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United States Politics Technology

Biden's Top Tech Adviser Makes Regulation More Likely (venturebeat.com) 96

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
President-elect Joe Biden's top technology adviser helped craft California's landmark online privacy law and recently condemned a controversial federal statute that protects internet companies from liability, indicators of how the Biden administration may come down on two key tech policy issues. From a report: Bruce Reed, a former Biden chief of staff who is expected to take a major role in the new administration, helped negotiate with the tech industry and legislators on behalf of backers of a ballot initiative that led to the 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act. Privacy advocates see that law as a possible model for a national law. Reed also co-authored a chapter in a book published last month denouncing the federal law known as Section 230, which makes it impossible to sue internet companies over the content of user postings. Both Republicans and Democrats have called for reforming or abolishing 230, which critics say has allowed abuse to flourish on social media. Reed, a veteran political operative, was chief of staff for Biden from 2011 to 2013, when Biden was U.S. vice president. In that role, he succeeded Ron Klain, who was recently named incoming White House chief of staff. Reed then served as president of the Broad Foundation, a major Los Angeles philanthropic organization, and later as an adviser to Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective in Palo Alto, California.
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Biden's Top Tech Adviser Makes Regulation More Likely More

Biden's Top Tech Adviser Makes Regulation More Likely

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  • Good (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is great news. After 4 year of Orange Hitler we could use some regulation.

    • Yep.

      Big Corp has had it 100% their way for too long now. Time to shift the balance towards the little guys.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ruddk ( 5153113 )

        That is totally going to happen.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        No you silly person. This protects the pseudo celebrities, those lying asshats ability to lie about the quality of products for money. This is about protecting their reputation and the reputation of corrupt corporate executives and politicians.

        This obvious dividing line, real names or pseudonyms, curated (content controlled by the publisher, what they want people to SEE is seen), versus uncurated (the courts decide when something should be removed).

        Real name social media, uses a persons public identity to

    • I'll check the thread here later to find out how someone could possibly argue against improving consumer privacy protection laws.

      They'll be here soon, I'm sure.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ranton ( 36917 )

        I'll check the thread here later to find out how someone could possibly argue against improving consumer privacy protection laws.

        Easy. The people funding my next campaign don't like these new laws. I'll check the thread here later to find out how someone can possibly argue for a way to improve consumer privacy protection laws which put more money into my next election fund than the lobbyists I already work with.

      • I'll check the thread here later to find out how someone could possibly argue against improving consumer privacy protection laws.

        That may be part of this, but it's no one's primary goal. Everyone makes money from consumer data; nobody in a position of power is keen to cut off that gravy train. It may get some lip service though.

        federal law known as Section 230, which makes it impossible to sue internet companies over the content of user postings

        Here you go. The goal is content regulation The funny thing is both Ds and Rs want but for different reasons.

        1. Rs want to combat what they perceive as a left-leaning bias in the current application of their ToS.
        2. Ds want the (legal) ability to quash anything they decide is racist, hate speech, etc.

        • I agree with your assessment of the motivations of the two different mindsets. (I hesitate to call them parties because they certainly don't celebrate anything). However, what's the best way to deal with people who are spreading provable lies? Those that use overt and covert language to denigrate, threaten, or intimidate "others".

          all these forms of speech are protected under the First Amendment. One thought that comes to mind is a community reputation/labeling tag although given the nature people to form

  • Put me in the.... (Score:3)

    by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @03:21PM (#60758166) Homepage Journal
    ....I'll believe it when I see it group.

    Google/FB have waaaay too much money to throw at the US legislators to allow this to go through in any meaningful way.

    • They had just as much money to throw in California--and they also had to power to vote against the CA legislators. And yet it passed handily.

    • I am sure that democrats and Biden would regulate Google, Facebook or any Big tech after they did everything in their power to elect him. /s

      Give me a break. Democrats are the party of the rich elite.

  • I don't know why people think repealing this will help things. From the right-wing perspective, where they feverishly imagine they are being censored, it would obviously make twitter/facebook/etc... completely clamp down on anything even vaguely libelous/slanderous/dangerous. It would increase, not decrease, censorship.

    From the left wing, they may be happy with less disinformation and "harassment", but they will be sad when their own disinformation and harassment is also blocked.

    It also raises a constitutio

    • I don't recall anyone in the 1990's being scared to death of the government. They were scared of specific things (the clipper chip), but things like section 230 were asked for explicitly.

      As for letting people sue companies out of existence, well the Constitution prevents government from doing things. It doesn't prevent private citizens.

      • Right. Uhh, that's my point. In the 90's (I was kind of there...) people in tech wanted little regulation of new tech platforms.

        As for your second sentence, I'm not sure if you're serious. I guess I'll be Socratic and ask you a question - where exactly do civil trials take place and who enforces their outcome?

