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Digital Technology and the Regulatory State | Podcast Highlights

Blog Post | Communications

Digital Technology and the Regulatory State | Podcast Highlights

Chelsea Follett interviews Jennifer Huddleston about the benefits of digital technologies as well as how we should think about the risks and problems they pose.

Jennifer Huddleston —

Read the full transcript or listen to the podcast here.

We hear so much about the risks and downsides of technology. What are some areas where you believe digital technologies have improved our lives?

There are so many areas that we’ve seen transformed by technology over the last decade. Think about when we were faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, and so much of our lives shifted to our homes. Now imagine if that same thing had happened in 2010. How different would that have been? How much more limited would the options have been to stay connected to friends and family, entertain yourself at home, and continue your education and job?

Because the US has maintained a light-touch regulatory approach to the technology sector, we empowered entrepreneurs to create products that benefit consumers, sometimes in ways that we never could have imagined. I still remember the days when you had to have atlases in your car. And I remember when MapQuest seemed like such a huge deal. Now, if you’re going somewhere new, you often don’t even look it up in advance.

I’m hearing a lot of calls for more regulation of digital technologies. President Biden is saying we need to clamp down on AI, while Nikki Haley has said we must deanonymize social media. What are some of the dangers of over-regulating these technologies?

I’m going to start by asking you a question. How often do you think you use AI?

When it comes to ChatGPT, every few days. But I’m sure that what you’re hinting at is that AI is incorporated into far more than we’re even aware of.

Exactly. Most of us have been using AI for much longer than we realize. Search engines and navigation apps use AI. If you’ve ever tried to do a return and interacted with a chatbot, some of that is possible because of advances in AI. We’ve also benefited from AI in indirect ways. For example, AI can be used to help predict forest fires and to assist in medical research. Because AI is such a general-purpose technology, a lot of the calls for regulation may lead to fewer of those beneficial applications and could even make it harder to use many of the applications we’re already used to.

Oftentimes, people just don’t think about the consequences of regulation. When we think about an issue like anonymous speech, many people immediately jump to their negative experiences with anonymous trolls online. But we should also think about the costs of deanonymizing speech. Think about dissidents trying to communicate with journalists or people trying to alert each other to social problems in authoritarian regimes. Anonymous speech is incredibly valuable to those people, and we have a long-standing tradition of protecting that kind of speech in the US. When we look at creating backdoors or deanonymizing things, that’s not just going to be used for going after the bad guys. It’s also going to be exploited by a whole range of bad actors.

And this country was arguably founded on a tradition of pseudonymous and anonymous speech; think of the Federalist Papers.

Right.

What do you think is driving this distrust of new technologies?

Disruptive new technologies like social media and artificial intelligence are naturally going to make us uncomfortable. They create new ways of doing things and force societal norms to evolve. This is something that happened in the past, for example, with the camera. We’re now used to having cameras everywhere, but we had to develop norms around when, where, and how we can take pictures. With AI, we’re watching that process happen in real-time.

The good news is that we’re adapting to new technologies faster than ever. When you look at the level of adoption of technologies like ChatGPT and the comfort level that younger people have with them, innovations seem to be becoming socially acceptable at a much quicker pace than in the past.

The current technology panics are also not unique to the present. We’ve seen a lot of concern about young people and social media recently, but before that, it was young people and video games, and before that, it was magazines and comic books. We even have articles from back in the day of people complaining that young people were reading too many novels.

There’s also this fear of tech companies having too much market share. Can you walk us through that concern and provide your take on it?

I’m sure you’re talking about Myspace’s natural monopoly on social media. Or maybe you’re talking about how Yahoo won the search wars. These were very real headlines 20 years ago with a different set of technology giants. So, my first point is that innovation is our best competition policy.

My second point is that before we implement competition policy, we need to figure out why big companies are popular. If a company is popular because it’s serving its consumers well, that’s not a problem; that’s something we should be applauding. When we think about incredibly popular products like Amazon’s Prime program, people choose to engage with it because they find it beneficial.

