metrics of anti-trust have real problems with the digital platform not just because we have narrowed and narrowed anti-trust under the consumer welfare standard sort of the general critique of anti-trust and how it's gone in the last 40 years but because they challenge a lot of the ideas anti-trust assumes that the market generally works fine there are bad actors who abuse their dominant position and you go in and you remedy that problem and you can isolate the issue to a particular geographic market usually and identify a particular product market or service market that's hard to do for a lot of the initial platforms what is Facebook's market? Facebook's market is Facebook Google we say Google is search but because a lot of additional things besides search that help to make it that much more sticky we have I'm now broadcasting this over Twitter the micro blogging site that is now also apparently doing yourself a broadcaster but Twitter is not the actual broadcaster the broadcasting sense if anything it's like a cable access channel but again these things are not easily identified so what I say is let's look at the thing that everybody agrees gives the digital platform its power this network effect and particularly powerful sorts of network effects and I've borrowed a concept from telecommunications that was originally developed to describe the digital divide and explain why getting people on broadband networks was important not just because once you are on you enjoy a powerful advantage but because as more people get on the cost of not being on the network begins to rise exponentially so I start with it's an advantage to me the more people get on the more advantages then you get a tipping point where the incremental advantage to me starts to level off between 300 million people on Twitter and 400 million people on Twitter in the United States to speak English is relatively minor whereas if you are a business trying to communicate to customers through Twitter the more your competitors who are on Twitter the more your customers who are on Twitter the more it is a disadvantage to not be able to use that service so what I've said is ok let's go to the root of the issue where the market power here resides which is not so much in any specific market share but in the power of the network and the power to exclude people from the platform and that has to mention the market power so another piece of breaking news today that my organization and what's shameless blood there reported the House of Representatives today approved an additional 40 million dollars in funding for the Federal Trade Commission for enhanced competition and privacy enforcement which is I think we can all agree the public good news you're really proposing to create a new regulator why can't an existing agency such as the FGC do this job well as I pointed out in the book you could go with the Federal Trade Commission and modify it you have to change it in a way that will make it radically different from what it does now the list of tools that it needs and again it's not just about antitrust so antitrust and privacy well ok privacy relates to some of the antitrust but they're different and then it's antitrust privacy and content moderation and antitrust privacy content moderation and consumer protection of various types and election regulation so there's a lot of things in there that the FGC does not traditionally do and you'd have to essentially create a whole new agency that would specialize in this particular sector of the economy in order to do the job right you could go with something like the Federal Communications Commission which is at least closer but there are a lot of reasons why I wouldn't trust them they'll give you an agent pie but in particular because one of the critiques of agencies which to some degree is true is not so much captured in the sense of direct control again look at a new agent pie but the problem of the agency starts to think of things in a particular way so one of the critiques of the FGC during the time we regulated AT&T as a monopoly was it was too slow to introduce competition and was too solicitous of AT&T well yeah but that's because their mission for 50 years had been preserving the stability of the network and making sure that it was available to everybody at affordable rates and then 911 or whatever we were using at the time in your area as the emergency phone number was a very different way of looking at the world so yeah the FCC does a number of the things that we want to take a look at and they have experience with networks experience with some forms of these questions about AT&T but they have a very particular way of looking at things that I don't think is suitable for the new economy what I'd like to see is for us to start fresh I believe very strongly in the lessons of history I believe that this is the some magic black box that either we do nothing because it will anger the genie that lives in the black box and gives us wonders or we just tell people to do whatever the hell we want and the black box will produce the right outcome because we just nerve it hard enough you can take down the counter before it even gets posted so there is a thing there that we have to look at and respect we need to be informed by the lessons of the past but they shouldn't control what we're trying to do here the values remain the same but the rules have to be tailored to the specific sector so just to defend ashen probably he has an entertaining follow on twitter at least you know I don't know where he comes up with that stuff so you know take us through your regulatory tool here this new federal platform regulator what will it be able to do what tools will it have at its disposal just give us a quick run down on that so what we would want to have is an agency that has empowered both in terms of economic competition policy so there's a list of things that we look to as remedies that afford interoperability data portability which is seen as being the same as telephone number portability we get certain types of privacy protection particularly for competitors on the platform so that the platform can't use businesses that are using it as essentially a form of customer research and then leap in and take advantage of that as Amazon and some other platforms have been accused of doing so we want to have this agency that's empowered to review burgers and we'll add the specifics of this in a way that antitrust agencies are not generally empowered to do looking at whether they serve the public interest not merely whether there's been a loss of competition we need to have an agency that is frankly empowered to split up but companies were appropriate people do not realize just how critical the FCC was in both the original AT&T breakup and in maintaining the separate pieces for so many years the internet that people seem to think bloomed without any sort of government rental regulation was a direct result of several decisions of the FCC regulating the telephone network saying yeah you've got to let rivals use your network you can't discriminate in favor of your own products in fact why don't you let them get it in these lines of business because if we give you the market so we need all of that but we can't forget the content side we need to make sure that democracy is protected and by that I don't just mean ways in which we try to deal with fake news but ways in which we address the problems of filter bubbles and what do we do to try to nudge people to have an interest or at the very least in algorithms from shepherding us unconsciously to filter bubbles that we would not seek out for ourselves that's one of the biggest problems when you look at this is not just well I only want conservative voices or I only want progressive voices I can do that on TV today by just tuning into my favorite network that reflects my particular political view the real danger is an algorithm that's trying to provide the most engaging content for us and ends up being like this invisible sheep dog that is moving us in a particular direction so that we do not have what Cass Hudson has called an architecture of serendipity finding those things that we normally just would not find so we need an agency that