The Public Library Association may have packed up after its biannual conference and left Philadelphia last weekend, but for Andrew Albanese, the program lingered in the mind.

“From the opening keynote by Sally Yates, through Lee Rainie (of Pew Research Center), to Tim Wu’s ‘Big Ideas’ session, the common thread was the new media landscape--the erosion of trust, the need for net neutrality and a concern for what’s going on with our data,” recalls Albanese, Publishers Weekly senior writer. “There are obvious implications for our democracy--as we’ve seen with Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica story--and there are also grave implications for the future of books and reading.

“On net neutrality, particularly, [author and law professor] Tim Wu did not mince words,” Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. The instinct to censor remains very strong, he said, but laws like net neutrality guarantee a baseline for the free flow of information.

“Wu said the net neutrality issue is as important as the first amendment in our times, if not more so. And he implored that if we do one thing over the next few years it must be to restore net neutrality and guarantee our informational freedoms.”