Techdirt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of all the laws we discuss here at Techdirt, probably none comes up as often or in relation to as many things as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It's not an exaggeration to describe it the way Professor Jeff Kosseff does in the title of his new book, The Twenty-Six Words That Created The Internet, offering a detailed history of this vital piece of law. This week, Jeff joins us on the podcast for an in-depth discussion about where Section 230 came from, and where it's going.

It's time for another special cross-post from a different podcast. Mike was recently a guest on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's So To Speak podcast, for an interview about Techdirt, free speech, content moderation, and a range of other topics. If you didn't catch it there, you can listen to the whole interview here in this week's episode.

Unfortunately, as you know by now, the EU Parliament approved the current (disastrous) version of the EU Copyright Directive, which is now on track to become the law of the land. It's not good, but things aren't quite over yet. For this week's episode, we've got returning guest MEP Julia Reda — who has been a key force opposing the terrible articles in the Directive — to talk about what happens now.

We're pretty optimistic about innovation here at Techdirt, but it isn't an automatic good thing all by itself: implementation and intention matters, and that means political entanglements and complicated questions about governance, and that calls for big, new ideas. This week, we're joined by Tamara Winter from the Center for Innovative Governance Research to discuss new experiments in government like charter cities and special autonomous zones. Also, learn more about: Shenzhen - https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2501/564470PUB0buil10Box349496B01PUBLIC1.pdf?sequen Val D'Europe - https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/08/03/disney-has-built-a-pseudo-paris-near-paris The original vision for Disney World -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLCHg9mUBag&t=920s

We've been covering surveillance and the intelligence community for a long time here at Techdirt, but if you had to limit yourself to just one source on the subject, even we'd probably recommend you choose Marcy Wheeler. Following the recent news that the NSA has apparently shut down its bulk records collection program — the first exposed by Edward Snowden — Marcy joins us on this week's episode to discuss the surveillance state and why it might abandon Section 215.

Sometimes people ask us why we write so much about the police on Techdirt. Though our coverage has grown somewhat beyond the boundaries of incidents directly involving technology, the reality is that the problems with law enforcement persistently intersect with the same technological and legal issues we've always discussed here. But this week the focus is squarely on cops and technology: Mike is joined by Matt Stroud, author of the new book Thin Blue Lie, as well as our own Tim Cushing, to talk about the failure of high-tech policing.

You've heard the uproar — conservatives are being censored on social media! But... are they? The short answer is no. The long answer is this week's podcast, with Lincoln Network policy head Zach Graves joining us for a discussion about the misinformation, hyperbole and general ridiculousness surrounding supposed social media bias.

Lots of people have tried to sum up the differences between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. — but it isn't so easy to hone in on. Nevertheless, it's clear that at least some aspects of the west-coast tech approach could benefit a government that all-too-often appears incapable of accomplishing anything much. This week, we're joined by former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Code For America founder Jennifer Pahlka to discuss what the Hill can learn from the Valley.

It's no secret that journalism outfits are struggling, and have been for some time. There are lots of competing ideas about why this is the case, and who to blame, but the ultimate question is the same: how do we fund good journalism going forward? This week, Mike is joined on the podcast by someone whose opinions on this question differ significantly from his own — Columbia Journalism professor and former online editor-in-chief of the Guardian Emily Bell — to talk about whether journalism can survive the free market, and what the alternatives are.

We can hardly believe it, but as of this moment we've released 200 episodes of the Techdirt podcast! For this milestone, we've brought the increasingly-rare original team of co-hosts back together for a bit of a meta-episode all about podcasts — specifically, the recent news that Spotify has acquired Gimlet Media for the impressive and, to many, surprising sum of $230-million. Mike joined by Dennis Yang and Hersh Reddy to discuss what Spotify might be up to, and just how big the podcasting business really is.

Jon Callas has been at the forefront of computer security issues for a long time, most recently as the head of Apple's team of internal hackers that try to break into the company's own products. But just a couple of months ago, he made a change, and left Apple to work on tech policy at the ACLU. This week, he joins us on the podcast to discuss the new job, computer security policy, and the latest phase of the crypto-wars.

One of the most common responses to various complaints about giant tech companies is that you can just not use their products and services. Many people have pointed out just how difficult that would really be, but Gizmodo's Kashmir Hill decided to try it for real: she cut Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple out of her life for a week each, followed by a week without any of them. Her report on that final, empty week is coming out soon, but in the mean time she joins us on the podcast to talk about what it's like to live without big tech.

As our readers surely know by now, 2019 is the first time in a long time that new works have actually entered the public domain in the US! The Internet Archive and Creative Commons hosted a celebration of this fact, and this week we're joined by IA's Lila Bailey and CC's Timothy Vollmer to talk about that event and the exciting possibilities of a re-opened public domain.

It's that time again! Mike spent the week before last at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, checking out all the latest technology that companies are most eager to show off, and now once again he's joined on the podcast by CES veteran Rob Pegoraro for the CES 2019 Post-Mortem.