can look at that while being mindful and respectful of the First Amendment while being mindful of freedom of expression and finally we need an agency that is capable of harnessing these platforms for public safety uses I was on an advisory committee at FEMA for about two years and one of the big areas is the use of social media and other digital platforms for public safety and that's not an infamous for spying on people I mean actually tailored information about okay which leads out here in the five places you can go if you need if you've been evacuated because of a wildfire and people are able to respond in real time to somebody and forward that message and retrieve that message you know that's a very powerful thing and having an agency that helps to organize that and make sure that those capabilities continue to be built into platforms well again there are some other concerns which is quickly important so the guy who's been covering the anti-justification against Apple for seven years and it's gone all the way up to the Supreme Court and it's now back at the District Court where actually finally after seven years starting to get to the meat of the dispute I've always been incredibly frustrated about trying to use antitrust as a tool to regulate attack and the thing I found really exciting about the approach is that there's a lot of elements of privacy law privacy by design we haven't even talked about intellectual property you know you're talking about free licensing fair and reasonable and out-discriminatory experiments and why is it so important to sort of break down those walls and to sort of take these what have been separate from the anti-trust privacy intellectual property and sort of bring them together for trade-offs and the issue is not are we going to be able to have perfect privacy nor what that does to competition policy because perfect privacy has implications for competition privacy there's some trade-offs there we're not going to be able to say interoperability good or bad that may be good for certain types of things bad for the ability to disseminate harmful content we need to be mindful of these trade-offs and we need to do them in a rational way we're never going to be perfect but I am safe of hearing people talk about regulatory humility when what they mean is don't do anything because decision not to act is a decision and when you say well I'm afraid because it might have an unintended consequence I'm like okay so you do your best to try to figure out what those are going to be and you have mechanisms for course correction and the way to solve that is by not saying it's just an antitrust problem or it's just a consumer protection problem there is no such thing as pure consumer protection that exists in some kind of ideal it is always going to be very specific to the nature of the industry to the bags but when we look at something we say yeah fraud is bad what role social media should have in taking down fraudulent things especially when I don't think homeopathic medicine occurs I think it's a fraud but there are a lot of people out there who would be very upset if I got to say social media should treat all acts for homeopathic services as fraud or all cybercracking as fraud whereas we pretty much will agree that yeah, actual fraud or other deceiving people we should be doing something about that but then we get to the parts that are unique to the sector and we look at things like these dark design ideas where traditional antitrust is not going to help you out the idea that the fact that you've been trained by an industry that when something is highlighted it means one thing that can trick you by maybe the opposite thing highlighted is not something that antitrust pays attention to but it is something that a sophisticated regulator can pay attention to and that's why we need to combine all of these discipline to one and over design agents Well, let's open this up to questions I think we have a lot of on life that is going to take the grounds around the room I certainly didn't ask more questions but I'm sure you guys have some great ideas to ask Harold Hey Harold, so I'm on board I'm with you What is the legislative vehicle to bring this happen over the next 6, 12, 18 months So, this is a big buy and one of the things I point out in my book is okay, we need to recognize that it took four tries before we got the communications act of 1934 and in the intervening approximately 25 years actually 20 years use cases changed technology changed it was an evolutionary process so I think that you know, we can get some things in motion I think we certainly get the framework in motion I think that at the moment there is no vehicle because everyone in Congress is still thinking of these in their various silence the fact that it took us this long to get people looking at just privacy and saying, well maybe we actually should have some kind of federal privacy law it tells you something about the speed at which this moves at the same time I do think that we're seeing this be an election machine we're seeing that people care about this the more these things become embedded in our lives and the more these things become embedded in Congress the more people are looking to both the federal government and state governments for solutions and bluntly I have to say the thing that drove the companies and therefore Congress to be willing to talk about national privacy law in a serious way was California passed a strong privacy law so while I'm not sold on the idea that every state needs to have its own comprehensive digital platform regulatory framework, I do have to say that one thing that would keep Congress in the past is if we have a state like New York or California say, yeah, you know what if you the federal government aren't going to do this we're going to cast elements of this on our own and the prospect of that kind of a patchwork wouldn't drive Congress to act in a much more serious way so it makes sense when we have things like privacy and IP fall under one fucking, under one department but it seems like with certain tech companies out over here it affects regulations in transportation say with rideshare companies so I was curious as to your thoughts on the limits of this one regulatory body whether it extends to transportation companies or whether it extends to hospitality so I was curious as to your thoughts about that it's an excellent question because what I'd like to say for example for the Federal Communication Commission or the Food and Drug Administration is you have specialized agencies whose authority is narrow but deep meaning they have what at least on the surface of the statute look like really extraordinary patterns but those are tolerable because they address a fairly narrow area of the Congress it's important FCC deals with multi-billion dollar industries that are at the heart of our national information infrastructure but at the end of the day their powers are tolerable because they do not regulate everything that connects to that infrastructure they just regulate the infrastructure so on the other hand we do have a lot of cases where you have multiple agency overlap banks for example you have certain types of food and drug advertising is regulated by both the FDA and the FTC so I do think there is room for overlap what I'd like to see is the digital authority address the uniquely platform issues and we see this in other specialized areas too you know when Walgreens is regulated as a pharmacy they are regulated by the FDA and the Drug Enforcement Agency but when they are regulated locally around things like zoning or if their prices are deceptively standardized or whatever they are regulated by state consumer protection along the FTC I think we can do the same thing for folks like Airbnb or Uber elements that are in this platform wheelhouse the things that make you part of this sector should be addressed by the digital authority whereas whether you are violating local laws about rental housing or discriminating against you know whether people based on sexual orientation we can leave those with the same agencies that have investigated them I wanted to ask a question about what you thought of the European approach I guess what you are