Silicon Valley’s Rep. Ro Khanna talks tech regulation

On this week’s interview episode, Nilay is joined by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Verge policy reporter Makena Kelly to discuss Congress’ plans to regulate Big Tech in the new year. Earlier this month, Democrats were able to take back a majority in the House of Representatives, and after blockbuster events this year like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, lawmakers are gearing up to rein in these Silicon Valley giants. Khanna, who represents the California district that houses the Apple and Google campuses, was tasked with developing a set of principles these companies should abide by when it comes to issues like privacy, net neutrality, and anti-competitive behavior. He made the rounds, consulting with think tanks, the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, and the tech companies themselves. From those discussions, Khanna was able to put forth a framework of 10 rights US citizens should have when they’re on the internet. Khanna’s set of principles is called the “Internet Bill of Rights,” and with Democrats recapturing the House, tech leaders like Khanna have a chance to codify ideas like these into laws. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Dell. Before we begin, here's a word from Dell.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:30Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Yonah from The Vergecast. This week on the interview episode, we have Representative Ro Khanna, who is the congressperson for California's 17th District. That's a district that has Apple and Google in it. He just was elected to his second term in Congress, and I asked new Verge policy reporter McKenna Kelly to join me. We talked about everything from data privacy to net neutrality to anti-competitive behavior from the tech industry. Last year, Representative Khanna wrote the Internet Bill of Rights. He was actually assigned to this task by Nancy Pelosi after all of the various scandals that rocked the tech industry. We talked about that a little, but really, we talked about what happens now that the Democrats have won the House of Representatives, how they're going to work with Republicans, and whether, even if they miraculously pass a bill in Congress, whether President Trump is going to sign anything.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  We also talked about how the United States' approach to regulating tech companies has to be different than Europe's. I will say, he took some shots at European tech companies, which is pretty good. And I'll just put this out there, I'm pretty sure he pitched us a Snapchat subscription program. Look, I've interviewed a lot of politicians. Usually, it's really boring, and they dance and weave, but Representative Khanna actually answered the questions, which is some of the highest praise I can give. Check it out, it was a pretty fun conversation. So we are here with Representative Ro Khanna from the 17th District of California. Welcome.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  So you are a fascinating congressperson to talk to, because in your district lies both Apple and Google. And you recently wrote the Internet Bill of Rights, which I want to talk about, which lays out a plan to codify things like net neutrality and-- Privacy, but even more interestingly, you are a Democrat at a time when the Democrats have recently retaken the House of Representatives. And so the first question I want to ask is what should people expect from tech policy, from privacy, from net neutrality legislation? Are things going to immediately start changing? Are you just going to start passing laws and see what happens? Or is it going to be a more of a slow roll? How should people expect the new Congress to handle these issues?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Well, they should expect action. There was no action taken in the last Congress after massive breaches of people's data, whether that was Equifax or Facebook, or more recently, Google. And people want to have some assurance that their privacy, their data is going to be protected. This stuff isn't rocket science. We know what we need. We need a basic protection for people having access to their data and knowing where their data is. They should be notified if there's a breach. They should be able to move their data. And I expect that our Energy and Commerce Committee will take this up, and we should get something passed within six months, at least through that committee.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Jan Schakowsky already has a bill that has some of these principles in it. And I think if we can't deliver, we should consider changing the leadership of that committee. But the committee needs to deliver.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  So is that priority number one? Data privacy, data transparency?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  In terms of technology, I mean, the House Caucus has, of course, the priorities of healthcare, which we ran on, on minimum wage, infrastructure. But I think in terms of technology, having privacy and data security for people online is something that we should pass first.

