Progressives Discuss Future of Internet Policy
Alondra Nelson, a former top tech adviser to President Joe Biden, said Thursday she expects continuing administration focus on tech regulation, though she warned that focusing on keeping up with the pace of change is a mistake. Other speakers at an event by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Public Knowledge said the time is ripe to start looking at a new agency to oversee privacy and other technology issues. Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler warned that the U.S. in danger of defaulting on leadership in favor of other countries.
“Our policymaking is never going to be fast enough for innovation and that means that our policymaking needs to not be about the objects, or the technologies, it needs to be about the values and … about the society that we want to have,” said Nelson, former acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy: “We’ve got to think creatively about existing laws and regulation even as we seek new regulation.”
“Why do we need to have a technology regulator now?” Wheeler asked: “We’ve done such a good job thus far, haven’t we? It has only been a couple of decades that we’ve been living with the new digital reality, and its impact on privacy, destroying privacy … and exposing young people.”
The problems have been confronting us for years and “and it hasn’t gotten any better,” Wheeler said. The metaverse, the AI chatbot ChatGPT, and augmented AI are “going to do nothing but exacerbate the aforementioned problems.”
More of our lives now takes place online “in a way that we don’t even think about,” said Harold Feld, Public Knowledge senior vice president. “Never mind the metaverse, or being engrossed in TikTok for hours -- you can’t apply for unemployment in some states without a broadband connection, you can’t get federal aid in an emergency,” he said.
Creating a new agency isn’t “something you do lightly,” Feld said. Questions to ask are whether something is “recognizable as a distinct sector of the economy” and “important in our lives” and is it difficult for people to look out for their own interests, to defend themselves, he said. “You need a standing regulatory agency that can acquire the expertise that’s necessary,” he said. For solving a specific problem, Congress can pass a law, he said: “For the complicated, the difficult, the long-standing, you need an agency that’s going to be able to stay on top of things.”
The EU and U.K. “are moving swiftly to address digital issues in ways that will have a profound impact on the U.S. tech sector,” said CAP Technology Policy Vice President Adam Conner. The EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act are “now laws that are being implemented as we speak,” he said. They mean people in the EU have more protections online than people in the U.S., he said.
The administration’s “long-awaited” national cybersecurity strategy, released Thursday (see 2303020051), “calls for the first time for new cybersecurity regulation to secure critical infrastructure, to support national security and public safety,” Conner noted.
A lot of the “ideas” in the European data laws “are floating around in the U.S. Congress too,” said Anna Lenhart, policy fellow at the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics and a former congressional aide. Parts of both have been incorporated into proposals before Congress, she said. The laws give the European Commission oversight at a multinational level, she said: The EC is given “additional investigatory powers, abilities to do sanctions” and authority to look at how a company like Google is both protecting consumers and affecting competition.
Wheeler warned that time isn’t on the U.S.’ side. “The internet was invented in this country, the major players are in this country,” all the major technical components in smartphones “originated in this country, with the support of the United States government, and we’re about to become second stringers on establishing the policy for all of this brave new world that we pioneered,” Wheeler said: “Hurray for the EU and what they’re doing. … Hurray for the U.K. and what they’re doing.”
The Europeans have become the leaders “because we defaulted on leadership,” Wheeler said. Congress will do something, eventually, he said. The problem is “the quick and easy answer is, ‘Hey, they’re doing this over there, let’s just make that a rule here too,’” he said.
Nelson cited “the really profound need for a forward-leaning, comprehensive policy strategy for the technology ecosystem, for social media and well beyond, given the wide range of both pressing and emergent issues that we face.” “We need to use every tool at our disposal,” Nelson said. “We’re making rules for the road when the road itself is undergoing paving, constant resurfacing.”