The Tech Policy Press Podcast

On Oct. 6, the Privacy Center at Georgetown Law hosted Life After Data: The Conference on De-datafication, which asked participants to imagine a future in which digital data is no longer the currency that mediates our social, economic and political lives — and how we might get there.
One provocation on the program asked whether it might make sense, now or someday, to abandon the internet itself. Tech Policy Press put that question to its readers, inviting two-minute voice memos in response. In this episode, produced by Rebecca Rand, you’ll hear from author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff; Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School director Anika Collier Navaroli; Bridget Todd, author and host of iHeartRadio’s “There Are No Girls on the Internet”; Konstantinos Komaitis, resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council; Caddie Alford, associate professor of rhetoric at Virginia Commonwealth University, who shared her students’ responses; Janet Vertesi, associate professor of sociology at Princeton; Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society; Liz Orembo of Research ICT Africa; Robin Berjon of the Modal Foundation; and B Cavello, director of emerging technologies at the Aspen Institute.

Tech Policy Press and the Privacy Center at Georgetown Law are hosting a series of events dubbed The Edge Dialogues. The goal is to discuss ideas a are upstream of typical tech policy debates. The first guest in the series is Dr. Alondra Nelson, the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science and founding director of the Science, Technology and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study. She joined Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix and Privacy Center executive director Emily Tucker for a live discussion on October 22.

Google is an illegal monopolist. That is the finding of two federal judges in landmark antitrust cases over the company’s dominance of online search and advertising technology. But when it came time to order remedies, neither judge broke up the company. To discuss what the remedies mean for competition and for the broader effort to hold big tech firms accountable to democracy, particularly in the AI era, Justin Hendrix spoke with Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, and Mihir Kshirsagar, who leads the Tech Policy Clinic at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP).

In this episode, Tech Policy Press deputy editor Ramsha Jahangir examines the latest developments in Europe’s AI policy debate, from the push for safe, trusted and resilient AI to renewed calls for legislation on AI liability.
Risto Uuk, head of European policy and research at the Future of Life Institute, joins the podcast to discuss the emerging risks and the broader policy landscape. Then, Ramsha interviews Brando Benifei, a Member of the European Parliament, about the gaps left by the withdrawal of the proposed AI Liability Directive, the challenges of assigning responsibility across the AI value chain, and the case for a renewed European approach.

In the daily surge of news and headlines about technology, it can be hard for any journalist to fully contextualize the individual events they are reporting on and trace the underlying patterns, structures, and ideas that are producing them. Today’s guest excels at just that, covering one of the most complicated beats in technology journalism. Natasha Singer is a technology reporter for The New York Times, where she has spent more than a decade investigating how tech shapes schools. Her new book is Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools, published by W.W. Norton.