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.