 Okay, hi, I'm Scott Jones. I'm acting director of the electronic frontiers Georgia of electronic frontiers, Georgia. And tonight's presentation is Georgia legislative proposals to regulate social media. And our speaker is Georgia attorney Ron Daniels. And I'll go ahead and just a minute, I'll go ahead and ask Ron to introduce himself just a few preliminaries. If you could please turn off your microphone and your camera at this time. If you have questions, go ahead and feel free to put them in the chat area at any time. But then when we get into question and answer, when we get into the question and answer phase at the end of the talk. You can turn on your microphone and your speaker at that time and return on your microphone and your camera at that time if you'd like to ask a question, or you can continue to just put your question into the chat and we'll watch the chat area for questions. So at this time, let me go ahead as soon as is Ron pops back up. We'll go ahead and get started he's looks like he's reconnecting. By the way, yeah, I'd like to say that these bills we're talking specifically about SB 393 and SB 394. The I guess the the title of the talk implies that they, you know, it might imply that they only regulate that they only regulate social media but in fact they much they may be much broader than that and the extent to which they are brought up they may have some unintended consequences it's one of the things we'd like to talk about. At this time I see Ron is back on the stream. I want to go ahead and get you to introduce yourself and then we can get started. Yeah, I'm Ron Daniels I'm a consumer protection attorney here in Georgia. My credit is primarily all over the state but I'm located in little Georgia. I do a lot of random alphabet soup type of cases is what we call them, but the Fair Credit Reporting Act Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. A lot of Georgia Fair Business Practices Act and a lot of work related to consumers privacy and when when the rights get violated and other various acts. Let's go ahead. Do you want to start with SB 393. Yeah, it's 393 is titled and I think it's kind of interesting what they've created as the legislative title for Senate Bill 393 is known as the common carrier non discrimination act. And essentially common carrier in this sense is being made to use as a central as a communication medium. And what the act starts out by doing is noting essentially that social media has become so ubiquitous that it is the equivalent of telephone communication lines or something of that nature. It has to regulate social media providers and websites, what and what and how they can censor certain things and very much in particular when it gets to its definitional section. It takes a pretty clear aim at defining what censorship means, and it includes editing, altering, blocking, banning, deleting, removing the platforming, demonetizing, deboosting, regulating, restricting, inhibiting, denying equal access of visibility to suspending rights to pose, removing otherwise discriminating expression is how they define censorship in other parts of the definitional sections and throughout the post legislation they go forth and define things such as well not necessarily defining but include things such as shadow banning and essentially what this is is aiming at. It seems to be a reaction to the past couple of years, folks people getting banned on various social media platforms are feeling like they're, they're being demonetized and platforms such as YouTube or twitch or other platforms allow users to get money. But also just social media platforms are removing the ability of people to post and make comments. The really sort of interesting part about this is it takes a very broad view as a social media platform is. It does it just mean a website. It includes applications. So something like Facebook or Twitter. There's the both the actual website portion of it but as well as the applications that people have on the phones or their computers. And it takes this very broad defining brush to what it content considers to be a social media platform, which is probably correct. If you're trying to define what a social media platform is but it does exempt websites or applications that consist primarily of news sports entertainment cultural or artistic features or community information or content that is generated is not generated by users but is rather pre selected by the provider. And that is just sort of the weird exemption they put in there. Not really sure what exactly that is trying to get at but it sort of creates a little bit of ambiguity in terms of if information is being randomly generated or pre selected by the website. It can still be created by a user and then actually generated and spit up to other users by the website, whether or not it's included sort of, I guess, up to debate within the definitions. And so really the meat of it is the law attempts to make it where a common carrier such as a social media platform shall not censor discriminate against a user, a user's expression, or a user's ability to receive the expression of another user based on the viewpoint of the user or another person, the viewpoint represented in the user's expression or another person's expression or a user's geographic location in this state or any part of the state. The actual or perceived race, color, ethnicity, religion, religious beliefs, political beliefs, political affiliation, national origin, sex, gender orientation or disability of a user. And it applies regardless whether the viewpoint is an expression that is communicated on or through that platform or otherwise. So it doesn't just apply when, for instance, if somebody was saying something on Twitter and they did not get in trouble on Twitter and didn't get banned on Twitter for saying it, but they got banned on Facebook for what they were saying on Twitter. It applies to that just as much as it would as if you put it on the actual original website that created the issue. This is almost entirely, I think, a reaction to whether or not it's real or just perceived issues from the last couple of years. I don't think I need to go into too much depth explaining what all has been going on in terms of social media. We're obviously all pretty more savvy than the average person. So we have some idea of big tech, social media, the issues that they've been faced with Congress and other states trying to pass laws such as this. The interesting thing is that there's a almost a print of strike against terms of services. And the very second portion of this proposed legislation beyond the definition section actually says a contractual or other waiver or purported waiver of the protections provided by this chapter is void as unlawful and against public policy. And so if you had a website that said, well, we can ban anybody for any reason that we said choose at any point in time based on the content they are creating and putting on our website. This would ostensibly ask to say, no, you can't do that. And that's a really interesting concept. And I said it's an interesting concept because, you know, we're talking about private entities, we're not talking about a government entity, but it's being treated because of the prevalence of social media. It is being treated as a public utility. That that's the direct analog to it, just like a power line or a telephone line or airwaves, anything of that nature is being treated as a public utility and so the law is, or what the law is trying to do is essentially prevent these private businesses and private entities from censoring what new content they wish to censor. That creates somewhat of an issue, particularly because, you know, as a private entity is a private business, because most of these are for profit businesses. