The backlash against Big Tech dominates the episode, with new regulatory initiatives in the US, EU, Israel, Russia, and China. The misbegotten link tax and upload filter provisions of the EU copyright directive have survived the convoluted EU legislative gantlet. My prediction: the link tax will fail because Google wants it to fail, but the upload filter will succeed because Google wants YouTube’s competitors to fail.…
Continue Reading Episode 251: Executive Orders and alien abductions
Nate Jones, David Kris, and I kick off 2019 with a roundup of the month of news since we took our Christmas break. First, we break down the utterly predictable but undismissable Silicon Valley claim that the administration’s new export control strategy will hurt the emerging AI industry.…
Mieke Eoyang joins us for the interview about Third Way’s “To Catch a Hacker” report. We agree on the importance of what I call “attribution and retribution” as a way to improve cybersecurity. But we disagree on some of the details. Mieke reveals that this report is the first in a series that will hopefully address my concerns about a lack of detail and innovation in the report’s policy prescriptions.…
Continue Reading Episode 240: If Paris Calls, should we hang up?
Our guest is Peter W. Singer, co-author with Emerson T. Brooking of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Peter’s book is a fine history of the way the Internet went wrong in the Age of Social Media. He thinks we’re losing the Like Wars, and I tend to agree. It’s a deep conversation that turns contentious when we come to his prescriptions, which I see as reinstating the lefty elite that ran journalism for decades, this time empowered by even less self-doubt – and AI that can reproduce its prejudices at scale and without transparency.…