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  You know, we had the series of sort of hearings last year that were kind of spectacles. We're going to drag up CEOs, then we're going to ask Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook makes money, which is not a secret. Do you think the new Congress is going to be smarter about even understanding these companies? Do you think that the regulation will be more tailored?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  We've got a long way to go. The ignorance was bipartisan. I don't think it was particular to one party. And some of the questions frankly were embarrassing. And the staff, some of the staff of these committees don't have the technical expertise to really be thinking through these issues. And it's not that you need them to be computer scientists. It's just having a basic willingness to engage outside the halls of Congress and engage with technologists, engage with experts to have well-crafted regulations. Because what you don't want is regulation without thought. Let me give you an example. Everyone is for a notification if there is a data breach. Obviously, you should be notified.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  But what if there's a case where a company knows that if they notify in a case of a data breach, that's going to trigger more data breaches and they want some exception to fix the problem before notification? Well, that's a slightly nuanced issue, but you should have a regulation that deals with that so you're not forcing notification in the case where that's actually going to make the breach worse. My point is like that, every one of these principles is going to have a complexity and nuance that is going to require people to engage with technology experts. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to do it in this Congress. I'd be more confident if we reach out to an expertise beyond the halls of Congress.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Do you think that you'll have to compromise with Republicans when it comes to passing, either it be like data privacy legislation or net neutrality legislation? Because it seems like Republicans have been a little more focused on content moderation in the last couple hearings that we saw, especially the one in energy and commerce. They were kind of interested in conservative bias on these platforms. Do you think there'll have to be some kind of compromise?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, first let me address the conservative bias part. I really don't understand it. The people who benefited the most, the person who benefited the most from these platforms was Donald Trump. I mean, if you ask Facebook or Google or Twitter, they'll tell you that Donald Trump outperformed Hillary Clinton on all of these platforms. So if anything, there was a bias towards conservative speech. Second, You know, I know they trot out these statistics that Google employees all contributed to Hillary Clinton and didn't contribute to Donald Trump. Here's what no one's asking the question. Why are the rules different for Fox News or MSNBC? Matthew Genko at Stanford did a paper which showed that the polarization in this country

• 6:31Speaker 02

  in 2016 was far more a result of cable news and talk radio than social media. So, the fact that you may have a point of view by people who are private executives doesn't mean that the platform's algorithms are biased. But even if these platforms were biased, and I don't think they are, that's not a legal issue. When they start disciplining Fox News for bias, then we could talk about disciplining any other company. But they're all private companies. So, that's not a real effort to get something thoughtful. Randall Stephenson, I was just at a Wall Street Journal conference in technology, and

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Randall Stephenson was the AT&T CEO, said that he now supports net neutrality. He thinks there should be a right to people knowing their data, the right to be able to move their data, and he thinks these things are really simple. I found that encouraging. You know, if folks like AT&T CEO and others get on board with basic net neutrality and basic privacy, then I think you could get Republican support as well. And as he put it, it's in his interest that you don't have 50 different states having their own privacy rules, and you don't have a ping pong between administrations and net neutrality, and Congress codifies something for predictability. So, I think you will get at least some Republican votes.

• 7:55Nilay Patel?

  So, that's actually really interesting because you represent California. California passed a statewide net neutrality rule that really codified the old Wheeler net neutrality rules. Do you think that's going to work? Is that just leverage to get you in Congress to do something? Or do you think that is going to hold up when it's being challenged in court? Do you think that's going to hold up?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  I do think it will hold up, although who knows if it goes all the way to this Supreme Court, but for a court that has emphasized states as laboratories of innovation and states' rights to be able to do things, it would be pretty hypocritical for them to say states have rights when it comes to gun laws, but not when it comes to laws regarding the Internet or privacy, and especially when the federal government hasn't spoken. So you don't have federal preemption in this case. You don't have the federal government having taken a position. I do think that it makes sense to have federal legislation on net neutrality, and the concept of net neutrality is so simple. I mean, we make this very complicated. The political part of it is just saying that no one should be discriminated against for