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, they should have some say set over what sort of content they wish to allow to have on their website. And perhaps the intent of this legislation is to avoid what we would call in other aspects of the law is arbitrary and capricious sort of standard where you just say, oh, well, we're going to take some sort of enforcement action against this one user and not a private entity. It's not about this other user, even though they're basically doing the same thing. You know, whatever the intent is, I think it creates a problem because you're ultimately telling private entity what sort of content they can allow on their website. The part that really troubles me as a consumer protection attorney more so than anything else. And when I talk about things like this, I always like to give the disclaimer. I'm not trying to take necessarily a pro or against stance on any sort of legislation. I'm just trying to explain what the pieces of it that are there are trying to do. And so, you know, I have my personal feelings, but I'm not trying to display those and trying to swing by his opinion. I'm just trying to explain what each section does. But the part that troubles me the most is consumer protection attorney that I see in this in the functional level is that there's a provision here that says it shall not be construed to subject a common carrier to damage. There are other legal remedies to the extent common carrier is protected from such remedies under federal law or to the extent that they are authorized to act this way under federal law and to the extent that they can limit expression that unlawfully harasses individuals or unlawfully incites violence or expression that is obscene, lewd, lavacious, filthy, excessively violent or harassing. That is such a, I mean, you can literally find any peg you want and put in these holes. And that's just, in effect, this the statute, if it passed as it is written, these loopholes are big enough to drive a Mack truck through just because there's nothing in it that says you can't define any sort of content that's put up there as harassing or lewd or obscene, you know, what is obscene? Is it the standard of which we say, you know, when something is pornography or is it the standard of which we say, well, it's, they use a lot of colorful metaphors and so it's obscene language. You know, this is just way open to interpretation. And ultimately, I think it probably makes it where this is almost unenforceable as it is written. The other part that kind of gets to, I guess, a interesting facet of it is it requires common care or such, you know, we'll say Facebook or Meta to publish on its website a biannual transparency report for a six month period preceding the publishing report that goes through essentially user complaints and provides that information to users so that users can say, well, they, you know, they resolve complaints like this or they, they are infringing upon people's rights because they don't resolve these complaints properly. And here's where we get to essentially the enforcement mechanism, which is, if you're following along in the actual PDF, it's page eight and starts around line 183. It provides that a user of a website can bring a civil action either in a representative capacity or as a class representative. They can enforce this act so basically unbanned themselves for lack of better terminology, and they can recover injunctive relief, declaratory relief, and reasonable court costs and attorney's fees. And it also makes, from my perspective, a very interesting provision that it's a violation of this act also a violation of Georgia Fair Business Practices Act. And that to me is a big signal that whoever is responsible for writing this either is, I don't know that they're not cognizant of what the Georgia Fair Business Practices Act says, or that it's just sort of a disconnect and somebody to think through this a little bit better, but that the interesting portion of that from somebody who uses the Georgia Fair Business Practices Act probably more frequently than 98% of other lawyers in the state of Georgia. The Fair Business Practices Act requires actual damages in which the statute basically can have, in theory, none, because it doesn't provide for you to have damages bringing a civil claim underneath it in the first place. And the Georgia Fair Business Practices Act also prohibits you from acting as a class representative. You can only bring an individual claim. So it's interesting that they include that a violation of this is also a violation Fair Business Practices Act because it actually, if you compare the two of them, they don't work together, they contradict each other. So the things Scott and I were mentioning before we actually went live with this tonight is 393 seems to be the one that is moving through the Senate more than 394, which we'll talk about in a minute. I do not know, you know, the chances of this being passed or not. Best I could tell there's no analog in the house. We're not yet to crossover day for the Georgia legislature. So whether this makes it or not by the end of the year. I really do not have an answer for you in that regard, but from a perspective of somebody who would have to deal with this on a legal perspective, there, there's issues with it just from an enforcement perspective. There probably issues in the grand scheme of things to the extent that it's Contradicts other states. There's probably a business issue there. And that's something I'll talk about in a minute when we're talking about 394 that obviously there's an interest in having not necessarily a uniform. Laws across the entire country, but certainly it makes it difficult for larger technology companies. If you have 50 states with 50 different rules on the same thing and they start contradicting each other. That certainly creates problem. But it is, you know, I started out with reading the title of it and I keep going back to it sort of has one of those innocuous feel good kind of tiles of the common carrier non discrimination act and you hear that and think, well, that can't be too bad. You know, it doesn't sound like a terrible thing. And then you start reading it and you start having lots of questions about it. I'm going to go to 394, which is the much longer proposed legislation one. Here's to be kind of stalled out. And this is almost, it's not verbatim, but it is a copy in many respects of these California consumer privacy act. If you happen to have heard me talk about that before, I think what I said when right after that past mile was asked to talk about the consumer privacy act California is that eventually you were going to see basically every state adopt something similar. And that it would, you wouldn't really see anything that would deviate too much in the sense that it contradicts the California consumer privacy act. And the reason for that is quite simple. There's a large number of technology companies in California. There's a large number of internet companies in California, and there's 40 million people. And we all somewhat can appreciate that these businesses don't want to have 50 very different sets of rules for every different state that they are in. And so when you have a state that's large like that with a large number of people and there's a large number of