You now live in a world where all of our media is distributed by giant platforms, where Elon put his thumb on the algorithm as hard as he could on Twitter. There's a study out last week saying the Twitter algorithm now openly favors right-wing content and Elon Musk personally. What is the problem in our culture? Where's the rot in our culture that technology has enabled? And it is actually a synthesis of control over speech, control over distribution. We still insistently run a website. That's what we do. It is open distribution. You can get to us in your web browser. Most of my multimedia work is in podcasts distributed via RSS. Open distribution. You can see that open distribution is the thing that is the counterbalance to all this noise. How many of you would put a camera in your bathroom? Good. Good answer. How many of you are holding a phone right now? How many cameras are on your phone? It's not one. It's absolutely not one. It's like four. How many of you take your phones into the bathroom? It's crazy.
Neil and I have known each other for probably 20 years, and we've been talking about a lot of these issues, probably for about 20 years. So the landscape, I mean, I just kind of want to dive in on this. The landscape has obviously changed so dramatically, but you and I both come from a place where we care a lot about the First Amendment. We care a lot about freedom of speech, and I think we came to this work, both of us — I don't want to speak for you, so interrupt me if I'm wrong — really seeing the internet as creating a space for more information to more people. We were both like young and geeky and excited about that. Where are we now? What happened?
Oh boy. Well, if I have one message for this group of people, it's that if you don't know who your company's First Amendment counsel is or your defamation counsel, and you've never bought them a cookie, go do that. Do it right now. Like, the overwhelming threat to the First Amendment and freedom of speech that the Trump administration and Brendan Carr at the FCC and Elon running Starlink represents is almost impossible to quantify. I'm being dead serious. Thank you for clapping. And so Julie and I know each other because, I don't know, 20 years ago I started writing about net neutrality and Julie was at the EFF. Net neutrality, right, is a very simple concept. It's like Comcast can't throttle content on the internet. It can't favor some service over another one. It can't put data caps on Netflix and let NBC go through. Okay, that's fine, right? I think we all understand that. Well, you now live in a world where all of our media is distributed by giant platforms where Elon put his thumb on the algorithm as hard as he could on Twitter. There's a study out last week saying the Twitter algorithm now openly favors right-wing content and Elon Musk personally, which I think all of us can see. Meta just took all that content off of Threads. So the edge providers, the platform providers that distribute media, are now actively making decisions, political decisions. And there's not really net neutrality at the network level, right? So that can go away too. And then Brendan Carr, the presumptive chairman of the FCC, his idea for how we'll bring internet access to rural America is Starlink, which is owned by Elon Musk. And so if Elon has already shown his willingness to change the Twitter algorithm, what is going to stop him from saying, 'You know what? Actually, I don't want left-wing websites or sites that I perceive to be left-wing to be shown on Starlink. I only want The Daily Wire, and that'll be excused from the data caps, and NBC News or CBS News, they'll hit your data cap and actually be slower than the other websites. You'll go to that more often. I'm mad at Mark Zuckerberg. I'm going to make sure that Instagram doesn't get through at the same rate or the video quality is degraded versus the X platform, which I own.' There's just not a regulatory barrier between the network and the platforms that distribute the content and actual free speech that is totally collapsed and it's gone away. On top of that, I don't mean to just keep ranting, Julia, but Julia was like, 'I'm going to queue up.' On top of that, they keep making noises about suing journalists all day, every day. Trump, I think two days ago, was like, 'Ann Selzer should be investigated for her bad poll.' She was investigated. People voted and she was wrong. That's the investigation. That's the accountability that free speech demands. And instead, you have the president of the United States ranting about investigating some pollster. That's just a light example. So I look at the landscape of tech, which we cover. I run what is effectively a punk rock magazine about cell phones. We get to just say it out loud, right? That's fine. It's a culture magazine. And I say, 'What is the problem in our culture? Where's the rot in our culture that technology has enabled?' And it is actually a synthesis of control over speech, control over distribution, and now the government's interests. And those government's interests are deeply messed up. You know, Elon is not elected, but he has interests. He's going to tell you that the Teslas that are self-driving are not crashing. And if some platform does publish that, he has the ability at the network level and at the platform level to unpromote that content, to take it away from you. And I would just encourage everyone in this room to really think about what that means for our distribution, for the content that we're seeing, for how we reach our audience, for what our audience is counterprogrammed, and fundamentally how we all make enough money to continue doing the work, because if we don't have distribution, we're not going to make any money at all.