        • CDA 230 was a new tech regulation that provided immunity. Obviously, people want more things good for them, but that's separate from if it's from the government or not.

          As for your Socratic question, I'm going to respond in kind. I want to use my first amendment rights to paint giant murals extolling [insert horrific political group you disagree with], and I want to do it in your bedroom. Are you going to try to stop me? If so, who exactly manages the records (deeds) you appeal to say I cannot do it and

          • Trespassing - crime. Property damage - crime. So of course I will call the cops, I doubt they'll ask for a deed.

            What exactly is the criminal activity involved in legally selling a person a functioning weapon with no defects to a legal owner of said weapon? What exactly is the criminal activity in, say, slandering someone? There isn't one - it's a tort.

            So if I were an intrusive government who just wanted to do away with those pesky Constitutional requirements I would just make a whole bunch of torts and basi

            • And if I say that I own the house, and you are the one trespassing, do you think the cops will just side with you because of your smile? No, they'll use their computers to check official, government records against the name on your government ID.

              If you remove 230, I don't see how FB or Google survive at all, nor the non-star reviews on Amazon or Apple. And that's just the tip of iceburg.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Rhipf ( 525263 )

              You can make all the laws you want that someone can sue for whatever reason. That doesn't mean that if you do go to court you are going to win your case against XYZ. You don't even have to make a law that it is alright to sue gun manufacturers for the death their guns have a role in. Anyone can bring a civil lawsuit against any one else for any reason. There is no guarantee that your civil case will result in a ruling in your favour though.

    • We want the right regulation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Monday November 23, 2020 @04:11PM (#60758364)

      It's just bizarre to me as an old fogey remembering in the 90's when nerds were 100% scared to death of the govt stepping in to regulate things, now because of politics people on both sides are begging for them to do it.

      It's not bizarre at all. If regulation has to be had, you want it to be sensible. I don't LIKE paying taxes, but if I have to, I want it done in an intelligent way. I don't LIKE social distancing laws, but if I have to wear a mask and can't travel to other states during this spike, I want it enforced intelligently so I'm not wasting my time. The tech companies realize that self-regulation is not cutting it, so it's better to write regulations they can live with rather than letting the idiots in congress try it out without guidance. I want regulation. I work in tech and will be directly impacted. I want the bad actors disincentivized.

      As to the 90s, the 90s were a simpler time. If you wanted to publish a manifesto in 1999, you either had a horrible site on Geocities or some equivalent or you had to pay a monthly fee and learn HTML. There was a nice barrier to entry, so only smart and/or motivated people could easily spread information...and when they did, only people tech savvy enough to connect to the internet could read it. Most old and stupid people weren't online. Sure...stupid people have been online since day 1, but that's stupid tech-savvy folks. The dumbest fucks the world have to offer are now all online, especially on facebook. If you wanted to write a flat earth manifesto online in 1999, it wouldn't have gone too far because there simply weren't enough stupid people online that would ever read your geocities page. Now they're thriving facebook group and subreddit because we've drastically reduced the barriers to entry and, more scarily, sharing your dumbest brainfarts with a global audience.

      To me, the best example of that is that lady who flew to S Africa, made a really stupid racist AIDS joke on Twitter, went global, and was fired before she landed. Your stupid stupid poor judgment lapse of judgment mistake of a tweet can circulate the globe in an hour, gain a massive audience, and ruin your life. In 1999, I never could have fathomed the power that billions of people could read something I wrote if it was viral enough. I never could have fathomed deepfakes or foreign disinformation campaigns being so effective. I was on Slashdot in the 90s. I never could have fathomed the sheer number of ascii art swastikas posted here.

      Regulation is something that can't be ignored. We either need to think of some sensible regulations that work best for everyone or conclusively determine we don't need them. I am very nervous of gov action on this front and want the tech leaders to be involved in ways that make sense...for example, we can't stop hate speech, nor should we try at a gov level, but we can limit data collection on minors. We can say the large players need to take some action against bots, which would make a massive difference. Sites like twitter and facebook have a massive bot problem....so as an advertiser, am I paying to have people see my ad or just scripts? If it's a script, it's fraud, IMO. Why not regulate that they cannot bill you for bot view? Why not regulate that you have to explicitly bit of data you gather? Why not regulate that apps on the appstore disclose all costs? There are a lot of regulations around data collection and billing that would make life a lot better for everyone.

      • I never could have fathomed deepfakes

        You need to read more sci-fi.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

        In 1999, I never could have fathomed the power that billions of people could read something I wrote if it was viral enough.