companies and they get out ahead of everybody with the prototype. One of these privacy protection acts that tends to set the stage for what everybody else will do. You'll see other states do things that are similar. You see states do things that are a little bit weaker or more lax and you will see states do things that have more stringent requirements or more more enforcement heavy type of provisions, but you won't see anybody do something that really directly contradicts because it would create an impossible business environment, essentially. And so I think the position of this is actually some pretty good legislation. From an enforcement perspective and from how it's written, it has the benefit, as I said, of not necessarily being verbatim copy of the California Consumer Privacy Act, but there are provisions in it that are almost identical. And there are some significant differences, but essentially what it is working to achieve is to protect your data and to make a system in which you can have a say in how businesses are collecting your data and what they're doing with it ultimately. And the actual legislative findings, I think, in this one are a little bit more interesting than in the other one we just talked about. And they call this one the Georgia Computer Data Privacy Act, which is a pretty accurate description, but it notes that individuals within the state have a right to prohibit retention use or disclosure of their own personal data. And that's basically the upshot of this whole thing is that we're working on creating a system in which you have a say so in how businesses collect and use information about you, whether they get it from your phone or from your browser or however they get it. And you probably noticed in the last couple of years that most websites are now getting to where you have a pop-up, you have to say yes or no. And when you're purchasing things from online vendors, you're given these options about what can happen with your data. So most of these companies in reaction to the California Consumer Privacy Act are already doing a lot of these things. Perhaps a little bit better than California in terms of defining things. We have a wider description when you drill down on page three from lines 48 to 57. The actual, what we define in terms of biometric information is a more tightly defined but wider array of types of information, types of data than what you see in the California Consumer Privacy Act. The real sort of difference between the two in terms of definition comes when you get to the issues about what publicly available information is. It's very close to what's in the California Consumer Privacy Act, but there is some exemptions to it that are a little bit different. Perhaps most notably though is that it is very clear in that it is tied to information no matter how it is collected. And there's been some other acts of, you know, that actually take the position of trying to limit what scope of that is. But this is a very wide definition. It's not verbatim from the California Consumer Privacy Act, but it kind of stands on it. And I see we have a statement in chat and I'll just kind of read it out. But David says that he's noticed that when he's hopping out certain internet marketing tracking, they sometimes ask you for resident California. And that's absolutely in response to that California Consumer Privacy Act. Some of these companies are more sophisticated in terms of how they're aggregating the data and what they're doing is basically if a state doesn't have some sort of established policy, and they feel like they can still, within the confines of the California Consumer Privacy Act, still use data from folks from other states. Some of them are obviously not a programmer. I'm a lawyer. I have no business programming. The last time I programmed anything, it was a website using PHP back in 2004. And so I've not seen the back end of any of these things, but I do understand the legal aspect of having to comply with the laws. But from what I understand, some of these companies are trying to target information and essentially use what they can from other states and users from other states while they still can. Because basically the Wild Ball West outside of a few, I think we're up to five or six states that have some sort of analog to the California Consumer Privacy Act. The part that is sort of interesting when you get to how they define who this applies to. That's exactly right. You said that a little bit more eloquently than I did, but I was trying to be a little bit more politically correct. But when they define what businesses this applies to, it's really sort of interesting to me to compare to the California Consumer Privacy Act because it includes businesses that do business in this state. Well, what does it mean to do business in this state? Does it mean you have to have a physical brick and mortar here? Does it mean you have bad commercial assets here? Or does it just mean that you engage in some level of commerce in Georgia? I think if I'm reading this the way that I think is the only way you can read it, it could apply essentially to anybody who does any sort of business, anybody in the state of Georgia. But it is a conjunctive definition, so there's some subparts. One subpart is they collect consumers' personal information or has personal information collected on the business's behalf. But obviously we wouldn't be talking about the business if they didn't do that because they're not collecting data, they're not collecting data. A loan or in conjunction with others determines the purpose for a means of processing consumers' personal information. Again, if we weren't talking about having consumers' data and using consumer data, then we wouldn't be talking about it at all. Has annual gross revenue an amount that exceeds 50 million? This is a number that actually is higher than what's in the California Consumer Privacy Act. I believe the limit there, if I remember rightly, is 25 million. Here it's 50 million. A loan or in combination with others annually buys, sells or receives or shares to commercial purpose. The personal information of 100,000 or more consumers, households or devices, and drives 50% or more of the business annual revenue from selling consumers' personal information. So, as wide open as this is in terms of enforcement, it does kind of limit this to essentially big data collection companies. You have to have 100,000 more consumers' data before we can talk to them. You have to have 50 million dollars of revenue. So, the number of companies it applies to, you know, we're not talking about some small outfit in Norcross, Georgia that may have 5,000 people's information. It does nothing for a consumer whose information is with somebody like that. Whereas, I think the California Consumer Privacy Act, while it does have a floor, I think the floor is a little bit easier to obtain in California. And again, I think that's probably because, you know, they have so many tech companies. They have so much going on. And we have a discussion right now with John. Yeah, it is total. So, it is not just in the state of Georgia, it's 50 million dollars in gross revenue. It can be from the 45 million dollars from Canada and 5 million dollars from Arizona and one dollar from Georgia, and it still meets that definition. The other thing that really kind of sets us apart from the California Consumer Privacy Act is we have one of these causes that we have a number of statutes in Georgia that says it's to be liberally construed to affect its purposes and to harmonize to the