saying where I think we have been able to regulate the algorithms that you mentioned in a side of the way I suppose we are trying to see if we are doing alpha form regulation we are doing urgent control and I guess without creating this we are marching authority so I was thinking about that from what I can tell there is a lot of debate about this the UK competition report by Jason Furman but it is often referred to as the Furman Report recommended creation of if not a single regulator at least a coordinating agency that would make sure that everything that happened got sent to the right agency which to my mind is 10 years from now it would be an agency because one of the problems is precisely this you don't want the things flowing between the cracks it helps to have general oversight I think that you know it is important to see different models out there I have to say I have been impressed with a lot of what the EU has done and I have found what it has done in copyright directive and content moderation to be practical but not just because if it were implemented it would crash everything but because therefore it will never be implemented example UK point of law for those who are not familiar with this UK pass the wall a couple of years ago that said there is no free online available folks without age verification and that age verification has to be protective of people's privacy cannot involve the credit card and magically be able to tell everybody's age whenever they log in and can't just take their work for it it has now been delayed for the third time this time indefinitely because there is no way to do this and some people there was no way to do that they were like oh you just don't want to do but you get close to it there is actually no way to do this bad laws are bad not just because if you implement them they can be catastrophic but because they prevent but because they are unimplementable distraction so I look to things like the copyright directive or some of the things that are being bad around like taking down a terrorist content in a time frame that is just ridiculous and I say not only is that never going to happen and it's a waste of time it's going to be an investment of a lot of money and effort between policies that are just not implementable which will either lead to very uneven implementation in ways or where we just abandon the effort and have to start again in three years from now on the other hand maybe I'm wrong we can do this so you know that's why it's important for geographic regions to sovereign nations to create laws that they will implement their values I'm just glad that you're using me what would a single regulator fix that I guess I think a single regulator is better at this kind of thing because they have a great deal of expertise and where you refer within the agency is better so you know at the FCC maybe something goes to the media bureau or something goes to the wireless bureau but you know if it has to do with Comcast then whether it's going to the Comcast area or the wireless competition bureau or the media bureau it's at least going to be handled by the FCC and if it's an important issue the people who are running the agency are able to stay on top of it is this trailer so you say okay I need to be able to take care of content that is harmful to people I have to balance that against free expression I have to balance that against technical feasibility it is much easier to make that balancing in an agency that is a sector specific regulator than it is among multiple agencies at least that's been our experience here in the United States where the financial collapse is actually pointed to as one of the places where multiple agencies got played against each other I'm super supportive in general but I feel like I'm hearing too much about advertising and that seems to me to be where a lot of the money and power of these networks come from so I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that well yeah I think addressing the advertising issue is one of the things that a sector regulator will be able to do first of all and I've argued with the FCC a lot about this during the privacy bullmaking it's not just advertising just on top of my little access to grind it turns out that some of the real-time geographic location data that one of the carriers sold to bounty hunters was directly responsible for a shootout by bounty hunters at a Texas used car dealership that killed a couple of people it turns out that there are reasons we have very strict rules around this but my point there is the personal information stuff is not just about advertising even though people mostly conceptualize it at the moment as advertising again a sophisticated agency regulator will be able to examine that but I do think with regard to advertising so number one I don't believe that we need the level of information for targeted advertising in order to provide free services I understand the rationale is that you can extract that higher premium but when you did write down to it there isn't a lot of evidence showing that you get significantly better results from these highly targeted ads in fact the best results you got when you want to study that was when people losing ads from being targeted at them because it made them feel like the ads had been curated to be directed at them so you can tell people they're targeting ads whether or not they may achieve better results again though this is also a place where I feel society can ensure that it's at limits where it's like yeah I don't care if targeted ads work better the fact that we think that it's wrong for you to be able to exploit people in a moment of weakness by calculating the moment when they are most vulnerable to particular ideals is a societal judgment and it's one that we should take seriously yeah I have a question about just PR in general because I saw Facebook use this line recently I thought it was kind of compelling about using like I guess arguing against any legislation because of what China's done with their internet and yeah any thoughts on that and also just unique problems that these kind of legislation space generally because a lot of the public discourse happens on the very networks to try to regulate it well at least Facebook didn't claim that we should be regulated because otherwise we'd lose the 5G base but really but my point is that people will make all kinds of statements and part of the problem is that companies aren't always lying sometimes they actually have a good point so again this casual disregard but some of these things like well we wouldn't want to do it because you know that would give you the same capacity that you know China has yeah but no the answer to that is you build safeguards into the system or you avoid certain sorts of sexualized filtering that would give a government the ability to do this sort of thing but I do agree that there are problems with some of these where any time you start to make a content moderation system or a tracking system or any of these you know NSA and the rest will like sneak up and say we promise not to abuse it and you know history shows that every time that happens sure not we get to abuse so yeah there are issues but the consequence of that is to create safeguards you know the FCC for better or worse we deal a lot of things to protect it from to protect our infrastructure regulator from the kind of drug abuse that you see in a lot of other countries where it's directly incorporated into the executive we don't appreciate how much having the Federal Trade Commission or the FCC or the FDA independent agencies but the fact that you know Donald Trump can't just gain some of these license or can't do what say you know Burden does in Turkey which is every time there's a broadcaster that's critical of him suddenly you know there's an audit team there to discover that they have all of these infractions and they suddenly owe a 2 billion lira so there are some legitimate concerns but the answer is to build in democratic safeguards and oversight not to just throw up our hands Mike this is the last question and we're going to go to our second or part two of the demographic question so I'm the person I've never seen before who knows