Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future. I'm April

Glaser. And I'm Will Arrimus.

Hey everyone, welcome to If Then.

We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tets, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

We are recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 4th.

And Tuesday, September 4th is the first day of the Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Today we'll be joined once again by our slate colleague Mark Joseph Stern to help us make sense of what a Kavanaugh court might mean for the internet going forward.

Then we'll be joined by David Turner, a writer who covers music and technology and does a weekly newsletter about music streaming called Penny Fractions.

We'll talk to him about the state of music streaming. How does it work for artists? What are artists doing to push back against the streaming giants like Spotify, Apple, and YouTube? And we'll talk about some of the surprising ways in what streaming is actually changing music itself.

And lastly, we'll have Don't Close My Tabs, some of the most interesting stories we saw on the web this week. Cool. So, Will, how are you doing? I'm fine. I'm in air conditioning on another steamy summer day here in Delaware. How about you? I'm good. I'm in Berkeley, California at the Historic Fantasy Studios, which I believe are actually shuddering in two weeks.

So a little bummed about that, but always happy to be here. Yeah, it's an interesting place,

all kinds of jazz greats and actually hip hop grates and rock grades that are recorded here.

And journey, right. But I'm also really excited to jump right into it this week because we will be joined by Slate staff writer Mark Joseph Stern, who this time will be talking to us about Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who today is in day one of his nomination hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The hearing so far has been interrupted by protesters and Democrats have lambasted the entire ordeal for being rushed, in part in response to a Monday night document

dump of over 42,000 pages of information on Kavanaugh's tenure under George W. Bush's White

House. Kavanaugh's views on abortion and the Affordable Care Act have been the subject of most of the conversation about the nominee, but Kavanaugh also has a history and internet policy issues like surveillance and network neutrality. Mark, thanks so much for joining us, and you're with us from Washington, D.C. today, right? Yes, that's right. I'm here from Washington. Thank you so much for having me on. So let's start with net neutrality. Now that the net neutrality rules are repealed and groups have filed their challenges against the FCC's removal of the open Internet protections, could this filter up to the Supreme Court?

We know that Kavanaugh does believe that net neutrality actually infringes on the free speech rights of Internet providers.

So not right now because those rules have been repealed. As you know, this was being heavily

litigated before Trump's FCC came in and reversed those rules. But now that they are gone,

there's no real controversy for the Supreme Court to decide.

So that case is probably dead.

However, I am an optimist, and so I like to believe that eventually an open Internet will return to the United States.

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