• 8:58Speaker 02

  political speech, and that is something that I think everyone would agree on. And on the business part of it, it's just saying that you shouldn't be able to charge startups or entrepreneurs more money to access the Internet than large companies. And that's a pro-startup, pro-innovation policy that's important for American competitiveness. And so I do think that we will get some framework on net neutrality.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  I think it's kind of important, too, to bring up preemption, which is something that Republicans, especially in industry groups, have been bringing up with net neutrality legislation, with privacy, data privacy legislation, and things like that. Preemption would basically just, if passed in a federal law, would basically not allow any states to pass their own rules, rules that could later on be stricter than what is passed at the federal level.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So here's my big question about Randall Stevenson in particular, and I'll just disclose this now. One of the investors in Vox Media and The Verge is Comcast NBC Universal. They don't love me, but I'm just letting everybody know that they're an investor in the company. But you know, when the neutrality fight was going on, Comcast was out there saying, "We need a law. What we actually want is a law." And now you have AT&T saying, "You know what we need is a law. We want a federal law that preempts the state-by-state approach." And obviously, the danger is, one, regulatory capture. So you'll get the big companies in, they'll do their lobbying, you'll get a weaker net neutrality law. There's what you described as basic net neutrality, which is, I think, Chairman Powell was for, you know, you're sort of no blocking, no locking,

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  but we're going to allow throttling because we think that's a good business. Do you think we need strict net neutrality, no throttling whatsoever, equal access to everybody? Or are you willing to see some fuzziness around the edges?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  No, I think no throttling is part of the basics. And Randall Stevenson yesterday at least said that he thought no throttling was also going to be part of the basic package and throttling, of course, is making it slower for some people and faster for others. So I personally think Wheeler's Order is about where we need legislation and that's something that's going to help American consumers because they're going to want not be nickelled and dimed on the internet, being charged, if you don't have net neutrality, you could be charged one thing for using email, another thing for using social media, another thing for using web services. And the internet would become basically like cable. People would be charged based on different services and companies, startups would be priced out.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  You would never have Netflix having emerged if you didn't have some basic net neutrality or it was very, very hard for Netflix. So I think a robust defense of net neutrality is not just the right policy for democracy, it's also the right policy for innovation and economic growth. And the Democrats shouldn't compromise on something that's going to hurt the country when I think the vast majority of people support net neutrality.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  So you brought up healthcare at the very top as a high on the list Democratic priorities. Net neutrality, the Democrats ran on it, Republicans have opposed it. Was that a winning, was net neutrality a winning issue for you on the order of healthcare? Do you talk about it when you were out campaigning?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  I did, but I'm in a very unique district in Silicon Valley. And, you know, I think Beto O'Rourke talked about it at college campuses, but, you know, I don't want to pretend that net neutrality is something that's a winning issue across the country. It's an issue that is on our side, but people still fundamentally care about good paying jobs, about getting a pay raise, about making sure that their deductibles and premiums aren't going up for healthcare.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so let me tie these two together. I think I've woven my rhetorical strands. Okay, so you have the majority in the House, Democrats around net neutrality. You got Randall Stevenson saying, okay, let's do it. You pass the bill in the House, maybe you pick up a couple of Republicans. Let's say a miracle happens, you pass it through the Senate, which is still controlled by the Republican Party, and you gotta send it to this guy, President Trump, who once tweeted that net neutrality was, and I quote, "Obamacare for the internet. I've no idea what this means, but I managed to link healthcare and net neutrality in one's claim." Do you think you can pass a bill that Trump would sign on net neutrality?

• 13:07Speaker 02

  I do, because I don't think Trump cares that much about it. Trump was also for Medicare for All in his book, America We Deserve in 2000. He said the Canadian healthcare system is better than ours, and I'm for Medicare for All. And then, of course, he conveniently forgot all of that when he ran for president. So I think on net neutrality, I don't think this is an issue that his base cares deeply about. I think he's probably going to be swayed by the last person who talked to him on it. It's not a place where I see him spending a lot of political capital. I could see him spending political capital on immigration, on other issues, but I do think this is something, if we could get the House and Senate, that the president could

• 13:51Speaker 02

  be talked into signing.