about why I'm such a demographist so I've seen you prove in other context that you've got a generational shift in our current political landscape and you seem to be trying to fuse together with your argument here understanding the nuance of both the promise of society and bring in the same type of wisdom of the ancient past of both your past experience of media policy public access television that your generation may have really changes in the media landscape so my question to you Carol is are you too early or are you too late based on the right of the standard I like to think of Joseph Tom but one of the things actually that's been a sore point for me for a large number of years has been precisely this generational divide and the tendency of folks on either side of it to dismiss the other generation and with context to put it mildly I've been reading Senator Pepe's Twitter and tear gas which I recommend to everybody by the way and one of the things she points out is that one of the reasons why social media has snuck in under the radar of many countries was because the people running the countries just couldn't imagine why this was significant they brought into the whole slack abysm disregard of what organizing online was by the same token I also see people the internet generation who fail to understand that one of the reasons why politics is the way it is is because of traditional media and the way that industry is structured and that one thing you're going to have 30% of people believe in or 40% of people ever believe in global warming is a Chinese helps because they listen to Rush and they listen to talk radio and all the Facebook in the world doesn't matter to them so I do think that it's important to bridge that as frankly as somebody who gen X under 14 or on both sides of the the I feel quite involved in that position but yeah I do think that it's important for for people to realize on each side of the demographic line what the other really has to offer in terms of lessons. Well Harold this has been great thanks so much I think you have a really fresh idea it's sort of going to be important to you but I hope it gets a lot of attention I'm going to be watching you for sure Harold Harold, Mike, thank you so much I work in the same office as Harold and everyday he does what he just did here for you guys and he always has a reference that thank you Harold, thank you Mike for helping us with that conversation I'm going to ask our Part 2 panel to come up in front I'll help you guys if you can make your way in front grab a seat we've got 45 minutes we've got about 45 minutes left here in the event but we wanted to have a reaction panel up here because as I said in the beginning because our panel is up here it's really important to us in public knowledge that this be the beginning of a conversation that we want to happen in public we really hope that this these ideas around an extra digital agency are considered by policy makers the Congress will look at it but it doesn't mean it's the only bad idea out there and certainly it's important that this policy is made that all stakeholders are at the table so we've got an interesting mix of folks here who are going to help us engage in a little bit more conversation and we will come back out to the audience for more questions for them so I'm thinking of things that you want to ask and I'm going to applaud her at this and thank you, thank you guys for coming for participating in this today I'm going to introduce our group here going down the line first to my immediate right for her fortunate to have we've got Leslie coming from Google that Leslie could make today and I'm short but it's Jess Hammerly who is the public policy and government affairs manager at Google is with us, thank you for coming Jess to her right we had Rich Golds who is senior staff attorney at the electronic frontier foundation and have a secret that we work with very often to have been mentioned here in San Francisco to his right we have Dina Srivastava who is an antagonist scholar and an author and just moves to San Francisco very good so we're glad that she's here for her right we have Andy O'Connell who is public policy director head of content distribution operative policy at Facebook Andy with a prize for the longest title here on the panel congratulations Andy thank you for coming we appreciate that you're going to come in to stay with us bring your answer please and then on the extreme end of the family we have our very new friend from Mozilla who is the sponsor of the event our old friend Chris Bradley who is director of public policy and Mozilla so of course thank you for being here thank you for your help with the event so folks what I want to do to start off this conversation is to kind of go down the line and perhaps folks because I know Harold's lead book folks have read and checked out and heard the conversation beforehand it's a wide ranging it has this overarching idea of a digital agency an expert agency an expert regulator but it also has a whole suite of ideas for a conversation in May for regulatory fixes and it causes competition issues so I was hoping to take a minute to just share is there one major piece of Harold's proposal Harold's book that really stood out to you that you thought that's really strong that's really important and I agree with that and also is there one that you're like I'm not so sure about and I'm able to hear what that concern might be so why don't I start just as you're right next to me make sure the mic is on and then I'll let you take the mic I think in terms of thank you for inviting me to step in for Vice President last minute the thing is that we certainly I mean we appreciate a lot of the ideas in Harold's book for sure I think one of the things that we plan to be really the most valuable contribution to conversation is the idea of multifaceted approaches so looking at sort of a suite of tools to manage and address the issues that are raised by digital platforms that's definitely from design to looking at the antitrust to looking at tools for practice and tool gets and things like that there are really diverse issues of volunteer and they require a diverse suite of tools to address them and so we definitely appreciate that I think that in terms of something for conversation we could get into the navery of the definition of digital platform to start I think that in itself raises questions and just sort of the idea of creating a new regulatory body rather than empowering our existing regulatory bodies to have sort of the knowledge and the expertise to address digital platforms given that digital platforms are increasing part of the equity industry and so I think that's kind of our big start Thanks Colin Dahls for hosting this and thank you very much Harold both the fiction speaker and the camera man so this is a really welcome contribution to heated and very sort of fractious set of conversations going on right now and to take a step back from each of these individuals and say what does the big picture look like is a key piece that was really interesting what resonated with me the most was the focus on each round of ability as I think it seems you do too a more pressing conversation and breakups not necessarily usually explosive but it gets us to solving a lot of the problems that we're going to receive potentially and drawing on some really successful models of communications efforts and technology from the past that have been federated models where the rules and policies can be set by multitude of actors to which users can choose a model but that can still communicate with one another in a larger network and it's a good observation I think that doing that probably requires an expert agency because there are kind of getting into the lessons of history that you described in your book a lot of subtle ways to support a model like that especially through the cover on the other side the challenging problems was the inclusion of questions of content and that's because it is troubling to put questions of good and bad content into the hands of an agency which while accountable is directly accountable and the structure of first amendment and the other first amendment is is it the government or agencies