extent possible other laws of the state relating to privacy or protection of personal information. And when there's a contradiction, it wants there to be the greatest privacy or protection to consumers available. So, if two statutes disagree with each other, the ultimate purpose is to make sure we're protecting consumers. The California Consumer Privacy Act really, it's clear that's what the intent is in it. They perhaps do a little bit better job of harmonizing their statutes in the passing of the act and repealing conflicting ones. This is not really repealing conflicting ones is essentially just bootstrapping them in, leaving them there and just saying whichever one provides the greatest protection is the one that would survive. It does allow the Georgia Technology Authority to adopt rules and regulations necessary to implement and administer and enforce this article. And that is an interesting take because that's a, you know, that's another layer of some level of government issuing rules and promulgating it's the legislature basically deferring to them to have them to create rules that these companies will help to only have to buy by that or in addition to what is actually in this proposed legislation. The basics of it when you get down to what it does in terms of function, you have a right to have information deleted or your data deleted by businesses. You have a right to know what sort of information is being collected and you have a right to command the opt out of being subject to your information being sold. And so it functions very much like the California Consumer Privacy Act because both of these are very lengthy laws, but when you get down to it, that's what the function of both of them are to do is to provide a mechanism to opt out, to provide a mechanism for you to know what data is a business has and may have sold about you and to empower you and give you the right to demand that they delete that information. The interesting part about the Georgia proposed legislation that is somewhat more consumer friendly in California is that it allows for governmental enforcement through the Attorney General's office, but it also allows for the bringing the private rights of action. And the, the unique part about that is it sets a statutory damage, a statutory damages and you don't actually have to suffer actual damages you don't have to have your, your I did any compromise or somebody find something out about you that you don't want them finding out you don't have to find your, your password or information on some other website, you don't have to have some monetary harm to bring the claim to forces you instead can get up to $2,500 for each violation that a business commits. If it's just a normal violation, if you can prove that it is intentional, you get statutory damages of up to $2,500 per violation with no cap on the number of violations there can be so theoretically, you could have $100,000 for the statutory damages if a business was that flagrant. Brian has asked a question, isn't it true that commerce that crosses state lines falls under federal regulation? So, so that's a question of really about dual sovereignty. If there is a federal law at some point in time that does the same thing is going to be the one that that everything has to bow down to and it's what would control it. But there isn't a federal law yet that covers all of this. And so that's how the consumer California consumer privacy actors has gotten into place. And kind of moved along is because there wasn't a federal law so basically the states are stepping into where there's already a boy legally. Yes, if there is a federal law that contradicts part of this, or does the same thing get absolutely is going to essentially invalidate this and the other states efforts to to regulate this type of data collection and establish those rights. And your next question is a business that isn't registered with the Georgia Secretary of State and they expect to comply with the state's regulations where they're not registered. And that's actually right. It's the the focus of these these statutes or this proposalization and what they've done in California and a couple other states is more so with the the the users rather than where the business is. They have these definitions that say when you are when you're not doing business somewhere, but the ultimate sort of break come to say, well, it's your subject to Georgia's law is, are you dealing in fact with Georgia users or California users. That's very good question. And I think I previously gave up. We talked about California several years ago. Yeah, I sort of took the jaded position that I didn't think Congress was going to get to the point where they would pass a law to take place and to fill that void and they have not done it yet. It certainly is conceivable that that'd be something they get on an agenda someday and actually do, but I don't I don't know that I would hold my breath. But the private right of action enforcement mechanism the statute would have is sort of a very robust one. It also allows for injective relief actually forcing businesses to comply with the statute. And I know in particular that the EFF thinks that that sort of private right of action is a good enforcement mechanism. I personally like it because this is the type of statute that I use regularly. It's what we call a fee shifting statute. It empowers people to act essentially as prime attorneys general and it allows for you to recover your attorney's fees and costs if you prevail. And so, you know, that's probably the best way to have these types of statues enforced. Just because, as sad as it is, states don't have necessarily the resources to run down these things all the time and to enforce all these statutes. Sometimes when the violation of the statute itself is not something that's widespread or, you know, it's similar. Anytime your data is involved, I hesitate to use the word minor. But in the grand scheme of things, if you have something that's compromising people's data that's 30 million people or 3 million people or 300,000 people versus three people, certainly states going to be more interested in trying to enforce that. But having private right of action sort of makes a level playing field and gets around that. But it does allow the state of Georgia to enforce it and to recover its cost as well. We have another question about signing agreements that state jurisdiction, squarely in business where the state. Yeah, I don't know whether or not those types of agreements would invalidate this or not. It's sort of, you really sort of can't contract out of walls that you have to comply with. You can when it's a purely business type of thing and it's a civil law, but when you're setting consumer privacy and you're talking about things, it's not necessarily a criminal statute where there's some sort of criminal penalty, but when they set for a basic memo requirement, I don't think a user can ultimately at the end of the day contract away rights that are conferred by the statute. They might be able to contract away their ability to recover damages, but I don't think you can contract away the ability for them to bring a claim under this necessarily. But I think probably more to your, your point is that I do think you probably could limit to some degree the amount of damages somebody could recover or force them into a non judicial form such as arbitration or mediation or you force them to sue you in another state. Those are all certainly possible things, but I don't think you can actually contract away with the way