We should really only want to see antitrust or competition policy used if anti-competitive behavior is harming consumers. We don’t want a competition policy that presumes big is bad. And we certainly don’t want to see competition policy that focuses on competitors rather than consumers. We don’t want a world where the government dictates that the Model T can’t put the horseshoe guys out of business.

People of all stripes want to restrict how private companies moderate content. People on the left are concerned about potential misinformation online, while those on the right worry about political bias in content moderation. What’s your take on this issue?

Online content moderation matters for a lot more than social media. We often think about this in the context of, “Did X take down a certain piece of content or leave up a certain piece of content?” But this is actually much bigger. Think about your favorite review site. If you travel and you’re going to a new place and looking for somewhere to stay or go to dinner, you’re probably going to go to your favorite review site rather than read what some famous travel reporter has said.

The review sites allow you to find reviewers with your same needs. Maybe you’re traveling with young children, or you have someone with dietary restrictions. This is something that only user-generated content can provide. But what about bad or unfair reviews? What happens when someone starts trying to get bad reviews taken down? We want these sites to be able to set rules that keep reviews honest, that keep the tool useful, where they’re not being overrun by spam, and they aren’t afraid of a lawsuit from someone who disagrees with a review.

This is one example of why we should be concerned about these online content moderation policies. When it comes to questions of misinformation, I think it’s important to take a step back and think, “Would I want the person I most disagree with to have the power to dictate what was said on this topic?” Because if we give the government the power to label misinformation and moderate content, the government will have that power whether or not the people you agree with are in charge. So not only do we have First Amendment concerns here in the US from a legal point of view, but we should also have some pretty big first principles concerns regarding some of these proposals.

That’s a good segue into another concern a lot of people have with new technology, which is its effect on young people. What do you make of those concerns?

Youth online safety can mean so many different things. Some people are concerned about how much time their child spends online. Some people are concerned about issues related to online predators. Others are just concerned about particular types of content that they don’t want their children exposed to. The good news is we’ve seen the market respond to a lot of these concerns, and there are a lot of tools and choices available to parents.

The first choice is just when you allow your child to use certain technology. That’s going to vary from family to family. But even once you’ve decided to allow your child to have access to a device, you can set time limits or systems that alert you to how the child is using the device. There, we have seen platforms, device makers, and civil society respond with a great deal of tools and resources for parents. To reduce harm to children, we should look to education rather than regulation. We need to empower people to make the choices that work best for them because this isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all decision, and policy intervention will result in a one-size solution.

Many people are also concerned about privacy. Whenever there is a large gathering of data, that data can be leaked to the government or to bad actors. How should we think about data privacy?

When we talk about privacy, I think it’s important to distinguish between the government and private actors. We need very strong privacy protections against government surveillance, not only for consumers but also for the companies themselves, so that they can protect their consumers and keep the promises they’ve made to consumers regarding data privacy.

When it comes to individual companies, we need to think about the fact that there are a lot of choices when it comes to data privacy, some of which we don’t even think are data privacy choices.

One example is if you go to a website and sign up for a newsletter in order to get a ten percent off coupon, you’re technically exchanging a bit of data, such as your email address, for that 10 percent off coupon. You get a direct benefit in that moment. That’s a privacy choice you make. If we think about privacy as a choice, we start to see that we make these choices every day. Even where we choose to have a conversation is a data privacy choice.

The other element when it comes to data privacy is that an individual’s data, while we deeply care about it, is not actually that valuable. What’s been valuable is how data can be used in the aggregate to improve services. So, when we hear that we should just treat data like any other piece of property, it doesn’t necessarily work because data doesn’t act like other forms of property in many cases. Not only is the value of the data not tied to a single data point, but the data also is often not tied to a single user. This makes regulating data privacy very complicated. If you and I are in a picture together, whose data is that? Is it the person who took the picture’s or people in the picture’s? Or does it belong to the location we were in while taking the picture? Can you invoke a right to be forgotten that removes the picture? And if so, then what does that do to the person who took the picture’s speech rights? These are not easy questions, and they’re often better solved on an individual basis than with a one-size-fits-all approach.