in the government don't decide what is good and bad content and it's not simply a problem we have a problem but going and proposing an agency a new set of laws regulations about what's included in bad content is not necessarily part of the same problem but the problems of business and the problems of bad content are very interrelated but they are not necessarily one problem with one set of solutions great to be here that was a mistake so I think on interoperability it's interesting we can also look at some of these type of platforms that were much more interoperable and much less interoperable today for example facebook messenger used to be interoperable with icq we used to be able to propose a tweet on twitter and so there's been a climb back of interoperability and this is very natural behavior in natural monopoly markets but counteracting that through a position of interoperability would introduce some form of competition in the market and since they are lessons of history we have them in the toolbox they're very easy to use is I think but today we're talking about these type of platforms we're really talking 80-90% of the time about facebook and google and facebook made about 99% of its revenue from digital advertising last year google made 90% of its advertising of its top line from digital advertising revenue last year and all of those ads are traded in programmatic rtv option environments and the number one input in those option environments that rise from pricing is user identification and user data so I think it's crucial right now especially as we have sort of pending investigations and have the sort of federal and state levels and in congress that we talk more about user identification user data and our cookies in digital advertising so a thing we like most and a thing we might take issue with so I think at its core what I appreciate most about herald's work is the recognition that private sector companies are making a lot of decisions that feel like governmental decisions and that we need to wrestle with that as a society and government has a role in wrestling with those issues so at facebook in particular where we've been pushing for smart regulation the first is harmful content that's the issue that I work most closely with and I'll talk more about it tonight the second is privacy regulation which we've talked about quite a bit the third is election protection election integrity and the final one is data portability we think those are themes certainly in the book but there are issues that we think are incredibly important in terms of just values political tradeoffs that companies are forced to make at this point but that there are that governments and society ought to be playing a more direct role in it and I guess that's the transition to the thing I might take issue with which is sort of the focus on a single agency and I think for me it's probably more a question of just practicality we find ourselves in a position where we have to make these decisions and we can't afford to wait for governments to come to the table and make these decisions an example of that would be the honest ads act in the context of election interference we can't wait for congress to pass this sort of regulation so we're working to implement it already and so we're taking the initiative in a lot of these spaces but we want governments to be involved and take a bigger stand and it's not clear to me that we can offer any money so I think I'm also going to cheat and probably talk about more the whole thing each year but I promise I'll keep it short the first one is very short this is definitely the most probably draw morbidly that I've seen in a while I've been talking about the importance of competition for like two years now so I'm clearly in very favor of the territory I love seeing that in the book and then the European Commission has proposed a commission of vestiges with that constitution further and then the recent Chicago School of Business report that P.K. CEO G. Kimmelman was involved with took that constitution to draw morbidity further so these all came out in the past three months by the way I would say the timing of this book is very well aligned without competition or view shaping around the world like others on this panel the wallet we're going to end up in I'm very glad that I put it out there because it's time to have a conversation about how we do governance here I think we're going to increasingly find ourselves in a situation where we don't want governments making a lot of decisions we don't want companies making a lot of decisions we know we can't just leave it to users either because we see a lot of problems online but with the lack of making a decision or being clear so we're going to have to figure out some sort of long-term way for the voices and forces of users, governments and corporations and corporate norms and corporate cultures to all come together here and I can't tell you what that's going to be and I'll take it from the camera so I'm glad that we're pushing it and pushing it to see what the conversation takes us so let's pick out a few topics here from the many that are in the book and maybe we'll start with another you've got to mention the books here so interoperability as a concept there's a lot of positive feeling about moving towards interoperability or getting back towards greater interoperability are there barriers or are there challenges that you guys anticipate to getting to greater interoperability across different platforms and how do you see an expert in to maybe wrestling with that one obvious problem is interoperability in the sense that there's a bit of a trade-off there the other input to that trade-off is a form-consent user input how does one know who is going to who would share it with them and what the intentions of those third parties are that hopefully is a question for those who got some comments on privacy regulation which has to be part of the space but it also has to be part of the interoperability conversation the reason why it ends with why an expert agency would be useful on that is because of what happened to the local phone companies in the 1996 act where unbundled was managed interoperability with the incumbent long-distance network and yet their service calls were answered a little bit slowly things didn't work quite as well for the new phone companies as with the incumbent ones and I don't know if those are dependent on the best majority of the left business that's the sort of thing I think I made it in the nature of Congress I think that was Chris so interoperability in the digital platform incurs via EPI but I spent a lot of time explaining it to competition around the world over the past year so I think it's going to be hard it's going to be important for someone in government to be able to make specific changes by platforms to their APIs and make a call was the deprecation of the shutting down of this API made in the normal course of the following technology business was it made as Facebook's change to grab a point of API from the world and let it go in reaction to a privacy or security concern and even if it was made in reaction to a privacy security concern was it made right in a calibrated way or was the string type a little bit too much and now interoperability was not allowed to continue but it could have been also protected in the underlying privacy security concern so there's a really fine-grained really context specific process that needs to be gone through by a regulator with the capacity of the technical skills and resources to be able to look at what's going on what the company did and that's a set of predictable principles to try to give some clarity and guidance to the companies and that they know how much we can really grow the company to it's going to be hard but it's important that we start talking about and that we start getting resources and principles in place that we can do this predictably at the right and just to follow up on that what Chris is saying is basically these problems were solved and they were solved through to accomplish this very hard task but we think it's going to be so hard to implement but that the function only was again shut down so Exactly, so just if