        Sure you did :) Every single time you posted a message to usenet, it told you "This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing. Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [y / n]"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          I don't know what service you were using, but none of the services I used ever said that....or anything similar.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )

        o me, the best example of that is that lady who flew to S Africa, made a really stupid racist AIDS joke on Twitter, went global, and was fired before she landed. Your stupid stupid poor judgment lapse of judgment mistake of a tweet can circulate the globe in an hour, gain a massive audience, and ruin your life.

        This is only a good thing if you want to encourage more random acts of vengeance. To me, having your life ruined over a stupid joke is empirical evidence of intersection of technology and society malfunctioning in a major way. Seems like social media is choke-full of people eager to cast the first stone and they are being enabled by the platform to do so.

      • As much as I dislike the censorship done by big tech, at least I can move to an alternative platform. If one particular platform offers a "safe space" for the mental underclass of society, so be it. I would rather leave things as is than move to a model where the lawyers keep *any* independent thought from the light of day. If the law requires FB & everyone else to censor, then democracy is effectively dead... but if the law requires FB to abstain from censoring, most ordinary people who want that s

        • Yes, private censorship is bad, but regulation would effectively be an end-run around the first amendment, where nobody, anywhere - even those who can stand up their own websites - will be able to speak freely. If my ISP becomes liable for content I publish, then I will lose the even the ability to run servers.

          See, this is what Section 230 was all about. Your ISP (assuming they allow 80/443 traffic) wouldn't have to worry about being liable about what you put on a web server that you host, because they're providing a dumb pipe. As long as you pay the bill and aren't hosting child pr0n or a warez server, the ISP doesn't have to worry about providing you service to host (for example) a white supremacist website. Offensive, sure, but not your problem.

          The problem is with the sleight of hand that Twitter and Facebook

      • It's funny because the lady flying to S Africa did not make a racist joke. She made a commentary on how privileged she was and how little we think about people in third world countries. But because of precisely the thing you mention, dumb people incapable of basic nuance, she was fired. I guess poor judgement was true, she vastly overestimated people's cognitive abilities.

        I'm not arguing for no regulation. I'm talking about the real goal here. To the right wing, they want free rein to publish whatever crack

        • So which is it, do we force companies to censor the shit out of everything (left wing desire) or do we force the companies to not censor anything (right wing desire)?

          The Right Wing has a very very very long of censoring people, mostly for any content that portrayed homosexuality in a positive light. Don't you remember the 90s? It wasn't liberals writing angry letters to NBC because they aired comedies with gay characters. Some libertarians advocate for no censorship, but conservatives have been more than happy to legislate morality for fucking centuries. They're kind of known for it. Also, liberals are less about censorship and more canceling...something they learn

          • The conservatives had the right idea in the 90's. The world has become a perverse, polluted, depraved shit-hole for the loss of morality. I remember the 90's quite well, and they were paradise compared to this.

      • Counterpoint: https://timecube.2enp.com/ [2enp.com] a lovely archive of www.timecube.com circa 1997.

        But admittedly I don't think as many people have seen this as the AIDS tweet.

      • So if you have to stuff a hotdog up your ass, as long as you have to do it intelligently so that you're not wasting your time, you're OK with it?

        • So if you have to stuff a hotdog up your ass, as long as you have to do it intelligently so that you're not wasting your time, you're OK with it?

          ...feels good, man! Lets stay on topic and talk about things I don't want to have to do.

      • Or better yet... if you have to waste your time intelligently, so that you're not wasting your time, you're OK with it?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rhipf ( 525263 )

        Obviously you didn't use Usenet in the 90's. It didn't take all that much to set up a newsgroup (although getting others to propagate it wasn't always automatic) and there were newsgroup for a LOT of crazy things. Usenet wasn't as easy for fringe groups to use as Facebook is but it was still a rather strange place if you lurked around its fringes.

        • Obviously you didn't use Usenet in the 90's.

          ...usenet was pretty niche/fringe. Sure, you can write whatever you want there, but there was no algorithm actively promoting your nonsense. Only people recently reading your posts would ever see them and it was a tiny audience of tech savvy folks who were much more intelligent than the average facebook users.

          I could have typed out a manifesto and mailed it to every mailbox I could afford a stamp to back before the internet...it just didn't scale. I go back to that idiot woman, Justine Sacco, a 30y

    • Censorship is not necessary if the majority of people are capable of critical thinking. For most of my life that was the case. But recently, I have noticed that a great many people have become incapable or unwilling to engage in critical thinking.

      What's to be done? I leaned libertarian as a young man and I hate the idea of censorship.

      What if putting conspiracy fantasies in front of people who do not think critically is like giving whiskey to an alcoholic? Maybe pushing disinformation and fabrications on non

      • Oh, I agree. I'm concerned what the Trumptards are going to do. They are riling each other up with more and more bizarre conspiracy theories. We have a huge problem in that low-IQ people (and even some normal or high IQ people with mental illness) are able to find each other and feed off of one another.

