As the coronavirus recession
requires the Internet
to take on an even
more central role in our
economy, its major stakeholders
are changing the
landscape. The Justice Department
set to put
forward a plan as soon
as today to roll back
legal protections that
online platforms have
enjoyed for more
than two decades.
There's a lot of line here
in terms of the soul of
the country. The
president becomes increasingly
concerned that some of
these platforms are
perhaps violating free speech
and also bias
against conservatives. Twitter
attempted to
control the narrative by
starting to fact check
tweets on its platform,
specifically those by
world leaders. President Trump
responded with an
executive order re-examining
the ability for
social media platforms
to monitor speech.
What they choose to fact
check and what they
choose to ignore or even
promote is nothing more
than a political activism
group or political
activism. And
it's inappropriate.
But I think one of the
most terrifying parts of it
involves a suggestion that
the government should
be setting ground rules for
what speech is or is
not allowed on
a platform.
That video that can
demonstrate the eight minutes
of torture that an
African-American man had under
the police can be put
on a medium like Facebook
or Twitter and
have different interpretations.
But I don't think
that Facebook or Internet
platforms in general should
be arbiters of truth.
The battle over who regulates
the platform and the
Internet overall started long
before social media
was even an idea with
the actual hardware of the
network. The dark side began
to appear when money
became the driver. And
while our digital avatars
become ever more important
to our physical
livelihoods and our understanding
of the world
around us, one question
remains: who controls the
Internet? The Internet
was originally
developed by computer scientists
so they could
better share their research
with each other.
The U.S. Department
of Defense's Advanced
Research Projects Agency, or
ARPA, financed the
project. It was an
uncontrolled new environment.
Start at the
end research.
The research
was everything.
Arpanet, as it was called,
was focused on sharing
packets of
digital information.
I developed basically a
mathematical theory of
packet to achieve network
the networks we have
today called the Internet. ARPA
said we need a
network. Here finally was
the promise that we
could implement this technology
that I had been
working on for
so many years.
So sure enough, in
less than nine months,
Berrinagon Nooman, the company
that won the
contract delivered the
first switch.
What, we now call
a router to UCLA.
We connected it up
to our computer.
And a month later,
in October 1969, Stanford
Research Institute, 400 miles
of the north, got
their router. And we deployed
a high speed link
between the two and now
had two node network.
Over time, more
research facilities started
joining the network. And
it started to grow.
The National Science Foundation,
or NSF, also
opened up the networks
users from just computer
scientists to any
researcher or educational
institution that could reach
it, free of charge.
NSF built the hardware
that became the backbone
of the network. Personal
computers were also
becoming more common, and
the graphical interface
of the World Wide
Web was being developed.
All of these items together
grew into what is now
known as the Internet.
At the same time,
private companies started
building their
own networks.
In 1991, then Senator Al
Gore sponsored a bill to
help fund what he
calls the Information
Superhighway. That bill
injected 600 million
dollars into the development
of the Internet.
Al Gore put together
an a wonderful constituency
of academia, industry and
government to basically
deploy a very high
speed gigabit per second
backbone network. So people
like to snicker at
that. He made a
major contribution in deploying
the backbone. This bill
encouraged the Internet
to grow in both
private and public sectors.
In 1995, NSF then
awarded contracts for access
points for private companies
to maintain the
backbone of the Internet
and decommissioned its
own NSF net backbone in
April of that year.
Over the next three years,
NSF helped create the
framework the Internet
has today officially
ending its direct role in
the Internet in 1998.
That's an example where
the government creates
really something innovative like
it did with the
Internet and then handed
over to the private
sector to take that and
make it something that's
usable for the
common person.
Many of these innovations have
been able to evolve
due to the light
touch regulatory framework that
we've had since
the Clinton-Gore administration.
I thank the vice president
who fought for this
bill for so long on
behalf of the American
people. And I thank
the members of Congress
in both parties, starting
with the leadership who
believed in the promise
and the possibility of
telecommunications
reform.
So the '96 Communications
Act update really
provided for more
spectrum, because what
regulators found was that
as these systems were
actually evolving, they
needed more fuel.
It was a very much
a consensus bill and
it really did pave the
way for the Internet that
we see today. With so
many new stakeholders in
the backbone of
the Internet.
More voices started
gaining traction.
This now became a world
that the consumer could
enter and business
could enter.
Now, once that happens, there's
a major change in
the taste and the
character of this network,
namely, it is now
a money machine.
The Federal Communications
Commission, or FCC,
regulates the infrastructure
that supports the
Internet. How far that
regulation extends, has
been a challenge
for policymakers.
There's a belief that the
FCC should step in and
dictate the extent to
which this subdominant of
company when it comes
to their content.
And again, whether or
not they preference that
content, by putting it
over others or they
discriminate against other content
by not letting
you see it or the
throttle it, slow it down.You
know, all of that comes
under the net neutrality
provision, which the
FCC kicked out.
Many question if the
Internet should be considered
a public utility or remain
a service provided by
private companies.
The coronavirus pandemic
heighten the debate
after companies like
Facebook, YouTube, Netflix
and others responded to
a request from the
European Union to stream their
content in a lower
quality in Europe.
However, the network
in the U.S.
was able to withstand the
increase in data usage
without having
to throttle.
And I'm very proud
that it didn't collapse.
That it was right there.