you think about it in the context of Facebook there's, I think there's no question that you own your own data on Facebook you own what you post, what you say what information you disclose where it gets tricky is when it's information that your friends have shared with you so Chris and I are friends on Facebook I actually think we are friends on Facebook we are friends on Facebook so he shares with me a post or he shares with me his birthday or he shares with me where he works if we're thinking about being able to take your data as an entity to a different platform or to interoperate with another platform what do we do with Chris's data that he has shared with me which at least in the context of Facebook it's Chris's data that makes my experience on Facebook or all of the Chris's all the people I'm friends with and that's where it gets hard the idea that I am in my data I think is uncontroversial but where do we draw the line other people's data and they share with me that's where it gets really hard and I agree with everybody else that is where governments need to step up and help draw those lines the topic I wanted to bring up that it was discussed in Harold's book but it was not discussed this evening really fleshed out in his conversation about content moderation here on stage was Harold's book had a full forwarded defense of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and there's a lot of talk in Washington right now about that law and other concerns of platforms with harmful content online I'm curious what folks think about that law and it's utility but also the critiques out there that it is harmful and are there ways that it should be modified who wants to go first? I'm happy to borrow some of in these potentials last question let's not talk about specific laws and proposals we worked on last year they were related to limiting the safe harbor under section 230 in the context of sex trafficking we were extremely concerned particularly about the early versions of those bills as I think for most people in California because of the ways in which they let go of this problem because of the lack of their necessity to make this kind of change in the law it's critical I think there were a lot of concerns on that we moved from my team's position when the next bill to scale back section 230 to look at that and understand why we will almost certainly sympathize with the problem because these aren't coming from nothing well it's not exclusively based on German by a willful it's driven in large part because there's a lot of stuff online it's awful the internet is not healthy right now we've talked about that a lot through our internet health report publication we share the concerns that are motivating the U.S. to do more about unwanted content online we share the concern that's motivating European politicians to look at the e-commerce that's almost certainly going to happen in the next years doesn't mean that you actually need to change 230 or the e-commerce in order to achieve the goal of making the internet better obviously but Google we are very much pro-CG and the protections it provides I think one of the things when we get into these discussions about little in ways protections something that we can contribute to the conversation is transparency is data about what actually is happening on our platforms what kinds of things are we moving what kinds of things are we not moving what is the scale and again the scale of the problem is obviously I don't need to lecture in this room about the difficulty in trying to proactively monitor content of all types as it goes up or the potential through-speech issues with proactively monitoring people's content and censoring it but the more that we as an industry can put data out there that helps people to understand the complexity and the scope of content that's on our services and the ways that we enforce our own content policies and the rules and things like that or we can all kind of come together to talk about what are we actually trying to solve for what are the real ultimate what are some solutions and are we doing how bad of a job are we doing or how good of a job are we doing I think again it's I work on a transparency report which is why I'm obviously obsessed with this but the YouTube community guidance report is a huge first step for us as a company in terms of providing data on our own decisions about content removal and I think that the more we can do things like that and the more other companies can do things like that the more we can better understand really the effect of the scope and the scale of content like this on our services and we can inform these conversations in a way that you don't need to pull back state barbers but maybe we can create as a platform. I'm often sort of misapplied by these conversations about our platform's publishers why wouldn't you make your publisher a publisher and I've come to realize that at its core when people and media folks are raising these issues what they're really getting at is this question of responsibility and is there a sense that companies are responsible for moderating the content of the platform and I think an important part of this contribution is clearing up some of the confusion about that and reminding people that CD230 is what allows internet platforms to moderate and to take that responsibility it's both a shield and a sword in enabling companies to sort of take on that task prior to CD230 that created liability so I think that's an important contribution. Mentally we're just a personal experience report in Google and there's plenty of all sorts of information about moderation and any of their works with the oversight boards that's been referred to on the request of the Supreme Court for decisions around content moderation if you had concerns about the government getting involved with making some of these decisions that was proposed in Harrisburg and he had kind of a higher government involvement but also a private sector a self-regulation with some standards I mean where do we draw that line about the government's involvement in deciding what we need to track what we need to know about these content moderation decisions Actually I think Mentors in Harrisburg have a great idea I think that my organization has pushed forward for a long time now and we know a lot of the expansion of the loop of Transparency in the fund and the division by force so that doesn't make the same sort of speech concerns as a government policy that's a really positive one long section to a period of points most of the most current concerns terrorism recruitment, radicalization fan news to some degree harassment that are legally actionable in the U.S. that probably shouldn't be so whether or not those with the section 230 is preventing litigation that doesn't really exist anyway is maybe the right question this is well covered in Harrisburg and I think it's important when there was just so much this information and this inception around this law what it doesn't really section 230 represents what is different about the internet as compared to our communications network without it basically I think the internet becomes something that puts on my light cable TV it becomes a future of any medium instead of a many many medium and a weakness of the internet for good and bad is lost so you're saying what are the thoughts in my head on this topic so I'm just going to go from that we are this point in 2019 in the United States closer than we've been probably in my play of time to passing a baseline federal privacy law way behind most of us abroad I say that because we've been talking about privacy policies and what being good at privacy has a technical means for a long time we have been talking about what it needs to be good to be responsible for three years less a much shorter time so I think we have a lot more to do to map out the theme of responsibility I also like very much because it's a very important contribution in addition to this we've got a long ways to go before we really have a share of vision of what that looks like so one of the things the European Commission that outbound European Commission that I like to point to a lot is the way they handle disinformation not