        I have seen several grunt illiterately online about "If muh Trump says the word I'm ready with muh militia! Say the word, we'll get those Dominion using Kraken stopping pedos, buh gum!!". And this isn't in su

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I can't think of a time in modern history when people had more access to publishing than now.

        When could anyone make a video and broadcast it to the world for free before YouTube?

        When could anyone gain millions of followers and speak to all of them instantly for free before social media?

        Yeah there is censorship, but overall there is far more unfiltered speech nowadays than at any time before.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      The second amendment allows for carrying guns under the aegis of a well-regulated militia. In the current context, that's the National Guard. So you get to strut around with your silly guns under drills with your guard unit, that's it. No sneaky intimidating others thereby advertising that you are so frightened of your own shadow you need a gun to feel secure. You aren't fooling anyone, you are just a scared bunny.

      • No, it doesn't. Learn to read English.

        If I put up a sign in my store that says "Due to shoplifting by teens, no backpacks will be allowed on the premises" does that mean you can bring a backpack in if you don't plan to shoplift? Does it mean you can wear one if you're over 19? No, of course not.

        It's a parenthetical phrase. It's fucking risible that anyone would think they would make the second amendment about the ability of the national guard to carry weapons. Were they scared we'd be the only nation on ear

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      The problem is that they *are* editing the news stream. You can think of it in several different ways, but in any of them allowing them to avoid responsibility for their edits isn't reasonable.

      The problem, of course, is that the folks who get to decide when they're being unreasonable are the ones currently holding power (at any particular time).

      I don't see any good answer here except defending the presentation of the truth, and the question is "What is Truth?". It was valid when Pontius Pilate asked the q

    • One possibility is to consider the hoster a de-facto publisher only IF a content item is viewed by more than say 30k people. This wouldn't make the hosters have to sift every nook and cranny, only content with lots of views.

      For practical implementation, the hosters could have a threshold alarm "ring" at around 25k, giving them time to review the content. If there is a bouncer shortage, such as during a holiday or news spike, they can suppress further viewership until the bouncers return. The review workflo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sosume ( 680416 )

      What if your ISP labels all your outgoing mail with "the contents of this email are disputed"? This is what Twitter does. Section 230 should not apply.

  • This is an anti-piracy push by the MPAA/RIAA. The "abusive" speech is a farcical excuse to sugar coat the issue. At the end of the day almost all of that speech is legal and it's within the platforms rights to allow or deny it, being private entities. It's the copyright lobby that really wants it gone, so they can sue the companies directly over piracy. And it's not only the big platforms they are wanting to go after, it's the usenet providers, ISPs, and hosting providers as well. Right now they have to pla

    • Okay, less weed and more engaging the brain: Repealing 230 won't do shit to piracy since there's a whole different law that protects internet publishers from this and one which already overrules section 230. This little thing called the DMCA. You may have heard of it.

  • I am sure big tech will cry havoc and loose the lawyers and lobbyists.

  • The rest is OK, ... but that is fucked up.

    Like suing the building owner for somebody being an asshole on their premises.
    How's there even any logic to that?

    Dear police: That is YOUR job! YOUR entire point is to go after criminals! Walking the beat now includes websites! You do not get to offload that to third parties with no legal privileges!
    If you need a bigger budget to do your job... or rather more competence in automating most of that work... ask for that instead!

    Aside from the whole fact that... are we

  • So, in 2001, Turkey sentenced the forum operator of "SuperOnline" to 40 months of jail time (later converted to a monetary fine). Reason: some anonymous user posted an objectionable content, and they failed to identify him:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

    I work for a large tech company. Frankly, the "big tech" will have some issues, but it will be manageable (i.e.:: cost of doing business). But a small site operator will not want to risk jail or fines, and will just probably remove all user generated conte

  • This would make online forums disappear. Free speech will be gone. There's zero value in having to hire someone review to every comment (and then make mistakes). Think about it, if slashdot were responsible for all the nonsense you guys spew on here (myself not included, of course) ... would they exist? They'd be sued by everyone. All the crap people talk about Tesla and Apple .. for sure that would be lawsuit material. So the choice would be to not censor? Then they be spammed to hell the site would no lon

  • The future of the internet, as I imagine it based on government regulation and corporations killing free speech, reminds me a lot of America Online prior to 1993 (before it allowed access to the rest of the internet.) Here's hoping TOR, I2P or something else keeps things free. It's absolutely baffling but I guess in the future there will be money to be made by creating a search engine which actually searches.

  • From the makeup of his economics team, he seems to be more concerned with 'Systemic Racism' than people who give a shit about America's continued prosperity.

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