this is written, the ability to bring a client. You can limit it, you can sort of force it to be brought where you want it to be brought, but it doesn't really allow for is it ultimately be that contract will be void as against public policy. And you get a whole bunch of lawyers involved and we all have fun list type of issues. That's kind of the basics of both of these statutes or these proposed statutes. I know I mentioned previously that 394 is kind of at a standstill. It's not moving along from the best I can tell on the Senate website. I don't know if anybody else has looked into it and kind of figured out exactly where it is. It is sort of interesting that the when you compare the two and compare who's sponsoring both 393 and 394. They have significant overlap of the senators who are sponsoring it. And David's asking a question about Florida passing something similar to 393 and do what's going on with that. I actually do not know. I would suspect if something similar to this was passed that there would be some sort of constitutional challenge to it. And yeah, they were probably enjoying it just on the basis of less test the constitutional merits of it before it's enacted. Courts typically do do that unless it is some sort of clear situation where you you know you're never going to stop the thing. And so I don't know the answer to that, but it's a very good question. And it'd be interesting to see if something along those lines doesn't affect how the Georgia Senate from Georgia House or Georgia governor reacts to something like 393 or perhaps changes if it gets joined by some federal judge. Scott, I know you were going to do a question and answer. I don't know if you want to continue doing it in the chat or if you wanted to do another mechanism. Aaron asked 394, should it be something we're encouraging or state centered as a support? Aaron, I kind of try to be neutral about whether or not people should support these or not. I try to just describe the way they function. I think, if I understand correctly, Scott, that EFF has somewhat of a position on it, but I'm not certain about that and I'm not going to speak on behalf of y'all. Well, first of all, I want to say that EFF and Electronic Frontiers Georgia are separate entities that were separate organizations and we're connected through the Electronic Frontier Alliance. But as far as EFF, the bigger organization, they did review 394 and they gave it mostly pretty high marks. I think after reviewing it myself, one of the concerns I have is that actually is pretty good in a sense of having real enforcement. It is probably much better than the Virginia bill in that sense, the Virginia law. It's got the private right of action and also the Attorney General can come in on an action regarding the privacy. I think one of the concerns I have is that the Attorney General's offices in many states have become a lot more politicized than they used to be. And so I think it opens the door for selective enforcement for maybe opening cases against certain businesses and not against others. And my other concern about 394 especially is maybe in terms of scope. I wonder if it pulls in businesses that it didn't intend to pull in like AT&T, Home Depot and things like that. If that's true, then you could see other businesses weigh in against it that haven't considered it because it looks like on its face it's a big tech bill, but it might be much bigger than that. And if you consider the businesses in Georgia that have, that are more than $50 million businesses, there's quite a few of those that aren't big tech companies. So you ought to have to go back and check, but I wonder where the dividing line is on that. And John asked a question about whether or not other state, well not necessarily state actors, but other actors, other agencies could enforce 394. And the quick answer to that is no. The way the Georgia constitution set up, there's no mechanism for a state agency to act outside of the Attorney General's office. With the exception of if the governor directs the Attorney General's office to do something and the Attorney General's office refuses because it is still a constitutional office, but it's an inferior constitutional office. The governor can then appoint a special assistant attorney general or in some context hire a district attorney who is another constitutional officer in the state of Georgia to act as a special assistant attorney general to enforce it. But there's really no mechanism for a local or state agency to enforce 394. And there's nothing in it that allows for a collective action like the 393 did. So you're basically limited to private rights of action by individuals or by enforcement of the Attorney General's office. And David asked if there was any specific language you might want to discuss being amended. I will defer to Scott on that. I don't know of anything in it that from a perspective of being passed legally, I don't know of anything that just strikes me as being problematic that we call somewhat from a legal perspective to say, you know, hey, you've got to pump the brakes and fix this. There certainly might be ways to limit things so you don't have unintended consequences. You know, I've always heard because I was a child and basically every six class that making laws is like making sausage and sometimes you get chunks of fat in there you don't intend to have. And there's always unintended consequences of legislation. But I don't know of anything that is certainly problematic from a legal perspective that would need to be changed to get people to support it. And yeah, I want to say that our question and answer session is open. So if you want to jump in with a microphone or the camera, feel free to do so at this time. But in terms of having, you know, I haven't had enough, really haven't had enough time this year to do as much work on some of the bills other than identifying the bills. I guess we have asked EFF for some help but we haven't done as much analysis and I haven't done as much analysis as I'd like to for this year. So I can't pin down anything specifically yet, but you know, I'd love to be working on that more. I think we'll have some opportunity as this goes over to the House side, particularly for 393 because 394 doesn't seem to be moving yet at this time. It's got until crossover day, which is roughly around the 15th. I'm not exactly sure when, but it's around that time to, you know, if it doesn't if it doesn't pass by that time. The bills in Georgia live for two years so it could come back next year, but I think the political dynamic will be a lot different next year than it is this year. So I see Bridget is on now so if you've got a question go ahead with it. Yes, thank you. First of all, thanks for the presentation, Ron. I wanted to know what event encouraged the legislation on 393 to be introduced. And I was wondering if legislation like that could be used to fight the censorship that's going on on various websites such as YouTube, Facebook, things like that. That's my first question. And then my second question is related to the earn it bill, which was first introduced March 12 of 2020. The same day everyone went out and bought all the toilet paper. Everyone was focused on toilet paper. They first introduced that bill, which was masqueraded as a child protection law, but it actually took away our encryption, which took away our privacy online. So I'm just wondering how this bill could circumvent that law or if it's related. And to your first question, it would be conjecture completely on my part to try and figure