misinformation but willful generation of falsely information the European Commission did not do a thing that one might think the European Commission would do which has introduced a law that says you're not allowed to publish discrimination instead they set up this process they set up a process for the European Commission basically breathe down on top of a group of big companies and said what can you do to make this problem better and through a lot of pressure a lot of sort of dynamically style hanging there companies made real commitments last year now Lozilla has made some quibbles about how some of those commitments and then executed a gentleman in here the process is a really I think inspiring part let's know me that we don't know how to write a law today that says don't have this question online what can we do and I think it's a really, really good progress to make and I think there's probably a lot we can do to come to this again in that same also so we're going to go to questions from the audience since I kind of wanted to ask one more question and I think I'm going to be in a little bit but if you have a question since I'm up here and not playing over out in the audience like I was in part one there's a microphone right here so just come on up to the microphone so just come up you know you're our antitrust expert here we have folks who talk to the Federation but that there was you know there's a clear line in the same I think in Harold's presentation about well antitrust definitely cannot deal with these conflict moderation issues and I think it's one of the strongest arguments for a digital platform in some respects but as we look at the power of antitrust law I'd like to give you a take on what you think antitrust can and cannot do when it comes to these competition consensus arrays and especially looking at new businesses and streams are rolled up by companies kind of way to side when they've crossed the line where something isn't competitive or revertical or revertical how do we deal with those are some questions there was a lot sorry let's start with the content I guess I'm going to push back generally and say that competition is I would argue the most effective tool to make sure that the free market is opening those services that consumers like right so competition is a very important tool in the toolbox and if we don't have it we should correct that problem so that we can make sure people are competing with these digital platforms and plus we have competition and we have different platforms we might solve a lot of these problems that we're talking about even on the content side on digital advertisers don't have transparency into a lot of the process and you as a user you don't have a lot of optionality in terms of changing the algorithms the way the content is displayed to you there's no mechanism for you to go back and sort of look at all the ads that were targeted to you and then actually understand why they were targeted to you right so we will solve a lot of these problems including content problems with competition we have a question for the audience and please thought they were still free to step up my name is Chris Whitman I have very interested in the discussion on interoperability because I have spent a better part of my career litigating telecom and connection cases and so I was very interested to hear you Chris say someone is going to have to look at specific changes to APIs whether they are being done in a calculated way and measure that against the set of predictable principles or set of principles my question is how does that happen in internet time the inter-connection cases that I've been involved with have gone 2, 3, 4 years or more yeah well it takes 4 years it's not going to be a very effective regulatory mechanism that they certainly would do with that I mean in practice one of the things that does happen is companies give a fair bit of a risk before changing the APIs because a lot of things depend on them so if you have in a 6 month window if a company announces a change to the APIs you have potentially a sufficient amount of time there for the extra 40 million dollars the federal trade commission is getting if they hire more technologists because they don't have nearly enough to have a conversation with that company and they can have a pretty lightweight first pass in a sense of the rationale for it and the consequences of it maybe talk to a couple of other people who if someone brings a complaint to the agency to say hey you know this is really messing me up the agency can say is it really messing me up or do you just have to change your code a little bit even more with the new structure I think it can be done I think that's why an expert agency is the right body to do it as this goes to the court system and I don't see how you can have a litigation led process worked fast enough I think this is how you do it in a sense of the way but you're going to have to have appeal right absolutely if you're in that situation start to follow if you're in that situation the barriers get stained some changes I mean it gets a little complicated and even I'm sure it's probably a little uncomfortable the idea of a more specific intervention between our companies and our APIs and so forth like if it's about an act it's going to be about an act you have to do I have a special answer Andy I think I heard you say earlier that people on Facebook own their own data and I want to know can you say it with a straight face after I think that's happening or is Facebook a finding ownership in some other way that most people would not be familiar with because I think ownership is meaning you have control and if data is on Facebook ends up in English on some other server not controlled by Facebook and you don't even know that it happened how does that comport the ownership? Yeah it's a good question it's a fair question and I think the Cambridge Analytica scandal was certainly a breach of trust by Facebook and by our developer partners and it happened as I think Carol mentioned back in 2015 and substance to that immediately following that in prior to this becoming public we made a number of changes to lock down our APIs to prevent things like that from happening I think at the principles level though the idea that stuff you put on Facebook you should be able to take where you want to take it it's something we've tried to embody for a long time you can already download all of your information on Facebook and you can also add a transfer project to really sort through some of these questions about what you do with the crisp data that you shared with me but there does need to be a regulatory component to that to sort through some of these harder questions Please yeah that's all and it's raising Yeah Maybe what's up Facebook Messenger Instagram more into referable actually that's not going to help the petition because you're across one company so I wonder whether you think that there is something to be done in terms of virtual and saying Facebook should not be able to acquire WhatsApp in the future to prevent any of these companies from acquiring any kind of sort of related sector I guess I feel like I should talk a little bit too much but this is a soft ball floating my way so I apologize the first thing I wrote about interpreter really was a hypothetical imagine that Facebook WhatsApp merger had been allowed to proceed but under the condition that any integrations of data functionality between two companies were implemented through APIs that were offered to third parties on reasonable terms so if you imagine that future of the interpreter in the future I think it's having a lot of these things I also was not particularly kind after the WhatsApp MyMessage and I believe I called it the new ball and carton or something like that because it's not in fact interoperable to have your own services just to be able to talk with each other in the context of messaging a service that could in fact be so much more truly interoperable messaging is a heart like if you want to support an environment for innovation for growth and development messaging protocols there are a lot of standards out there but it's certainly from my perspective when you can you want to push