Blog Post | Human Development

A Feast of Human Progress and Abundance

Let’s give thanks for how far we’ve come since the time of the Pilgrims.

Adam Omary —

Summary: A family group chat about Thanksgiving dinner reflects centuries of extraordinary advancement. The same journey that once separated families by months can now be made in hours. A meal that was once a rare luxury has become highly affordable. From instant communication to abundant food, everyday conveniences serve as a reminder that human ingenuity has transformed hardship into prosperity.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, my sister sent a link to our family group chat. It wasn’t an RSVP form; it was closer to an online wedding gift registry. All the Thanksgiving classic foodstuffs were on the list—turkey, honey baked ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, candied yams, green bean casserole, pumpkin pie, and more—each with a sign-up slot to commit to bringing the goods. This brief interaction represented numerous aspects of human progress, and I paused to take it in with awe and gratitude.

For one, I live in Boston, not far from where the original Thanksgiving Pilgrims settled in Plymouth, while my family lives in Los Angeles. The distance between us is almost identical to the distance between Britain and the New World, roughly 3,000 miles across land instead of ocean. Yet, the majority of Pilgrims never returned home and never even had the opportunity to stay in contact with the world they left behind. A letter across the Atlantic would cost days’ worth of wages and take months to arrive, if it found safe passage at all.

By the time the first Americans began settling in California in the 1840s, locomotives and the telegraph had been invented, but no transcontinental systems had yet been established. Most westward settlers knew they were signing up for a one-way journey taking many months, with high rates of death and disease. If they could maintain any contact with family on the other side of the continent, messages would take weeks via stagecoach. Even the extraordinarily speedy and expensive Pony Express system—with riders galloping nonstop at full speed, exchanging horses every 10-15 miles, and exchanging riders once or twice a day—still took 10 days to deliver messages across the country.

By the time the first transcontinental telegraph line was established in 1861, messages took minutes rather than weeks but were extraordinarily expensive—nearly a day’s average wage per word. Messages had to be brief and were largely reserved for the government, the military, and the ultra-wealthy. However, a decade later, the first transcontinental railroad was established, which, with the adoption of standardized domestic postage, meant most Americans could afford to send letters across the country and have them arrive within a week. Travel between Los Angeles and Boston became possible but still took weeks and cost several weeks’ worth of average wages.

Innovation accelerated even more rapidly during the 20th century with the invention and commercialization of telephones and air travel. By 1950, the luxuries of traveling between coasts in six hours and communicating across coasts in real time became possible. But these new services were still extraordinarily expensive. Transcontinental flights, both then and now, cost around $300; however, adjusted for inflation, a $300 flight in 1950 corresponds to well over $3,000 in today’s dollars. Likewise, while modern phone plans offer unlimited texts and calls for the equivalent of a few hours of the average minimum wage per month, transcontinental phone calls in the 1950s cost over $2.00 per minute, or over $27 per minute in today’s dollars. Only in the last 30 years, thanks to the economic engine of progress, did it become affordable for the average American to call long-distance for hours.

The technologies enabling long-distance communication and travel have improved immeasurably from the time of the Pilgrims.  That alone is reason enough to be thankful. But besides the amazing pocket-sized supercomputers and the satellite infrastructure that made my family’s group message possible, our exchange hinted at another amazing development that people often take for granted: food abundance.

My father grew up in a small Palestinian village in northern Israel, where most people were farmers. He was one of nine siblings and told stories of how chickens were slaughtered only on special occasions—red meat even rarer. A single bird was shared among a dozen people. “You were lucky if you got a drumstick,” my father said. Everything from feeding to slaughtering and plucking was done by hand. And without refrigeration, the meal had to be eaten at once.