to tell you what I thought this was a reaction to. I know somebody had noted in the chat box a few minutes ago that there was one, two, three, four, five other states that have attempted to pass something similar to 393. I think it's a reaction to just what's been going on at a very high level in terms of what we've seen social media companies do in the past, say, five years. I mean, I've been seeing people get demonetized on YouTube. Usually about this time of night is when I'm watching YouTube videos, randomly on my iPad and going down rabbit holes. And you'll see people talking about being demonetized, whether it's wrestling, YouTube's a watcher or anything else for any variety of reasons. And says, I think it's just a reaction to what's been going on. I think certainly the banning of certain people in politics probably has something to do with it from various websites. I think it also has something to do with just the fact that more and more people are becoming, I don't want to say self-aware, but more aware of how social media works and it's becoming more and more ubiquitous. There are people that I didn't think when I was in high school would ever be using a computer, have Facebook on their phone in my hometown. So I think it's combination of things. I don't know that I could point to a single thing that was the cause of it or not. Because ultimately I didn't write this and I didn't offer it and I'm not asking any of these people, even though I know a few of them, who are the senators that are sponsoring it. So with respect to the earnings, I don't know how much it interplays with that or not. I didn't think about that when I was looking at it. But that is certainly an interesting thought and I don't know off the top of my head how it would interact with that. Yeah, I want to jump in on Ernett. Ernett has come back to life. It was two years ago and now it's come back to life. I'm hoping to do that as the next topic, but I'm looking for a speaker now. So we're mostly focused on the state law tonight and Ernett is federal. But it's a fair question to ask what the interplay is between the two and what the interconnection would be between the two. Yeah, my last point, they do seem to be opposing each other. And so that's why I was just wondering what correlation you see or how one could be enforced versus the other. And with the first point I was making, I really was asking that question about what event inspired that legislation just because I got the impression from it that the same thing that I've been experiencing that I've get censored on things from not speaking about COVID and 5G in the same video on YouTube. Or there's been doctors videos where they were explaining things about COVID or things about how we should respond to it that we didn't need a vaccine and those videos were all taken down. And when you follow the money and follow everything and you figure out that it's all funded by Bill Gates and a lot of his friends, then you're like, okay, we need something to fight that law. And then even on Facebook, we have things like conversations like, okay, I support Trump or, you know, it's like, if I say certain things that where I'm disagreeing with someone else, they're like literally censoring people and making people get off of social media for a certain amount of time just because of their opinions on things and nobody's threatening anyone. No one's making lewd or, you know, lewd comments or things like that. So we really do need protection with things like that. I don't know why the bill was first introduced, but speaking from my end of things, something needs to change on that end. And that sort of will make sense. I like to approach particularly technology related legislation from the perspective that the law is still trying to catch up with technology and it's never going to catch up completely. But we're not that far removed from, who was it was the senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, that said the internet was a series of tubes. And he did not mean it in the way that it actually sort of was a series of tubes. He meant it because he didn't understand it. And the law is very similar. I'll tell you, I get on setbacks a lot with the lawyers about how we've got to adapt to the times and adapt to technology and we're getting better. But as a profession, unfortunately my profession feeds the digital branch because one of the requirements is that you have been a practicing attorney to be a judge. We're just not there in terms of a robust understanding how works. You have some folks who have it. IP litigators probably ahead of me. You've got folks who have programming documents far ahead of me. And then you've got some poor lawyers in little Georgia that just know how to use a computer pretty well. And we look like we really know what's going on. So I think a large part of it has to do that with people are just getting to the point where they use social media so much that it's catching up and it's catching up to the law faster than the law can react to it. And the use is catching up faster in the law correct. So yeah, I think it's fair point to bring up. I want to make a yeah, I wanted to reinforce the point about social media and the internet in general that social media is not a town square. In the sense of being a public park. And it's also not not a common carrier despite the claims to the contrary in the act because that's a case where you have a private company that's given a particular service area in exchange for taking any and every legal comer that that that's there. I mean the best analogy for social media is that it's more like a shopping mall. If you go to a shopping mall you know it's open to the public during certain hours under certain conditions but you know the moment that you set foot on in a shopping mall it's private property. And if the security guard on private private business doesn't like you they can discriminate against you they can throw you out for the worst reasons and I'm not saying that there's no discrimination. I'm not saying it doesn't have a political slant or anything like that but it's private property and even stronger than if you look at the values of our society even more strongly than the first amendment we value private property and that's something that came down from common law is very very powerful in in our body of law. And so before we even get to a first amendment question we really have to think about this is private property. Now if the government owned the owned the social media company lock stock and barrel I think it'd be a different question and a very different discussion that we're having but it's not just a social media company that's privately owned pretty much the entire Internet is privately owned. And this means that even if you have a social media company with a wide open very wide open policy that's just wide open to everything. It's possible that the backbone provider which is a private company will decide not to route those packets and there's no first amendment right to have your packets being routed by a private company. And so if they consider your if they consider the content from the social media is so incredibly toxic that they would lose business, which is a lot of what's happening these days with the signaling that's going on. They might decide to not route your packets and not not send the packets from that particular company to the rest of the users so we decided on a model. That's of Internet ownership that's completely privatized is very different than other countries, including