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

I'm Will Oremus.

And I'm April Glazer.

Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

We are recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 16th. On today's show, we'll talk about the latest stop on the net neutrality train and what the Senate is doing to throw a wrench in the FCC's gears.

We'll also discuss how Congress is set to renew a major piece of Internet mass surveillance legislation.

Later, we'll be joined by Siva Vadianathan, a professor of media studies at University of Virginia, to talk about Facebook's big changes to how its news feed works, and what they might mean for the way we read the news and talk to each other online. And lastly, don't close my tabs. Back by popular demand, thanks to those who asked where it went last week during our CES coverage. We'll be discussing our picks for the best on the web this week. All right, April. So we're back from CES in Las Vegas, and I think it was very rude of the tech world not to pause and stop making news while we were gone. Because there was a pause at CES, right? The lights went out in the middle of the largest consumer electronics show in the world. That was exciting. I was actually, I wrote about this for Slate, but I was actually on a Samsung VR ride at the time. And the funny thing was that nobody noticed the power had gone out because our little mobile

VR headsets were still showing this weird bobsled race that we were on.

And so the whole convention hall was in pandemonium and we were all still sitting there

watching our little VR game. So much for VR as a path to kind of increase people's empathy. I guess it depends on

everything. But no, the news did not stop. And one thing that kept chugging along is the Senate's

attempt to undo what the FCC did towards the end of last year, which was also to undo the net neutrality rules that were passed under President Obama.

You know, Senate Democrats are trying hard to gather enough votes to pass a Congressional Review Act, which would essentially kind of undo the FCC's kind of regulatory push that they passed at the end of December.

All right.

So help me out here.

So the FCC passed net neutrality rules under Obama.

And then the FCC came back this winter under Trump and Ajit Pai and they rolled back

those net neutrality rules. And now the Senate's trying to roll them forward again. Yeah, now the

Senate is trying to restore them essentially. And in order to do that, they need a majority in the

House and the Senate. They now have 50 votes they announced on Monday. They need 51 in the

Senate to push that along. And then, you know, of course, they need much more in the House, which is going to be a lot, you know, bigger uphill climb. And then the other issue with this is that Trump can choose not to to sign off on this, even if they do get a majority, you know, in both bodies. And so it's a big gamble.

And, you know, my assumption is that this will likely still kind of play out in the courts in terms of

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