I want to just dig in a little bit here first on the net neutrality piece. The suing journalists piece we're going to get to, too. I think that is just beyond terrifying. But on the net neutrality piece, I think when we were first working on this issue, I don't think I quite understood just how, like, a little tweak, how insidious a little bit can be around the edges to kind of drive people to various news sources, to various products online. I think that's — it's sometimes hard to understand because all of us are high-information news gatherers, high-information users, and most people I talk to every day also are. Yeah. But it's like the little things around the edges. And I think you're getting to that, but as you think about how to combat the little things around the edges, how to reach people who maybe aren't high-information audience members, how do you think about that? How do you think about that for your own business?
So we still insistently run a website. That's what we do. It is open distribution. You can get to us in your web browser, which sadly Google controls, but we're working on it. We are distributed via RSS. Most of my multimedia work is in podcasts distributed by RSS, open distribution. You can see that open distribution is the thing that is the counterbalance to all this noise. If you go back to that net neutrality fight 15 years ago, who was the main character? It was Alexis Ohanian. What was he saying over and over and over again? 'I don't want my website to be throttled.' What has really happened to the media in general is we've accepted the business models of closed platforms. So I constantly interview CEOs all the time, media CEOs, platform CEOs. I interview a lot of hosting provider CEOs lately. The CEO of Squarespace comes on the show and I say, 'Why would anyone start a website?' And their answer uniformly is, 'Oh, to do e-commerce and not have to pay the app store fees.' This is the most depressing answer to 'why would anyone start a website' in human history. Right? We all started websites back in the day to reach an audience, to put up what we wanted to, to build new kinds of media properties. I founded The Verge with 12 of my friends, and we wanted a thing that was ours that we could run our way. Now kids are starting media properties. They're doing it on YouTube. They're doing it on Instagram. They're doing it on TikTok, and they are building the properties that the platforms want. Every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how pissed off they are at YouTube. That's the day they become business people, right? Because they're like, 'Oh, I can't do the thing I want. The algorithm is making me make something else.' That control is a problem, and we should deal with it in various ways. I think antitrust is a good way to deal with it. But the other problem is that as you close down net neutrality, it actually becomes very hard to start a new website because Netflix can pay the ISPs to be faster. And so that is the small tweak that makes it insidious, right? Is, oh, suddenly this thing that we perceive to be open, that we perceive to be democratizing, is actually much more closed down, and the incentives of all of these systems only point to some outcomes, and it is very hard to counterbalance those outcomes, especially on the platforms themselves. So we have to build our own distribution. We have to build our own networks, and we have to say, actually, we're going to go have the fight with all of our First Amendment lawyers. Do you all take this note? I'm dead serious about this. You need to talk to the lawyers at your companies and say, 'Are we ready? Can you describe the set of threats to the First Amendment today and predict which ones are coming tomorrow?' This is a small bar, right? The First Amendment bar is a small — it's a small group of lawyers, and they all just had a conference and they're all freaking out. They're also all ready to fight, right? This is like — it's been boring for a little bit now. It's like going to be exciting again. But these small tweaks to our distribution, to who incentivizes you to make what work, they have a massive downstream impact on what consumers actually see and the quality of information they actually receive.
I'm a former First Amendment lawyer, so this is very near and dear to my heart, this entire conversation.
You told me to be optimistic. I'm so sorry.
You know, one of the other kind of things I've been thinking about a lot in response to what you're saying right now is that there was a time when you started The Verge in the, you know, early days of Engadget, where entrepreneurism was — it was really, there was green space everywhere, you know, and if you were young and if you were hungry and if you were interested in the technology, you could find a way to get out there. But now a lot of the young people who I think are really entrepreneurial and young and hungry do end up on the existing platforms. And even if some of those young entrepreneurial folks do stand up their own website, it's really — I'm hard-pressed to think of a small, non-venture-backed kind of startup in the space.