democracies, and we just don't have any portion of it virtually no portion of it. Once I even I think once upon a time we did have NSF net, but aside from that no portion of it has ever been owned by the government. And so it's all been private property and private property rights are very strong and you have to think about it in those terms. So I noticed that attached to this hand raised. Did you want to turn on your microphone or turn on your speaker and say a few words. I'm not hearing you yet. I'm seeing you. Okay. There you go. Okay, go ahead. New headset just arrived today. One of the things I noticed is with a lot of these bills, it seems to be written by people. Let's be honest, not the smartest brains and technology. They are the sort of people we've gone 20 years ago midnight flashes and the power goes off. The vcrs be flashing midnight for months and months and months. And now they're trying to write all these tech bills as a hearing. I think Monday were a lot of the same things were brought up in a US House subcommittee. And that's the big problem is they seem to just think they can lie about it, push it through and have somebody else know it harder to deal with the consequences of their ignorance. And that's where I get a lot of these bills are. They seem to think that they don't understand what they're doing and they seem to cherish that ignorance. And that is a huge problem with all these bills that they think that the comments, the questions, they're the only ones that matter in the fact that they are some kind of fancy lawyer or something. My congressman down here, I'm down towards the Columbus area. And he's the deputy whip for the GOP party, the district just below. Taylor Green, Drew Ferguson, and he's a. He loves to prattle on about his ignorance of technology. He was a dentist and every time he pushes through technology, it's really, really bad. My old congressman, Austin Scott over in Macon used to be an insurance salesman. His son, his 13 year old son used to do all his tech stuff for him. And that's, that's the sort of ignorance we're dealing with when it comes to these tech bills that people just don't get it. They don't seem to want to get it. And they think that what they want can just be magically fixed by having some other smart people just nerd her to be harder, because they told them to. And that seems to be endemic with all these kinds of bills. Not really a question, but yeah, I mean, as a comment, I think maybe the problem is it's getting away from a market driven approach. We've had a long history with internet technology of solutions looking for problems. But this this kind of gets away with that that the, you know, the phrase that that you mentioned is nerd harder that basically the legislator that doesn't understand the technology at all can go out and pass a law that says, well, you've got to build a solution that does this with with no idea of the feasibility of doing that solution or the difficulty of doing that. And in some cases, it's just going to be infeasible. And I don't know, you know, when you get into court and the rubber meets the road, I just don't know how that's going to work out. And kind of to that point, I think that's going to be a problem forever, so long as we've got the system that we've got. And I say that, and not trying to be flipping about it. I mean, it's a very, very sale point. But the ultimate problem is we don't have a bunch of experts writing these laws and acting as our legislators. We have people that, particularly the Georgia legislature, they're all they all have day jobs for lack of better descriptor that they're not legislators full time. And while congressmen and congresswomen are full-time politicians and full-time congresswomen and congressmen, they still, you know, you're getting a swap of people. You're not getting this many doctors and this many lawyers and this many astrophysicists and this many bankers. You're getting people from all sorts of walks of life who have very different backgrounds and very different life experiences that really don't foresee us substantially changing the system such that we ever get away from that. And so I think that's just always going to be a problem, which is sort of why having talks like this are really good is so that people can be aware and so they can interact with their representatives. But, you know, I do tend to agree that I think technology kind of falls to the wayside, at least from a legislative perspective, because, you know, I had a physical science professor when I was an undergrad that would explain electricity tongue-in-cheek as the magical gnomes and the sockets. You know, we don't think about how the electricity gets to our VCR. We just know that it comes out of that socket. And, you know, a lot of people don't think about the process that it necessarily has to undergo to get from a power plant to a power line to a transformer to down the road to your house and then get inverted or converted or whatever happens before it gets to your device. And what each capacitor does. And so, you know, everything is complex. There's nothing in this life that is simple. And I don't know the way to solve that other than just trying to be proactive and engage. But it's a very good point. You know, I said earlier and I think somebody made the comment earlier that, you know, there's a lot of contradictory stuff in 393 that just sort of makes it where it really doesn't achieve anything when you start looking at the loopholes, at least. From my perspective as a lawyer, if I had to defend a company that was being sued for it, I could say, well, you know, this is something that they expressly can do because we define that as obscene and you didn't define what obscenity is. And so, you know, thanks for coming, but that's all folks. We're done. It feels almost like a feel-good type of legislation in some respects or just a reactionary legislation that, you know, if you took it completely at, you know, oh, well, we don't think common carriers should discriminate against people's ideas. We're saying that out loud is very, you know, non-offensive. It seems like you could say, oh, well, that seems like a good idea. But when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, it just, you know, your nuts and bolts aren't connected. Yeah, because that ends up becoming compelled association into the First Amendment. Yeah. And compelling, those don't know, compelled association means that you're basically forcing them to carry your speech, therefore not letting them deny their right of free speech to be associated with you or not to be associated with you. Okay. I see Chuck has his hand raised. Did you want to jump in, Chuck? Yeah, I just wanted to say from what we've heard so far, it sounds like that 394 has some good pieces and we are liking that. And we may actually even want to let our senators know that even though we're not seeing movement on it right now, that we'd like to see movement on it and what's got it stalled. So that might be one point to make, that that might be something some of us would want to do. But I think what's even more important is the 393, it seems like there's a lot of agreement that there's problems with it. And so I'm curious what the group here thinks in terms of is it worth asking for something to be changed, amended to reworked, or are we looking to do a tactic where we get it stalled out and it never gets anywhere because it's just terrible. Personally, I would say the latter, because I don't really see enough of it that looks like it's worth doing anything with, and