This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 9, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What does 2024 have in store for tech regulation

after a whirlwind year in 2023, in which courts generally turned away state-level

attempts at regulation and big cases are now pending before the US Supreme Court.

Caters David and Sarah and Jennifer Huddleston provide a

rundown. Before we get too deep into the specific individualized discrete

topics for future podcasts, it's worth sort of taking stock of the previous year and what we expect for

2024 with respect to tech regulation, most notably AI and other efforts to try to rein in or control the outlay of new technology, both at big firms and smaller upstart firms.

So let's start with how courts handled tech regulation in 2023.

Lena Khan of the Federal Trade Commission

has been undertaking a fairly ambitious effort

at attempting to control Big Tech to make tech feel more like a utility in many ways. So David, if you don't mind starting

us off, how did courts deal with a lot of the claims and feel free to

detail some of those claims from the federal government regarding so-called big tech?

Yeah, so we saw several decisions in in 2023,

including things dealing with California's age-appropriate design code.

And also we saw a decision against Montana's

Tik-Toc ban. Several of these types of decisions were we see as different

states, different governments, you mentioned the FTC,

different regulators are trying to limit the ability of tech companies

to create products that appeal to consumers and they are often trying to minimize some sort of

...