for standards based protocols so that different services communicate with each other you want to permit interoperability so that you can design services to function with each other even beyond what you could do with standards I mean once these services are already inside Facebook a policy change that gets made it's obviously tougher to do anything about that all the time but I don't think that was the best shiny example of interoperability on the merger we are sort of in the process of getting re-evaluated and if there's we can find by addition an antitrust law there as I spoke sort of looking at just all reports there's all kinds of reports in the paper about antitrust agencies and antitrust enforcement looking at as well as looking at other companies there was this conversation in Harold's discussion around the importance of having Google agency responsibility so that in the same way that the FCC partners with DOJ and telecommunications managers that an expert agency could also put the certain conditions on that Chris was talking about but they can also look and see if in addition to those conditions if there needs to be sanctified rules around interoperability I mean to me that's the strength of this argument for a digital agency that can be quicker and faster than just the enforcement of the antitrust official site is there any disagreement with that idea that having dual agencies with dual jurisdictions is the problem or or is it just kind of benefit like that if not go back to that question over here I don't think it's a problem that different agencies handle different aspects again I actually want it to be useful to think of digital platforms as a sector of the economy with the UD said problems that doesn't necessarily mean that all of those problems are going to be solved through the same mechanism for this agency one example of virtual institutions nobody virtual initiatives are a little bit troublesome because of one-offs and because they tend to be time limited often I think XA2 rules of conduct are going to be a better way to go than rules enforced through merger conditions like doing particular merger usually from 5, 7, 10 years after that merger question just so what question after is that what is different about the landscape now that's saying we'll just wait for competition to magically arrive and sweep these companies away in the way that they slept with companies that were before basically there was my space before Google there was like there was that site a bunch of other websites that weren't alive and might have never heard of so what is different now that's waiting for things to resolve themselves doesn't always happen before what's the different now why some sort of intervention at some level in social network case there was a very strong competition for the first 6, 7 years on the market and then the growth friends just shifted and one company consolidated the market after that and others fell out but the second sort of answer to your question is anticoast law doesn't particularly care that competition eventually is going to come in and wipe away these companies there's a period of time when consumers are hard and the purpose of the law is to come in and help consumers with that period of time so if you agree with your long term sort of evaluation of the market that different market is eventually going to come in and wipe sort of the slate clean but we're just trying to fix that those numbers that period of time are just as you referred to were aided by some major anticoast cases so not much based on Facebook but the U.S. source of Microsoft case arguably created the root of the rise of Facebook and so on that it's doing things that may have been talked to Microsoft otherwise and then folks within Microsoft would have been saying it was because they had the elbow and then before the AT&T the commercial internet so can I Chris please so I do think that things are different not everyone agree with that but I feel very strongly that one is to the company's credit that is growing and adapting in all of their services they also often apple did this very notably with the iPad that came out they're willing to cannibalize themselves sometimes up to a degree in order to get ahead of what would have been the next disruptive indicator in the market I mean in a brief misguided earlier phase of midlife when on the job teaching department and my job talk paper was an argument that the theory of sort of innovation essentially died in the context because of the company's ability to control the intersection points which I think is the sort of technical version of the economic version that says market entry costs are a lot higher than we assume them to be because you need to get to a certain critical mass of data and network events in order to really have scale to make a difference when you're on the job there's a lot of different actions that go into this but it definitely leads I'm not actually as convinced and fundamentally different I mean if you think about Facebook if you think about messaging Facebook doesn't need messaging if you think about photo sharing or video sharing Facebook doesn't need any of those sectors advertising Facebook doesn't need we think of these as all pretty competitive markets for not regulating in smart ways because as I said at the beginning there are essentially governmental functions that a lot of these companies find themselves competitive to serve in a lot of situations and so it's appropriate for government to intervene in those spaces and again from our perspective we think it's privacy election integrity, harmful content data portability in the first instance we're raising our title and we're going to throw up and you just said Facebook doesn't dominate advertising there are a lot of people who are going to challenge that so do you want to you're pointing to Google you're saying Google but you know there are a lot of people who argue that there's a duopoly incompetence here Facebook and Google just disagree with that I mean I think there are a lot of people that would argue I'm stepping into the antitrust domain which is not my expertise I'm focused on content but I mean depending on how you define the market you get very different answers but even if you narrowly define it as digital online advertising Facebook is not okay well right so if you narrowly define it as digital online advertising which I think every competition globally has distinguished this but I was just going to say I think there's one that actually takes that we have on the focus in the North and District of California that defines the market as social network so can I kind of go back to Carol's book briefly so you just rather than focusing on market definitions it's really a really an interest in this constant exclusion of theory that was teetop I don't really calculate that yet but I do have some notes on one of my pieces of paper where I was serving a map of like this is a coefficient A times the function of value of data and a coefficient B times the function of value of the network and then some third coefficient C times the function and it involves both of those two and we can start to map that out and talk more about that later but I do think it's more useful to think about those metrics rather than to focus on market definition questions which is just right on the message okay excellent well first of all help me thank our panel for coming up here at rest of the call we've been going for a long time we can't tonight it's 8 o'clock and that's the end of our program but I want to thank you all I want to thank everyone who's been watching this stream and I appreciate it and I want to thank you all who came out in person we don't get out to the West Coast a lot at public knowledge and so what we do we really appreciate you guys coming out and supporting and engaging in these important discussions final thank you to again to our sponsors from the United States and Mozilla companies put this together there's a lot of refreshments in the back so please hang out come and talk to Harold ask him all the questions in the world I know he can go on for hours as well and I'm looking forward to seeing you guys next time so thank you for coming out