I don't think that they're very, I don't think that they're, I don't think they know what they're doing. I think that there actually is an intent and if some of us could walk around on the hallways down there in one of the legislative buildings, we might actually hear what someone really thought because they would say they wanted to do this and it would be completely out of the box compared to what they've come up with. But that's, I've seen that personally before, so I know that's what they do. But I don't really know what that is and it sounds like that we need to get rid of 393 and make sure that it doesn't go through. What does anybody else think about that? Well, I mean, I'll say that, you know, I think that I need to sit down and work on a position, I guess position, you know, a position paper on all the bills we're tracking and include 393 in that. And I guess at this point, we've got a bunch of people here. I need to ask it, would anybody like to help work on that? There's this not the only other, that's not the only bill that we're looking at. These are not the only two bills that we're looking at. I did narrow the focus, but I mean, we've got a school filtering bill for internet filtering that we need to look at. We've got another couple of other bills. And this is really this year is, I've been tracking technology legislation for many years in Georgia. And this year it has some of the greatest number of technology related bills that I think I've ever seen. I think part of it is the political dynamic of this year, but also part of it is just increasing awareness of technology in general. And I think we're going to see more and more of them. So it's getting harder and harder for me to sit down and do all this. So I think maybe one of the questions I have tonight is would anybody like to join in on the effort if we do, you know, if we sit down maybe over the weekend, maybe on an evening and work on this together. And yeah, you can, I see Bridget is responding. So I'll go ahead and include you on that, but you can put your information on the chat if you'd like to work on this. David, okay. Yeah, I would love to put together a standing committee for legislative review. I would call it LRC or legislative review committee is something I'd love to be able to do every year, but I haven't been able to get that going yet. But I'd love to do that as a standing committee every year, but we can certainly pull something together at Hawk in work on it. And I see David and Bridget have responded. Are there any other questions tonight? Okay, and then Kit Kat also any other questions tonight about 393 or 394. Okay, I'm going to take a minute here and let's see, I wanted to I didn't have this ready to go so I need to look it up in my browser, but I think it's 1217. So we have 1217. Also, this is very different than everything else that we've done tonight. So I'm, I'm kind of straying off the path here, but this is another one that we're looking at. And I wanted to bring it up. And it's something that we should really comment on. Let me see if I can get to it. And if I share this, this is a student technology protection act. And it does several things, but one of the things it does is it is it mandates. It mandates filtering. In the schools, and that's already done at the federal level by the by SIPA, the Child Internet Protection Act, and SIPA has been reviewed by the Supreme Court and has been found to be constitutional. So there's no constitutional question against filtering of Internet of, you know, against filtering of Internet in schools. I think that maybe the issue here is that this is a bill that require the purchase of new filtering software by local school districts and there's no funding being provided. And so one of the biggest issues I found is with the funding. Now there's always a concern about filtering software and whether it will filter in a way that that's kind of fair and above the board, above board and will it filter, you know, will it make certain marginalized communities feel left out or feel ashamed or something like that at a time when, you know, in the schools at a time when you have a lot of young people that are starting to explore their identity and that is a potential problem. One thing I will say that's good about 1217 is that it does encourage not just allow but encourage parental involvement. So it's important if this does pass, and I don't think it's a good idea for it to pass, but if it does pass, I would say that it's very important that parents of all political persuasions engage their local school boards exactly as described in the bill. But this is another thing that we're looking at I want to pull together a list of other things that we could look at, and we'll find a time that we can get together, maybe a couple of us in and talk about these. Did you have, I guess, let me go ahead and turn this off, but Are there any remaining questions about 393 or 394? And also I wanted to ask Ron, do you have any closing comments? I don't really have any too many closing comments other than, you know, I think from a practicing attorney standpoint with all due respect to everybody else's comments. 393 for me is the more difficult one to try and deal with from a practice perspective. 394 is, I think, ultimately better written in from a functional level and having to deal with it as practicing attorney makes more sense. I'm not here to tell you whether something's a good law, bad law or not. I'm just trying to look at it from the legal perspective of how it works and how it functions. And so, you know, I think there's a lot of good comments about this. And I know most of our actual discussion kind of back and forth has been 393, but I'm a big fan of things that allow for private rights action. And not just because I have a business, you know, a business interest in private rights of action. I think from just a perspective of enforcement mechanisms that private rights of action are one of the greatest tools there are to and particularly when you have a statute that authorizes what we call fish shifting and allows for the playing field to get leveled. I think that is just probably the government at its finest when you can just go to the courts and get redress for violations statutes. I appreciated all the thoughts and all the questions and Scott, you having me here and hope I've had something useful to say that people can at least can say they wanted something about one of these or both of these. Yeah, I really want to thank you for for coming out. It's not just not just the fact that you're a Georgia attorney but also it crosses over into your practice area. And so I think this is it's really good to have your perspective and I really want to thank you for making the time this evening and coming out and talking to us. I think we'll have a lot of a lot of comments going on and I think the conversation should continue, but I need to go ahead and start wrapping up the recording the official part we will hang out here kind of unofficially I actually have to go do some work related stuff at 9 o'clock but between now and 9pm. We can hang out on the channel and kind of chat casually. But again as far as the stream and recording I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up and say one more hearty thank you for coming out and you know I hope we will. We can continue this conversation and you know I hope to see you again at track on this year. That would be a very good thing. And thank you to the audience to for the for the comments and questions in your engagement tonight.