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We're back! It's been a lull over the holidays and we've gone a while without new podcast episodes, but now we've got several lined up for the coming weeks — and today we kick things off with a very interesting discussion. Many of you probably know about the controversy and concern over the Internet Society's sale of the .ORG domain registry to a private equity firm, but one prominent defender of...

When Kashmir Hill last joined us on the podcast, it was to discuss her experiment with cutting big tech companies out of her life. This week she's back to discuss something even harder to escape, and subject of her recent article in the New York Times: the low-profile companies that track consumers and assign them secret scores, and the disturbing amount of power they wield.

We've said it before (and even put it on a t-shirt) and we'll say it again: copying is not theft, and intellectual "property" is anything but. In September, the Niskanen Center published an excellent paper exploring this issue and explaining why IP is a misnomer — and this week we've got one of the authors of that paper, Daniel Takash, to discuss in more detail why property is simply the wrong len...

GET YOUR COPY OF THE ANTHOLOGY AT https://workingfutur.es/ A few weeks ago, we sat down with some of the authors from Working Futures, our new anthology of short stories about the future of work. Today we're back with three new guests whose stories are featured in the collection: Andrew Dana Hudson, N. R. M. Roshak, and Randy Lubin (who helped design the scenario-planning game we used to spawn ide...

We've written a lot about Backpage ever since it replaced Craigslist as the favorite target of grandstanding prosecutors, and especially since it was used to help pass FOSTA. Now history's being rewritten to claim FOSTA took Backpage down, despite that not being the order in which things happened. The biggest issue, though, is that taking down these sites makes it harder to fight sex trafficking —...

A couple of months ago, we were surprised when a WIPO employee showed up in our comments to defend the organization's new database of supposedly infringing sites against our many criticisms. In that post, we highlighted a Twitter thread from lawyer Rick Shera — who represented Mega — and this week, Shera joins us on the podcast to further discuss the inefficacy and negative impact of these kinds o...

GET THE BOOK: http://workingfutur.es/ As we hope you know by now, last week we released Working Futures, an anthology of short stories about the future of work in our world of rapidly advancing technology, inspired by settings we developed with a specially-designed scenario planning exercise. For this week's special episode of the podcast, we've brought in three of the authors whose stories are fe...

With all the misconceptions, political projects, and flat-out panics about tech in Congress these days, it sometimes feels like any positive legislative progress regarding technology is impossible. But once in a while you find a lawmaker who is out there pushing smart bills about tech, such as one that aims to help solve this whole mess by restoring and redesigning the Office of Technology Assessm...

The latest big news in the ongoing discussion about social media moderation is the release of Facebook's official plans for its independent oversight board, which will review content moderation decisions in an attempt to bring some transparency and due process to the system. This week we're joined by returning guest Professor Kate Klonick, who was present as an observer at Facebook covering the en...

"Dynamic pricing" is an idea that sounds efficient and effective in economic theory, but often collapses under the weight of customer anger when put into practice. But while that is true of some of the most egregious approaches, other forms of dynamic pricing are ubiquitous and largely accepted — in part because of how the systems work, and in part because of how they present themselves to custome...

The future of the internet is... uncertain. We've always been optimistic about what technology and innovation can achieve, and that hasn't changed, but right now it often feels like we're facing more new challenges and more reactions to them (including dangerous ones) than ever, and pessimism about the internet seems to be at an all-time high. This week we're joined by EFF Executive Director Cindy...

By now, you likely all know the story of David Karpf's mild "bedbugs" joke that drew the personal, professional and journalistic ire of the New York Times' Bret Stephens. As it turned out, Karpf — a professor with expertise in media and political communication — was more than capable of responding to Stephens and talking about what was happening in a variety of media outlets, with far more insight...

We've talked a lot about how many of the controversial, challenging problems that exist online could be addressed by refocusing on making the internet what it was always supposed to be: a network of open protocols, not a cluster of walled gardens. Mike's recent paper on the subject lays out the reasons in detail, and on this week's episode of the podcast we're joined by one of the people working t...

Last week, we featured part one of our discussion with lawyer Joshua de Larios-Heiman, about the details of the FCC's Facebook settlement, beyond the headline-grabbing fine. It was a long conversation that we cut off right in the middle, so be sure to listen to part one first and then come back for part two, in which we finish picking apart the settlement item by item. PART ONE: https://soundcloud...

Ever since the FCC announced its proposed settlement with Facebook, the headlines have focused on the largest-ever privacy fine that came with it — but few people paid attention to the many, many important details. This week, we've got the first half of a two-part podcast with lawyer Joshua de Larios-Heiman, who helps us go through the entire settlement from start to finish, and pick apart what it...

There's a new but growing desire, both within the tech industry and among onlookers, for more technologists to get involved in public policy and doing work to serve the public interest. Various plans to help make this happen are starting to appear, and an especially interesting one is the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, which aims to help establish a new generation of tech policy entrepreneurs using an inc...

Moral panics are nothing new, but they've taken on many new forms in the internet era, and their patterns have rubbed off on other kinds of techno-panics. This week, I join Mike on the podcast to discuss the way we talk about the potentially scary aspects of tech, how to spot a tech panic, and how to start changing the conversation into something more constructive.

Bruce Schneier is a name most Techdirt readers are very familiar with — he's a famous computer security expert who most recently has taken up the mantle of Public Interest Technologist, and been exploring exactly what that means. This week, Bruce joins us on the podcast to discuss how technologists can dedicate themselves to the common good.

Josh Hawley's bill that aims to force "political neutrality" on social media platforms has caused a lot of stir for something so obviously unconstitutional and doomed to failure. There are so many problems with the bill that we've got three experts this week — Daphne Keller, Jeffrey Koseff, and Aaron Mackey — to help dig into all the ways this attack on Section 230 sucks.

Live streaming is here to stay, and it seems to be getting more popular by the minute — but for many people, it still seems like a foreign land and evokes a cliched "I feel old" response. This week, Mike is joined by not-so-regular-anymore co-host Dennis Yang, who has been experimenting with Twitch, to get a beginner's perspective on the platform, the community, and the medium of streaming.

In all the attempts to understand just what happened with the 2016 election, a lot of blame has fallen on the internet and especially on Facebook. The attention, which often focuses on the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian interference, is not unwarranted — but it often seems to lose track of the fact that Facebook is just one part of a broader media ecosystem, and not necessarily the most i...

Once upon a time, there was something called the Office of Technology Assessment, charged with the critical if unenviable task of educating members of congress about issues related to technology. Since that seems like a pretty good thing to have, recently some people have been pushing to re-establish the office. This week, we're joined by two of those people — Daniel Schuman from Demand Progress a...

The topic of what (if anything) to do with Facebook was hardly fading from public discourse anyway, but it received a bump when co-founder Chris Hughes called for the company to be broken up. This week, we've got two returning guests on the podcast with plenty to say on the subject — UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye, and famed internet lawyer Mike Godwin — to discuss the m...

The regulation of technology is an extremely important issue that impacts all our lives, but it tends to take a back seat in the world of mainstream politics, and when it does come to the fore, the lack of knowledge on display among elected representatives can be... disheartening, to say the least. In some ways that's starting to change as a generation of people who grew up with modern technology...

Whether it's from his novels, or his work for the EFF and others, most of you probably know all about Cory Doctorow. He last joined the podcast two years ago to discuss his book Walkaway, and this week he's back to talk about his latest book, Radicalized — a collection of four novellas, the first of which is directly based on the issues with the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. Check out the...