• 13:53Nilay Patel?

  So, speaking of the president, yesterday, he tweeted that Comcast NBCU was an antitrust problem. He obviously sent his Justice Department after AT&T, Tim Warner. Competition policy is one of those things that is in your Bill of Rights. How do we make these platforms more competitive? How do we reduce anti-competitive behavior? But vertical media mergers is adjacent to that, if not completely tangential. Do you think the renewed sort of antitrust focus of the Trump DOJ will bleed into tech? Do you think they'll break up Facebook?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  I don't know if they're gonna go break up Facebook, and it would be a big challenge for Trump, who cares about America and innovation and America outpacing China. I mean, the one place that's working in the economy is Silicon Valley. It's a good thing that Apple, Google, Facebook... Microsoft, Amazon, or American companies. Imagine if they were Chinese companies or German companies. That said, there does need to be more antitrust scrutiny. I think when Facebook had acquired WhatsApp or Instagram, which are horizontal competitors, in retrospect, the FTC should have reviewed those. I think there'd be very few people who today would say that those mergers should have gone through without any review. You could have made the case back then that the FTC wouldn't have realized how big of

• 15:06Speaker 02

  a platform Instagram would become, and maybe they would have still allowed the merger. But I do think that you have to strengthen the FTC and the Department of Justice to make sure that large-scale mergers are being reviewed, and also that they're not anti-competitive practices, that these tech companies aren't using their own platforms to privilege their own content. That said, you know, the history of Silicon Valley has been one where yesterday's dominant firms are no longer as relevant. If you had talked in the 1990s and said who was going to be dominant in search, you would have had everyone say Microsoft Bing. Today, 90% of Americans couldn't name Bing.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  So I don't think it was the Department of Justice's antitrust suit that brought them, Microsoft, to lose their competitive advantage. It was two brilliant folks at Stanford, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. So who knows what the next technology companies will be? I'm sure there's some young entrepreneur today thinking about a social media platform that protects privacy and that doesn't bombard you with propaganda from politicians like Ro Khanna or Donald Trump or whoever. And, you know, maybe they'll charge a subscription fee, and that could take off. So I say all of this because I'm not an apologist. I definitely think that the social media companies have more responsibility. There needs to be better antitrust enforcement.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  But I'd be cautious of thinking that these are somehow companies that are going to remain dominant for the next 30 years.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

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• 18:15Nilay Patel?

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• 18:27Speaker 03

  You mentioned that if Facebook were to acquire WhatsApp or Instagram today, it probably wouldn't happen. What do you think has changed in the past couple of years to make that something that would never happen now?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, first of all, I'm not sure if it would never happen, but it would certainly be scrutinized. And I think what's changed is there is a recognition that technology, while it has extraordinary benefits, also has dark sides and downsides. So everyone knew about the Arab Spring, and I still believe that Facebook has encouraged Parkland kids to mobilize and have their voice heard, and has allowed a platform for ordinary citizens to have a greater voice and for families to share experiences. But now, today, we know that there are dark sides. I mean, the brutal murders in Myanmar, where Facebook was not aware that people were using Burmese language to basically encourage killings

• 19:26Speaker 02

  or mob lynchings overseas, has made us realize that these platforms, when they are very, very, very large and have no competition, can also facilitate things that are not good for humanity, and that there needs to be a role for oversight and regulation, and that we want to have competition so that they're continually improving.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  So it's interesting. We had Tim Wu on the show a couple of months ago. His book just came out, The Curse of Bigness. You know, his entire argument is the economy should work for the American people, and that the mechanism of working for the American people is actual competition. He goes so far, say, you know, we should just break them all up, just peel off Instagram, call it a day, it'll be fine. But how do you, if, without going that far, how do you increase competition for a company like Facebook in a way that has some effect on how they operate overseas?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Well, it's a very tough question. I mean, I do think you need to strengthen the FTC and require more disclosure of data, require data portability, let people be able to take their social graphs off of Facebook and move it to another platform. Make sure that if there are anti-competitive practices, that the FTC is cracking down on those practices. And then you need to create an environment that has capital and talent for startups. So not just startups at Silicon Valley, but startups across the country. I mean, we have seen that new business formation in this country has slowed down. New startups have slowed down. How do we create the ecosystem for more startup activity so that you can

