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The recent ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline has brought renewed public attention to cybersecurity issues. The field is always evolving, and the attack serves as a great starting point for understanding the current state of cybersecurity, so this week we're joined by three experts — Ross Nordurft and Alex Botting from Venable LLP, and Amy Mahn from the National Institute of Standards and...

It's no secret that we were not at all impressed with WIRED's recent cover story about Section 230. The resulting conversation sparked a Twitter debate with the story's author, Gilad Edelman, and we thought... why not bring it to the podcast? So on this week's episode, Gilad joins Mike to discuss and debate the story, our response, and Section 230.

Last week, the Oversight Board made its highest-profile decision yet: upholding Facebook's suspension of Donald Trump, though with the caveat that it needs clearer policy reasons to make the suspension indefinite. Unsurprisingly, a whole lot of people have a whole lot of opinions on this, and we wanted to learn more about the decision from the source. Julie Owono is an Oversight Board member and t...

The past several years have done a lot to expose the failings of the "marketplace of ideas", as disinformation and harassment campaigns have shown an ability to spread and flourish despite ample amounts of counterspeech. This triumph of mob behavior, especially on Twitter, has challenged a lot of people's preconceptions about how free speech functions, and one person who has been exploring these i...

The way a lot of people talk about content moderation is disappointingly uncreative — most of all in the way they boil every decision down to the binary decision of "leave it up or take it down". But this framework is extremely limiting and doesn't reflect the way content moderation professionals work, and one person working to paint a better picture is Santa Clara Law Professor Eric Goldman. He j...

After a few cross-post episodes, we're back with a brand new conversation, and it's all about a big subject that intersects with the majority of what we cover here at Techdirt: rights. In his book How Rights Went Wrong, Columbia Law professor and Constitutional scholar Jamal Greene proposes a new way of thinking about rights and how they interact, and he joins this week's episode to discuss this p...

It's one more podcast cross-post this week! A recent episode of the Institute for Justice's Short Circuit podcast dug into two very interesting legal cases: one that explores one of the more rarely-invoked pieces of Section 230, and another that tests the limits of the Fourth Amendment. Mike joined IJ attorney Josh Windham and host Anthony Sanders to discuss the cases themselves and what they mean...

We've got another podcast cross-post for you this week! Mike recently joined the Cato Institute Daily Podcast to discuss the PACT Act — the more "serious" proposal for Section 230 reform that is still riddled with problems that will do damage to the entire internet. Listen to the full conversation withn Mike and Cato's Will Duffield on this week's episode.

Despite all the nonsense that dominates so much of the public discussion on the subject, free speech in the age of big social media platforms is a vital topic with a lot of nuances, and there are many people with important perspectives on it. One such person is EFF Director of International Freedom of Expression Jillian York, whose new book Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveilla...

For some reason, a lot of people who get involved in the debate about content moderation still insist that online platforms are "doing nothing" to address problems — but that's simply not true. Platforms are constantly working on trust and safety issues, and at this point many people have developed considerable expertise regarding these unique challenges. One such person is Alex Feerst, former hea...

Textiles have been around for such a long time that we barely think about them. The making of fabric is one of the oldest crafts, and has played a major role in human civilization for thousands of years — and that might lead one to assume that there's nothing left to be learned from fabric's history. But they'd be wrong. This week we're joined by Virginia Postrel, whose book The Fabric Of Civiliza...

There was a time not too long ago when tech companies enjoyed broad public support and adulation. Now they face widespread opposition and criticism from almost all corners. The shift from one to the other has long been called the "techlash", but it's always been unclear where it really came from and how it happened, and especially what role journalists and the media played. This week, we're joined...

Last week, we hosted Section 230 Matters, a virtual Techdirt fundraiser featuring a panel discussion with the two lawmakers who wrote the all-important text and got it passed 25 years ago: Chris Cox and Senator Ron Wyden. It was informative and entertaining, and for this week's episode of the podcast, we've got the full audio of the panel discussion about the history, evolution, and present state...

We recently announced the winners of our third annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. Now, just like last year, we're dedicating an episode of the podcast to looking at each of the winners a bit closer. Mike is joined by Randy Lubin (our partner in running the jams) and myself (with some unfortunate audio issues that I apologize for), to talk about all these great games that bring 1...

Questions of content moderation and intermediary liability have seeped into just about everything these days, and not just with regards to Section 230 but also a whole host of laws in the US and around the world. A lot of people seem to think that a long list of societal and political failings can be rectified by regulating content online, and don't talk about how these problems run deeper and hav...

The first batch of decisions about Facebook's content moderation from the recently-established Oversight Board has garnered lots of reactions, including many kneejerk ones — but there's plenty to discuss, so for this week's episode Mike is joined by Harvard Law's Evelyn Douek to talk about the decisions themselves and what they signal about the board as a whole.

The most important point we've repeatedly made about content moderation is that it's not simple, and there are always trade-offs — but this doesn't mean "do nothing" is a viable option. There are no perfect solutions, and that's why experimentation and innovation is important, especially when it comes to pressing moderation questions like those around abuse and harassment. This week we're joined b...

We've got one more cross-post from another podcast this week, and the subject is still the law that's dominating the tech policy discourse: Section 230. Mike recently joined R Street's Shoshana Weissmann on the Daily Tech News Show hosted by Tom Merritt, for a roundtable discussion about the all-important online liability shield and its many, many vital applications that people typically fail to c...

The podcast went on pause over the holidays and amidst the deluge of... events — but now we're back! And to kick things off, we've got a cross-post from Nick Gillespie's Reason podcast. Mike recently joined Nick for an interview about Section 230 and why a decentralized internet is better than a heavily-restricted one, and you can listen to the whole thing on this week's episode of the Techdirt Po...

The pandemic and associated lockdowns have underlined the incredible importance of broadband, and the many problems with it in America. This week, we're joined by Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic — Mike's ISP, and one with a reputation for treating its customers well and speaking out against bad broadband policy and regulation — for an insider perspective on what's happening with US broadband in 2020, an...

This week, we're having another conversation about how more decentralized, interoperable, and competitive systems could help restore the original promise of the open web — and this time around we've got a pair of guests with perspectives that are related do, but distinct from, the protocols, not platforms idea that we talk about so much. Author Cory Doctorow has been discussing adversarial interop...

This week, we've got another panel discussion for you, with Mike joining Georgetown Law fellow Gigi Sohn and panel moderator Zach Graves of the Lincoln Network (both also former podcast guests) at the Reboot 2020 conference to discuss the "techlash" — the public opinion backlash against big tech — and try to figure out what exactly it is, and where it's going in the future.

Recently, Techdirt began a new monetization experiment with Coil. It's a system for making payments on the web, but it's not just another micropayment service layered on top of existing technology — it's part of a broader effort to create an open standard for web monetization based on the Interledger network protocol. This week, we're joined by Coil founder and Interledger co-creator Stefan Thomas...

There are countless debates raging over every aspect of internet regulation — questions of social media moderation, net neutrality, antitrust, copyright, privacy, and plenty more — and the election happening right now is going to have a huge impact on those debates. This week, we're joined by international policy expert and former European Parliament member Marietje Schaake for a long conversation...

With the pandemic spurring a mass switch to remote working for many people, especially those at tech companies that were among the earliest adopters of the trend, discussions about the uncertain future of Silicon Valley have resurfaced. This week, tech reporter and VC partner Kim-Mai Cutler joins the podcast to discuss whether the pandemic-driven changes in how we work will drive a mass-exodus fro...