It hardly basically shuddered
when this demand
came in. Paid
prioritization would allow
companies to sell what they
call a fast lane.
Can the Federal
Communications Commission, the
FCC, dictate where
the businesses
must lay cable?
The underlying speeds that
they may maintain and
whether they can do
a paid prioritization?
What I personally don't want
is to allow a
provider to decide who
gets bandwidth, who gets
how much bandwidth and if
and when that benefit
gets turned off. At the
end of the last
administration, the
Federal Communications
Commission declared that there
can be no paid
prioritization. Then in
2016, the U.S.
Congress enacted a bill
to override that
decision by the
Federal Communications
Commission, which handed back
to the broadband
deployers the option to
do paid prioritization.
So that's kind of
where it stands now.
While the courts are
still deciding who regulates
access to the Internet.
The conversations taking place
online are growing
increasingly tense.
Today, I'm signing executive
order to protect and
uphold the free speech and
rights of the American
people. Currently, social
media giants like
Twitter receive an
unprecedented liability shield
based on the theory
that they're a neutral
platform, which they
are not.
Not an editor
with a viewpoint.
My executive order calls
for new regulations.
Under Section 230 of
the Communications Decency
Act to make it that
social media companies that
engage in censoring or
any political content will
not be able to
keep their liability shield.
That's a big deal.
Days after President Trump
signed this executive order,
it was challenged in
the courts. On the
false assumption that's being
made is you either are
a neutral platform or you
moderate content. And that's
a false choice.
And that's not what
the law requires.
The law says you can
be whatever type of platform
you want. And when you
remove content that you
consider to be objectionable,
you're not going to
assume liability
for that.
I think for the most
part, tech companies don't
want their content to
lead to unlawful activity,
but they actually have a
huge challenge when it
comes to the recent
activities of the president's
tweet that in some way
could have been perceived
as inciting violence.
Twitter obviously came through
and said, hey,
we're just going to mark
this as a potential for
that. Facebook, Mark
Zuckerberg basically said
Facebook is staying out of
it because they're not
the arbiter of
anybody's troop.
When it came to
the president's executive order,
it's there's a lot of
different components in it
that are worth unpacking.
But I think one of
the most terrifying parts of
it involves a suggestion
that the government
should be setting ground rules
for what speech is
or is not allowed
on a platform.
That suggestion was first
explored in the 1996
Communications Decency Act
aimed at curtailing
the presence of pornography
and illicit activity
on the Internet.
The entire Communications
Decency Act was found
to violate the First
Amendment, except for
Section 230.
Those two
important provisions.
One, it makes clear
what is called conduit
immunity, which basically says
if you are just
the intermediary, you are
not responsible for the
content that
is transmitted.
Good example that would
be in a library.
But the more important
provision is the second
section which made
clear that platforms
could moderate content that
could remove lewd,
lascivious or otherwise
objectionable content
without assuming liability or
either the removal
of that content or the
failure to catch any
content that they
didn't remove.
Section 230 empowers somebody
who's setting up a
social media Web site for
cat lovers to remove
any dog related content.
In effect, President Trump's
executive order would
change how social media
platforms are treated
under the law and
consider them publishers, which
could make them liable for
all content written on
their sites. Just like
media organizations like
CNBC. The DOJ has been
working on this for about
a year. But it does
dovetail with the president's
recent executive order, which
require the FCC or
would at least ask the
FCC to promulgate new
regulations in this
space as well.
It wants Congress to rewrite
Section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act
to remove the
liability shield for civil
action if platforms
are found to facilitate
or solicit federal
criminal activity, such as
fraud or scams.
All of these changes
could upend the business
model for tech's
biggest companies.
Industry groups are
against it.
And the big caveat here is
that the DOJ cannot do
this alone. It would
need Congress to act.
We have don't have a
regulatory chief that really
can look at the Internet
in its 21st century
form, let alone the extent
to which is equitably
available to everybody.
There are those who have
and those who don't have
adequate connectivity in
their workplace, their
home, and now those two
combined or in the
equipment to hand in the
laptops, to have in and
the service they have.
In many respects, the
digital divide is really
leading to digital
invisibility, which has
foreclose on the
opportunities that technology
has for people to participate
and engage in our
society. The FCC estimates
that 19 million
Americans don't have access
to fixed broadband
service at
threshold speeds.
Some would suggest that they're
actually 40 to 100
million people that
are not online.
And if you think about
that, that probably is not
too off. If you count
rural Americans, you count
large low
income communities.
People who are older,
people with disabilities
and people who
are foreign born.
The Internet saw lots
of successes through private
research, funded in
partnership with the
government and eventually handed
over to private
companies. While there have
been some reports of
governments attempting to
create their own
Internet service providers,
private organizations
are taking the lead
in developing the
infrastructure to bring
the world's online.
Facebook has launched
partnerships with South
Asian countries like Bangladesh
to provide free
connectivity to those
in need.
However, the platform provided
by companies like
Facebook could, without
proper regulations and
guidance, do more
harm than good.
For example, some blame Facebook
for its role in
the persecution of the
Rohingya people in
Myanmar. With the public
square continuing to
move outside of downtown
and online, digital
stakeholders will have increasing
power over the
global conversation.
I think we get caught up
in this us versus them
argument around the private
sector and who
regulates the Internet.
And I think what COVID
19 has actually revealed
is that it's not about
who owns the Internet.
It's about can it get
to everyone who needs it.