• 20:56Speaker 02

  see the next Zuckerbergs or the next Sergey Brin's emerging? I think that's very, very important.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  You have to install digital ethics classes in every college and university to make sure we don't... You get Sergey in school saying, don't do what I did.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  No, no, I definitely think we need more humanistic thinkers in these tech companies. It's not just about legal regulation. It's about what is their ethical responsibility to society, to democracy, to the country, to job creation. I think that they have a long way to go in responsibility, but I also don't think that you can just blame the polarization and violence and hate speech on social media. I mean, the fact of the matter is that Matthew Greco at Stanford shows that one of the biggest causes is talk, radio and cable news. There are huge issues of income inequality. There is issues of gerrymandering of how people are living in terms of their political ideology. There's a challenge of immigration and assimilation.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  So the country is going through a lot of transition and I think social media is highlighting some of the divisions that exist. They need to do a better job to be part of the solution.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Something that wasn't in your Bill of Rights, but that I have heard other lawmakers talk about is increasing like media literacy courses in high schools and middle schools. Do you think that's something that could help?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  I think it's a great idea. And I, you know, part of me thinks we're the most educated society in human history, right? The average Caucasian has 14 years of education. The average African American 13 years. In World War II, the average Caucasian had nine years. The average African American had about four years of education. There's never been a more educated from a schooling perspective society in human history. And so you would think we would have the tools to be able to cast informed decisions. And yet we've elected Donald Trump. I mean, not to be that partisan, but it's just this disjuncture. But part of me thinks, look, Americans, we should have the self-confidence and ability to say,

• 23:00Speaker 02

  we're not going to just be manipulated by what we see on a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed. We're going to be capable of being critical citizens and exercising citizenship the way our founders wanted us to. And that comes to schooling and education and making sure that people are critical thinkers.

• 23:18Nilay Patel?

  So I'm a pretty fierce advocate for net neutrality. But let me channel my Vergecast co-host, Paul Miller, who thinks I'm dumb, and make sort of the conservative slippery slope arguing about net neutrality. Because you've brought up cable news a number of times. If we're going to impose net neutrality on information distributors like AT&T and Comcast and whoever and say, everything has to be the same, isn't the slippery slope to content moderation sitting right there that we're going to go to information distributors like Facebook and Google and say, okay, now you have to actually make sure you turn the knobs such that the same viewpoints are equally distributed on your platforms? Isn't that the sort of the search neutrality?

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that sort of the next obvious thing to go ask Google for?

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Well, this is when Al Franken talked about net neutrality for Google, and I said, Al Franken didn't know what he was talking about. And then he had that unfortunate scandal. But what would neutrality on Google look like? It would mean like when you typed in Ro Khanna into search, instead of getting any sense of relevance, you'd get random things which had Ro or Khanna in there all over the world. And that wouldn't be very helpful. So any search by definition is not neutral. It's based on the values of people who are saying, well, we want to prioritize relevance or we want to prioritize the number of people visiting something. So I think there's a huge difference between net neutrality for Internet service providers,

• 24:47Speaker 02

  meaning everyone should have access to the Internet, versus requiring neutrality for content providers or content platforms. I don't think you could tell Amazon, you need to have every possible product in the world on your page, or Facebook to say, the Ro Khanna page on Facebook should also have the anti-Ro Khanna page right next to it, which is what neutrality would look like. And I think when you look at television, you do have neutrality in terms of the bidding off of getting cable and having the access to that. Where you don't have neutrality is you can have private companies like Fox News or MSNBC have a point of view. And I think that similar analogy holds to the Internet.

