SAFE TECH Act

Subscribe to SAFE TECH Act

My law firm partner, Jonathan Cohen, has been closely monitoring the developments in the regulation of social media and other big tech platforms by the current administration.  He offers these thoughts on likely areas of legislative and regulatory action in this area in the coming year. 

Many nights, the last thing I do before falling asleep is put down my phone, and the first thing I do upon waking is pick it up.  I know I’m not alone in this.  And how many times have we made an online purchase from bed?  Internet-enabled digital technologies seem to have transformed life for most Americans, changing how we conduct business, connect with each other, and receive information and entertainment.  The advent of these technologies in recent years is what former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, in his 2019 book From Gutenberg to Google, calls the “third major network revolution,” after the invention of movable-type printing and the innovations in travel and communications brought about by railroads and the telegraph.  This new revolution is rapidly changing our information ecosystem.

Beyond the commercial opportunities and challenges presented for tech, media, and telecom companies, as well as content creators, the societal impact of this third major network revolution is fascinating and wide-ranging, but also potentially troubling.  Illustrating the power that tech platforms exert over us, Taylor Lorenz of The New York Times recently reported on a conversation she’d had with a 10-year-old boy who was disappointed that no photos were available when he Googled himself.  The boy felt that he wasn’t a real person until his photo came up in a Google search.  Leaving aside the numerous sociological implications of the tech revolution, the tech sector is under scrutiny as never before.  Its business model of tracking users’ online actions and using the data to sell targeted advertising and feed algorithmic amplification has been described by Harvard professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism.”  Others call it the “attention economy.”
Continue Reading Hot Topic for 2022: Tech Regulation

In recent months, we have seen concerted attempts to reign in digital and social media from all along the political spectrum – from Washington, in the states and even internationally.  We thought that we would look at some of those efforts and their motivations today.  We will look at many of these issues in more detail in future articles.

Towards the end of last year, the Trump Administration sought to strip social media platforms of Section 230 protections because of their alleged bias against conservative speakers (see our articles here and here).  A similar perception seems to underlie the recently proposed Florida legislation that seems to create for social media a policy similar to the equal opportunities (or “equal time”) policy that applies to broadcasters – a social media service cannot “de-platform” a political candidate if it allows the opposing candidate access to that platform.  That proposed legislation also has announced goals of requiring clear rules for access and editing of political views on such sites.  A press release about that legislation is here, though the actual text does not yet seem to be available for review.
Continue Reading Everyone Seems to Want to Regulate Online Media – But Can They?  Setting the Stage- Looking at the Range of Regulatory Proposals