Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast, your source for policy rants and raves from Tech Freedom,

your Washington, D.C. advocate for the freedom to tinker and innovate. I'm Evan Schwarzenstabber,

your host. On today's show, 20 years of internet regulation.

It's been 20 years since Congress passed the 1996 Telecom Act, and that was the first major

update to our nation's communications law since 34. Since then, no major update. So today we're

going to talk about what it got right and what it got wrong.

Joining me in our DC studio to discuss this is awkward dinner guest and president of Tech Freedom,

Baron Soka. Berrin, welcome back to the show.

You know, most people find me a charming dinner guest.

Well, Baron, you've been away from the show for a while now and we've never had more subscribers so is this a coincidence

probably not well we'll give it a try we'll do some a b testing today see if people like you again

so web 2.0 user generated content things like facebook and twitter these are things that today we can

take for granted because we've had them for so

long. But if our law in 1996 went a different way, we might never have seen these things succeed

or they might have been managed much differently. So this is an example where the act might

have gotten something right. Tell us about it. Yeah, it's what Adam Fear calls a negative

law. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act is probably the most important part of that law.

It basically said that online platforms wouldn't be treated the way that newspapers were under

traditional tort law. If you're a newspaper and you publish a letter to the editor, you're liable

for that if it's defamatory.

And so that liability is something that would have crushed online speech platforms simply for the reason of scale.

There's no way that you could screen the literally billions of photos and comments and videos that are posted online.

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