• 25:30Nilay Patel?

  Do you think the distributors of cable news, you know, Facebook is a distributor of information, and the press gets mad at them, hey, we're doing your content moderation for you. Like, we found this bad thing, and then Facebook says, huh, and they take it down. You could do that with Fox News and Spectrum Cable all day long, right? You could say, hey, CEO of Spectrum Cable, like, we're watching this thing you're distributing. Is that appropriate? Is that an appropriate ask of those kinds of platforms?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Well, that's the question. I mean, because you look at, and not to mention the study, but it never gets mentioned. And some people should read it. It's the only academic study on polarization and propaganda, Matthew Greco at Stanford. And he did the research and he said, actually, young people who used Facebook were polarized, but not nearly as polarized as older voters. And they're the most polarized and they're getting their information from cable news. And that's one of the biggest causes right now of polarization. So should we require fact checking anytime there's something said that's wrong on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh or on MSNBC? And is social media something almost a counter to some of that propaganda? I do think social media should develop their own journalistic ethics of where they want

• 26:37Speaker 02

  to have diverse perspectives and if they want to flag things. But long term, I guess, I'm a First Amendment supporter and enthusiast and I have a sort of John Stuart Mill view that you let ideas out there and in the long run, good ideas prevail and that American democracy is strong enough and mature enough to allow that. And people say, well, we'll look at Europe. Well, Europe had two grotesque world wars and a history of the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. And as bad as Trump is, it's nowhere near what Europe was. So I think America's tradition is much more open to speech and we've been much better at pluralism and not having that kind of history as Europe's had. And that's allowed for innovation.

• 27:19Nilay Patel?

  So you brought up Europe. So obviously, what you are talking about right now is regulating big tech. The country, the, you know, the organization of states that is currently regulating big tech the most aggressively is the EU. They have imposed fines on Google for Android. They have passed the GDPR. Is that a model for you? Is that something you're looking at? Like, oh, we should just do the GDPR again?

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Let me put you on the spot. Name the three best European tech companies in the last 10 years or 20 years.

• 27:49Nilay Patel?

  I can do 20. Give me, if Nokia?

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Okay, okay. People often say Spotify, maybe?

• 27:58Nilay Patel?

  Spotify's good. Uh, half of Sony Ericsson, the Ericsson half. There's three, done. But if you, if you cut me to 10, I'm, I'm stuck at Spotify.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  So, so, you know, I, do I think we should look at the GDPR? Yes, but, uh, you know, we don't want to be Europe when it comes to tech innovation. I say this as someone who's called for regulation on, on tech. But there's a reason that you had section 230 and that that in part spawned American innovation in technology and you had Apple and Google and Facebook and Twitter and Microsoft and LinkedIn and PayPal and cryptocurrency and, and all of the technological advantage that we have. What we need here is well crafted regulation. Let me give you a specific example. Google, uh, in Europe, they want consent in every use case. That means if I am on a platform, a newspaper platform, The Washington Post or the European

• 28:50Speaker 02

  equivalent, and, uh, I see an ad, I have to click and consent every time I see an ad because every time an ad is shown to me, that's a use of my data to target me. Now, my view is that that's going to require 20, 30, 40 clicks for a consumer just reading things or visiting things on the website. In our case, we have too few consent requirements. You basically consent to the service agreement that no one reads and then you've consented away your data for the rest of your time on these social media platforms. Well, maybe there is a compromise, something that says you need to consent every time there's a collection of your data, uh, but you don't have to consent every time there is a use of your data. So I think the nuance on this matters.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  It's why people like Tim Cook and others have said we need regulation, but well crafted regulation, regulation that's consistent with the First Amendment, consistent with innovation and will protect Americans. But that will look very different in my view than the European regulation.