By contrast, in the United States today, food is so cheap and plentiful that several relatives can volunteer to bring a whole turkey. At my local supermarket, frozen birds were recently on sale for $0.47 per pound. A 15-pound turkey, enough to feed a family, costs less than an hour’s minimum wage.

I am grateful for the world of superabundance, which has improved our lives and Thanksgiving holidays beyond what our ancestors could have dreamed. The fact that these interactions are commonplace enough to be taken for granted—communicating in real time across vast distances, flying across the country or around the world in hours, earning enough calories with a day’s wages to feed a family for a week—make our story of progress all the better.

This Thanksgiving, take a moment to consider how life has improved since the time of the Pilgrims. The food on your plate, the technology in your pocket, and the family who traveled long distances to be at the table were all made possible thanks to generations of compounding progress.

The Keyword | Science & Technology

New Updates and More Access to Google Earth AI

“When disasters strike, Google products like Search and Maps help billions of people make critical decisions to stay safe. Our flood forecasting information — now covering more than two billion people — provides life-saving forecasts before the most significant river floods. It’s helped organizations like World Vision get drinking water and food to communities when they need it most. And during the devastating 2025 California wildfires, we provided crisis alerts with information from local authorities to 15 million people across Los Angeles while showing them where to find shelter in Google Maps. This is all made possible by our geospatial AI models, not only for floods and wildfires, but cyclones, air quality and many more.

We recently introduced Google Earth AI, bringing together these geospatial models to help tackle the planet’s most critical needs. Earth AI is built on decades modeling the world, combined with state of the art predictive models and Gemini’s advanced reasoning, letting enterprises, cities and nonprofits achieve deeper understanding in minutes…

Gemini capabilities in Google Earth enable analysts to quickly understand information about the world just by asking questions. Now, we’re bringing new Earth AI models to Gemini capabilities in Google Earth, letting users instantly find objects and discover patterns from satellite imagery.

For example, a water company can now spot where a river has dried up — which can help communities predict the risk of dust storms during a drought — and notify people in advance. Or, analysts can quickly identify where harmful algae is blooming in order to monitor drinking water supply, giving authorities time to issue warnings or shut down water utilities.

This experimental capability will be available in the U.S. in the coming weeks to Google Earth Professional and Professional Advanced users.”

From The Keyword.

UCL | Communications

UK Neuralink Patient Uses Thought to Control Computer

“A patient with motor neurone disease was able to control a computer just by using his thoughts following the UK’s first Neuralink implant surgery in a study led by UCL and UCLH clinical researchers.

The surgery is part of the GB-PRIME study evaluating the safety and functionality of Neuralink’s robotically implanted brain-computer interface (BCI), which aims to improve independence for people who are paralysed. 

The surgery, which took place at UCLH’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN) in October 2025, went as planned, and on the day following the procedure, the patient was able to begin using their BCI implant to move a computer cursor with their thoughts and to return home from the hospital.”

From UCL.

The Verge | Space

SpaceX Launches 10,000th Starlink Internet Satellite

“On Sunday, SpaceX launched 56 additional Starlink satellites on separate Falcon 9 rockets, surpassing 10,000 total satellites launched into low Earth orbit to date. The milestone was reached on board the 132nd Falcon 9 launch of 2025, tying the previous annual launch record with more than two full months to go in the year.

Of those 10k satellites, only about 8,608 are currently operational, according to Jonathan McDowell’s satellite tracker calculations. Starlink satellites have a lifespan of roughly five years before they’re intentionally de-orbited to burn up in the atmosphere. The first Starlink prototypes launched in February 2018 ahead of its 2021 commercial service offering.

SpaceX has approval to launch 12,000 satellites — with over 30,000 planned — to bring fast, low-latency internet to the world.”

From The Verge.