The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Last week, Canada passed the Online News Act, legislation that requires tech platforms to remunerate Canadian news outlets, and the platforms are not happy. In response, Google announced it will remove links to Canadian news outlets from its products. Meta also said it would remove Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram. 

The Act itself has yet to be implemented- it has to first go through a regulatory process to sort out how it will work. So, these moves by the platforms may be a tactic in the negotiation of the particulars. But the platforms also clearly want to send a message to other jurisdictions where similar legislation is under consideration.

For an expert opinion on the politics surrounding Canada’s Online News Act and its broader implications, Tech Policy Press Contributing Editor Ben Lennett spoke to one person who has been following it closely from his perch in Montreal. Taylor Owen is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, the founding director of The Center for Media, Technology and Democracy, and an Associate Professor in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. 

Over the past few months, there have been a range of voices calling for the urgent regulation of artificial intelligence. Comparisons to the problems of nuclear proliferation abound, so perhaps it’s no surprise that some want a new international body similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But when it comes to AI and global governance, there’s already a lot in play- from ethics councils to various schemes for industry governance, activity on standards, various international agreements, and legislation that will have international impact, such as the EU’s AI Act. 

To help get his head around the complicated, evolving ecology of global AI governance, Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the three authors of a recent paper in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science that attempts to take stock of and explore the tensions between different approaches, including Michael Veale, an associate professor in the Faculty of Laws at University College London, where he works on the intersection of computer science, law, and policy; and Robert Gorwa, a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center, a large publicly-funded research institute in Germany.

Earlier this month, Justin Hendrix traveled to RightsCon, the big gathering of individuals and organizations concerned with human rights and technology organized by Access Now. The sprawling event had hundreds of sessions on a wide range of themes, but one topic discussed across multiple tracks was the importance of encrypted communications, especially to groups such as political dissidents and journalists.

A key panel at RightsCon featured Signal President Meredith Whittaker, who spoke out about policies proposed in legislatures around the world that threaten the promise of end-to-end encryption to preserve the privacy of messages sent between individuals and groups. Leaders of encrypted apps have pulled together of late to speak out against the proposed UK Online Safety Bill, signing letters and appearing at events. Shortly after RightsCon, Hendrix connected with Whittaker to learn more about Signal’s posture against such legislation, why she sees encrypted communications as so crucial to freedom and human rights, and how the company thinks about safety and its role in the broader digital ecosystem.

In the United States, it’s fair to say that federal, state and local governments have struggled in the era of digitalization. Decades in to that era, there is still a gap between the policy outcomes we seek and what citizens often get when they engage with government agencies and services online. At its worst this gap means people aren’t receiving critical services that sustain their lives; and at the very least it reduces faith in government to be able to solve problems right at the moment when it’s clear the collective challenges we face are going to 

Jennifer Pahlka, who served in President Barack Obama’s administration as deputy chief technology officer and founded the nonprofit Code for America, has written a book that asks us to reexamine how government works, and how it should work, in the digital age. It's called Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, and it's the subject of the podcast today.

Last week, a group of very important people, including the U.S Secretaries of State and Commerce and trade representatives from President Joe Biden’s administration, met with top European Union officials in the heart of the Swedish Lapland for the fourth Ministerial meeting of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, or “TTC”. Pressing needs were tackled, new initiatives were launched, commitments were made, and cooperation was deepened on a range of tech policy issues, at least according to the press releases.

To hear an unvarnished view from someone who was at the meeting about what might actually come of it all, Justin Hendrix invited on a journalist who is, in my opinion, one the best tech policy reporters in the world: Mark Scott, Chief Technology Correspondent for Politico.

Today’s show has two segments both focused on generative AI. In the first segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Irene Solaiman, a researcher who has put a lot of thought into evaluating the release strategies for generative AI systems. Organizations big and small have pursued different methods for release of these systems, some holding their models and details about them very close, and some pursuing a more open approach.

And in the second segment, Justin Hendrix speaks with Calli Schroeder and Ben Winters at the Electronic Privacy Information Center about a new report they helped write about the harms of generative AI, and what to do about them.

Last week, the Supreme Court released decisions in Gonzalez v. Google, LLC, and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh. In this episode we’ll discuss what it tells us about how the Court is thinking about social media and intermediary liability, and what it might tell us about future cases the Court may hear. I’m joined by an expert who follows these issues closely, and has shared his expertise with us on this podcast before: Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University.

Today’s episode features a discussion with Nick Seaver, a professor at Tufts University and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation from the University of Chicago Press. Nick is an anthropologist who studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. His book is the product of ethnographic observation and conversations with developers working on music recommendation algorithms and other systems designed to understand and cater to user preferences. His research gives us a better understanding of the motivations of the executives and engineers designing systems to command our attention, which he considers to be “a currency, a capacity, a filter, a spotlight, and a moral responsibility.”

Justin Hendrix speaks to writer Malcolm Harris about his book, PALO ALTO: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM, AND THE WORLD, which considers the historical antecedents for the project of Silicon Valley.

Recently Justin Hendrix caught up with Gus Hurwitz, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and the director of the Governance and Technology Center. He’s also the Director of Law and Economics Programs at the International Center for Law and Economics, a Portland based think tank that focuses on antitrust law and economics policy issues. Hurwitz told Hendrix he’s leaving Nebraska at the end of the semester for a new position that is soon to be announced. 

The conversation covered a range of topics, from how to think about the relationship between technology and the law, how to get engineers to engage with ethical and legal concepts, the view of the coastal tech policy discourse from Hurwitz’s vantage in the middle of the country, the role and politics of the Federal Trade Commission, and why he finds some inspiration in Frank Herbert’s Dune.