• 29:48Nilay Patel?

  Do you think Tim Cook is saying that just because that's a strategy credit to Apple? Like, it costs him nothing if there's privacy regulation in the world. Apple doesn't make these products.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, sure, I'd say it too if I were him. But he could say something that's self-interested and also right. And so I'm sure he is very self-interested. And Zuckerberg's retort, that was not a bad one. He said, "Yeah, but we, you know, we don't charge $1,000 for our products." And we're, yeah, we're monetizing people, but we're also a free, free service. And there is a trade-off between the cost of providing a service. And Apple is a, Cupertino is a very expensive city where Apple is located. And it's a product that is for the middle class or upper-middle class. It's not a product that is just of mass production, certainly for the world. So, these are questions enough, enough trade-offs. But I, I think that Google, Facebook, Twitter, others can embrace stronger data protection

• 30:42Speaker 02

  and shouldn't monetize their, their users as the only thing, or view their users primarily as just a monetized commodity.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  I think something interesting, too, that we haven't seen from industry groups and we haven't seen from companies like Apple and Google. They're very, they're very ready to talk about sometimes preemption, talk about consent, opt-in consent, opt-out consent. But something that they've been kind of not really talking about is the enforcement part. Like, hey, we have the rules, but like, what happens once we break them? So Tech Freedom today came out with something. It was like one of the first real comments to the NTIA's, the Department of Commerce's privacy initiative. They talked heavily about enforcement. I guess, really, what is your perspective on enforcement when it comes to these things?

• 31:30Speaker 02

  That's a great point, because you're, you're absolutely right. I mean, antitrust rules, the biggest challenge is enforcement. The DOJ and FTC don't have the teeth to really enforce many of these provisions. And even if you had a drafted Internet Bill of Rights and you had laws, if you don't empower the FTC or FCC and increase the staffing, you're not going to be able to have significant enforcement, and that may not move the needle. And then even when you talk about self-regulation, a lot of these sites have terms ...of service where, which are constantly being violated and they don't have the capacity for enforcement. For example, the pipe bomber who sent bombs to President Obama and Secretary Clinton had tweeted out things and threats on Twitter, clearly violating Twitter's Terms of Service,

• 32:15Speaker 02

  but their internal policy didn't enforce it. Now, part of me is sympathetic in that you went from, Facebook went from 100,000 people to 2 billion people in 15 years, right? I mean, from a small company to something larger than any country in the world. So, the scale is enormous and they haven't caught up with the enforcement and review that's necessary. That's the sympathetic case, but the reality is they're a company that now has a large public trust and they can't just hide behind the sense that they grew too fast, they grew too quickly, they didn't know what's going on, they don't know that people are using their platform to kill people in Burma. At some point, they've got to do more and, and that more means hurting the bottom line,

• 32:57Speaker 02

  perhaps, hiring many, many more reviewers, and if they can't manage it, then scale back. But, the growth was so fast and so rapid that a technology that by and large I view as positive, probably grew faster than the regulatory and enforcement mechanisms and has led to some of the challenges.

• 33:14Nilay Patel?

  So, I want to end with a pretty, I think, question nobody ever really asks congresspeople, and then I want to, I want to ask you what people should be looking for. But here's my, just sort of esoteric question at the end. This is your second term in Congress, you know what you're doing now, right? You know where the bathroom is. You represent, in your district, you have two of the biggest tech companies in the world. What are the mechanics of that job like for you? Do you think, oh, you know, Google's campus is here, Apple's campus is here, lots of these employees live right here. How do you think about actually representing those people when you go to work every day?

