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A couple of weeks ago, Mike was in Washington, DC for the State Of The Net conference, where he participated in a panel called Internet Speech: Truth, Trust, Transparency & Tribalism. For this week's podcast, we've got the audio from that conversation with all sorts of interesting ideas about how people are dealing with fake news, trolls, propaganda and more.

When it comes to many of the legislative issues of interest to us here at Techdirt, we've always been able to count on at least one voice of reason amidst the congressional chaos: Representative Zoe Lofgren from California. In addition to playing a critical role in the fight against SOPA, she continues to be a voice of reason against bad copyright policy, expansive government surveillance, and the broken CFAA, among many other things. This week, she joins Mike on the podcast for a wide-ranging discussion about these topics and more.

Last week, Mike sparked lots of conversation with his post about rethinking the marketplace of ideas without losing sight of the importance of the fundamental principles of free speech. Naturally, there's plenty more to discuss on that topic, so this week we're joined by Buzzfeed general counsel Nabiha Syed — whose recent article in the Yale Law Journal, Real Talk About Fake News, offered a thorough and insightful look at free speech online — to try to cut through all the simplistic takes on free speech and talk about where things are going. Mike's post: https://tdrt.io/gCy Nabiha's article: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/real-talk-about-fake-news

In the midst of the political chaos in America and the world at large, a whole lot of attention has been turned to Facebook and its role in modern democracy. The social network has responded by announcing another round of news feed changes, the true impact of which (if any) remains far from clear. This week, we're joined by Mathew Ingram from the Columbia Journalism Review to talk about Facebook's changes, and whether we can or should expect them to fix anything.

Mike was at CES 2018 last week, and now for the third year in a row we've got our special episode of the podcast dedicated to looking at the best (and worst) innovations on show. As usual, he's joined by long-time CES veteran Rob Pegoraro — so without any further preamble, here's the CES 2018 Post-Mortem.

If you've been reading Techdirt for more than five years, you probably remember the conclusion of Mattel v. MGA — and if you've been reading for more than thirteen years, you might even remember when it started. This epic legal battle over intellectual property went through nearly a decade of rulings and reversals, and the resulting story is a fascinating one that ties in a lot of the topics we discuss here at Techdirt. It's also the subject of the new book You Don't Own Me by law professor Orly Lobel, who joins us on this week's episode to revisit this particular law opera and what it says about the wider world of IP.

Even those of us who believe that the internet is overall a tremendous positive force when it comes to discourse and culture can admit that, in many parts of the online world, having constructive and substantive conversations is... difficult. And that issue has most certainly come to the fore in the last couple of years. So this week, we're joined by author Barry Eisler (one of our first and most frequent podcast guests) to tackle the challenge of framing important debates in productive ways, and actually getting somewhere with them.

Gaming is changing the nature of storytelling. Video games of course — but also the modern rise of board games, tabletop RPGs and other forms of analog gaming. A good game does more than just arbitrarily pair play with a veneer of narrative, it marries the mechanics and the ideas to enable interesting new ways of conveying and exploring complex ideas. This week, we're joined by game designer Randy Lubin to discuss how games can tell stories in a way nothing else can.

Normally, we wouldn't dedicate a whole episode of the podcast to talking about a single app — but every now and then something small comes along that contains innovations worth exploring. So this week, we're taking a look at the hit trivia app HQ, which is one of the first new things in recent memory to gain real momentum with "appointment viewing".

If you're a Techdirt reader or just a general regular on the ol' internet, our topic this week — the current situation with net neutrality and the FCC — needs little introduction. And we've got two very special guests joining us to discuss it: former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler (author of the rules that Ajit Pai is currently undoing) and his former advisor Gigi Sohn (who joined us on the podcast in February to predict pretty much exactly what is now happening). There are few people as qualified to talk about these issues, so enjoy this week's episode looking at Trump's FCC and the future of the internet as we know it.

We've been talking about internet platform regulation for a long time, but in the past year these issues have gotten a huge amount of increased focus — for a bunch of fairly obvious reasons. But a lot of people who are fairly new to the issue tend to make a lot of questionable assumptions and jump to some problematic conclusions, so this week we're joined by someone who has been studying these questions for many years — Annemarie Bridy, a law professor at the University of Idaho and Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford University Center for Internet and Society — to discuss the complicated consequences of various attempts to regulate online platforms.

I don't think I need to say much to introduce this week's topic — we're all well aware of the conversation about Facebook's role in the presidential election, including questions of filter bubbles, fake news, foreign influence, and so on and so on. As is always the case in situations like this, a lot of people seem to be looking for easy answers, and easy places to point fingers of blame, so in this week's episode we're discussing why it's just not that simple.

As smartphones and other mobile devices have gotten smarter and smarter, they've taken over more and more of most people's general computing needs, and the importance of the classic personal computer has waned. And so for some time the question has been: will the PC ever go away entirely? That's our topic this week as we try to figure out who really needs a PC these days, and when and if that will change.

This episode was supposed to come two weeks ago when the news was a little fresher, so by now you almost certainly know all about the copyright claims on Donald Trump's appearances on the Howard Stern show. Though delayed by an outage at our cloud recording provider, the episode is still an interesting listen, with frequent Techdirt contributor Cathy Gellis joining the podcast to discuss the deeper question of whether copyright truly even exists on the interviews in the first place. Sorry for the delay, and we hope you enjoy it!

The rapid forward march of technology has long bred two leading camps of onlookers: the techno-optimists and the techno-pessimists. Honest people on both sides, however, must admit that technological innovation has had both positive and negative effects. Internet legend Tim O'Reilly is one of the people who think a lot about these issues, and his new book WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us — which discusses in detail the world that we are building with technology — was released today, and we're pleased to have him join us on this week's episode to talk about the book and the future of innovation.

Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny these days over its advertising and content moderation systems, especially since the high-profile revelation of Russia-backed ads during the election. But are things being blown out of proportion? And what, exactly, is to be done? This week we dig in to Facebook's ongoing advertising scandals, and debate what they really mean.

Last Friday on Techdirt, we posted video from the World Hosting Days, in which Mike Masnick sat down for a talk with Mike Godwin — a.k.a. the originator of "the Streisand Effect" meeting the creator of "Godwin's Law". As promised, we've got the audio from the event for this week's podcast, so if you haven't watched the video (or you just want to revisit it) tune in for a fun discussion about the history and changing meaning of these now-famous terms. Watch the video: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170915/16541938217/when-godwins-law-met-streisand-effect.shtml

While the 20th century was defined by mass production, since the digital revolution there has been talk about what might be the main trend of the 21st century: mass customization. Today, we're starting to see customizable mass-produced offerings pop up in a number of spaces such as apparel, and this week we discuss whether mass customization is finally approaching critical mass.

Just over a year ago, when Pokémon Go was taking the world by storm, we dedicated an episode of the podcast to discussing what made it so successful, and ended up with some differing predictions about what its future would be. Now, with the hype long and truly over but the game still far from dead (though just how far is up for debate), it's time to revisit the subject and figure out who, if anyone, was right about the future of Pokémon Go. Hear the original episode: https://soundcloud.com/techdirt/is-it-the-pokemon-or-the-go-that-matters

Can you believe it? Tomorrow is our 20th anniversary! Techdirt has come a long way since Mike started it as a newsletter on August 23rd, 1997, and this week's episode of the podcast is a celebration and exploration of that history. Mike and Dennis are joined by Medium's Alex Feerst acting as moderator/interviewer to discuss the past 20 years of Techdirt.