• 33:46Speaker 02

  You know, a lot of people I represent are nurses and firefighters and teachers and people who can't afford the cost of living. In fact, I'll be self-reflective. I ran and lost once at forty-eight percent and then I won my second race at sixty percent and was fortunate to get re-elected with seventy-three percent. But after I lost, Mike Condo is a good person, he was a Democrat and we have a good relationship. He said, "Row, I know I had you beat one week into the campaign." I said, "How did you have me beat?" He said, "You came out with a list of endorsements and they were all the tech leaders." And so I put out my list of endorsements and there were all the teachers and nurses and firefighters and there were a lot more of those than there were tech people in our district. And so, losing actually made me

• 34:28Speaker 02

  more empathetic to understanding that while technology is in helping our world in so many ways and helping our communities in so many ways, there are also people being left out. And the central work that I'm doing, both within my community and around the country, is to figure out how are we going to get more people participating in a software revolution? I believe the software revolution, like the industrial revolution, is going to transform every aspect of our economy. There are no such thing as tech jobs. Every job, this job, what we're doing right now is a tech-enabled job. And we're going to need people with tech proficiency and pathways to that, being able to live in the communities they grew up in. It's in Apple and Google and Amazon and other companies' interests to help facilitate

• 35:13Speaker 02

  that, so that there isn't a backlash against tech accumulation of wealth or concentration of wealth. It's why I was disappointed today that Amazon, it was a missed opportunity for them to put their headquarters in New York. You know what it reminded me of? It was that LeBron James in 2010 when he did the big decision and everyone, everyone knew he was going to go to the Miami Heat, but he let everyone else think that they had a shot. Then he went to the Heat. Same thing with Amazon. It's like they, everyone in the country, all the rural communities, urban communities, thought they had a shot and then he picks New York. I mean, that's where we need to be more thoughtful. How are we going to build pathways for communities left behind to participate in this new economy?

• 35:53Nilay Patel?

  The two things I've learned from this conversation so far is that I think you think Snapchat should launch a subscription service. And two, Jeff Bezos should have done an ESPN decision show to announce HQ2. Because those things are both incredible.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  That's what I've learned in my first year of Congress. You can say all the substantive things unless you give people the headline, it doesn't really matter.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, we'll see what we can do here. I'll work with that decision. So just last question, you've gone way over your time, you've been so generous, I appreciate it. What is the first thing people should expect? Is it the House comes in session next year and all of a sudden, you know, the relevant committees are pushing on privacy regulation right away? Is it going to take a back burner to healthcare? What's, what's the first thing people should expect who are interested in tech policy?

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing for the House is probably going to be something dealing with reform or anti-corruption. And we had, I started the No PAC Caucus in Congress, Beto and I did, and Beto ran on that. We've had people on the far left, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and more moderates like Conor Lamb, all run on no corporate PAC money, no PAC money. I think that people are going to want a fundamental reform of government. And technology is a part of that, right? I mean, technology has enabled campaigns in ways that don't rely on raising money and going on broadcast television. But after we get that reform package, after we get a vote on healthcare and minimum wage, then I think we will turn to technology.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  And the three top priorities in technology, one will be privacy and data protection, two will be internet for all. There is no reason why we shouldn't have every part of this country hooked up to high-speed internet. And three will be this transition. How do we get a country wired with tech proficiency to have the jobs of the future? And what do we need to do to prepare people for those jobs?

• 37:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, thank you very much. I appreciate all the time.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  I appreciate your show.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  Hopefully you'll come back if we publish our sensational subscription Snapchat headline.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  I don't know if I trust my own business sense. I am in politics after all.

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  Very true. All right. Thank you, Representative O'Connell. It was great to have you. Thank you so much.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  All right, that was Representative Ro Khanna. Thanks to him for joining us. He was very generous with his time. Thanks also to Verge Policy reporter McKenna Kelly for joining me and actually knowing what she's talking about, which is always useful. We'll be back later this week with a regular Vergecast, so tune in for that. Let me know how we're doing, who you want me to interview, what you want to hear from these interviews. I'm dying to know more. And you can tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. Would love to hear from you.

• 38:22Nilay Patel?

  And to wrap it up, one more word from our sponsor, Dell.

• 38:24Speaker 01

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